With the 2024 U.S. presidential election race heating up, many are hotly debating who the next Commander-in-Chief could be.
On one side is former President Donald Trump, who won by upset in 2016 before taking a narrow loss in 2020 to current President Joe Biden. The Republican candidate won his nomination and is now geared up to take on his third race for the White House.
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On the other side is Kamala Harris, who is favored to be the Democratic presidential candidate after Biden dropped out of the race earlier this summer. So far, she’s the only potential nominee heading into her party’s vote, which is set to conclude on Aug. 5.
While there’s no way to guarantee which candidate will win, there’s a select group of counties in the country that have managed to consistently pick the victor.
They’re known as “bellwether counties.”
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These counties have a strong tendency to vote with the majority of the electorate, meaning they nearly always select the presidential candidate who ends up winning the election.
So far, there’s only been one bellwether county that has picked the victor without fail: Clallam County in Washington. According to the Wall Street Journal, 18 other bellwether counties voted for Trump during the 2020 election, which means their record for consistency was “wiped out.”
However, there are two bellwether counties in Florida: Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.
To start with, Pinellas County only has one mar on its voting record. That was the 2000 presidential election between George Bush, Jr. and Al Gore — an incredibly tight race that suffered a laborious recount process due to the narrow gap between both candidates.
Meanwhile, Hillsborough County has two blemishes to date. One was the 1992 election between George Bush, Sr. and Bill Clinton, and the other was the hotly debated 2016 election when the county opted for then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
So what do these counties look like this time around? As of July 31, the number of active registered voters in each county is as follows:
| County | Democrats | Republicans | Others |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pinellas | 204,190 | 238,671 | 184,328 |
| Hillsborough | 290,483 | 282,226 | 258,463 |
With so many of these voters falling outside of the main two parties, it’s difficult to determine which way these counties will swing.
However, considering Hillsborough County has voted against Trump twice in a row, there’s a strong possibility voters there will come out against him for a third time.
Meanwhile, Pinellas County voted in favor of Trump during the 2016 election, and in favor of his opponent in 2020, making that county more difficult to pin down.
But the real question is: do these counties actually predict which candidate will win the election?
Well, it turns out that it’s probably all just a coin flip.
In fact, as voters become more polarized, bellwether counties become more conservative or liberal, reducing the chances that they’ll pick the winning candidate over successive elections.
“The simple answer is that chance effects can be much greater than people realize...” the researchers stated. “Bellwethers must make correct predictions regardless of which party wins election, but polarization makes it increasingly likely that counties will split into ones that vote regularly for a Republican or for a Democratic presidential nominee. Thus, as polarization rises, the potential for counties shifting their mean party preference across different elections declines.”
Regardless, only time will tell whether these two Florida counties pick the next winning presidential candidate.
In the meantime, you can head to News 6′s Results 2024 page for all of the latest on election information in Florida.
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