Before there was Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and Bill Mitchell’s Yard Signs, there was Vigo County, Indiana. The half-urban, half-rural area about 80 miles southwest of Indianapolis has voted for the winner of the presidential race in 30 of the last 32 elections, and it hasn’t missed since 1956—not even in 2000, when it went for George W. Bush over Al Gore 49.7 to 48.5 percent.
But the streak is vulnerable Tuesday. Multiple Hoosier political experts working in academia and campaigns told THE WEEKLY STANDARD they expect Republican nominee Donald Trump to win the roughly 108,000-person county. If Hillary Clinton captures an Electoral College victory, as the majority of polls and forecast models predict, Vigo County may end up being more like a microcosm of the nation’s shifting political tendencies than an expert prognosticator.
First, to understand what has made it an accurate barometer to this point. Short of a remarkable run of randomness, the county’s voters must have some overlap with the broader U.S. electorate if the two groups choose the same presidential candidate so frequently. It makes sense, then, that its political characteristics, more than other sets of census data, may best explain its predictive power. “I like to move away from education, economy, and race variables, and say we’re not like the nation on that, and go to straight political variables,” said professor Matthew Bergbower of Indiana State University, which is located in the Vigo County seat of Terre Haute.
As a Politico magazine piece
Such a number of indepenents can make for some volatile election outcomes. And so it is that President Obama beat Mitt Romney in Vigo County by just 339 votes in 2012 but walloped John McCain there by 6,619 votes in 2008. The county has seemed to move with the winds; “Here, there isn’t a big wide range of thinking when it comes to politics,” Terre Haute’s mayor, Duke Bennett, told Politico. So-called “swing voters” are coveted in tight races, and Bennett’s county has a horde of them. Maybe the center does hold in a small slice of Indiana.
But the variables the professor Bergbower deemphasizes favor a candidate like Trump. Vigo County is less diverse than the country: 85.7 percent of its residents are white, whereas just 61.6 percent of the U.S. population is, according to 2015 Census Bureau data. On a percentage basis, there are more people with four-year bachelor’s degrees in the country than there are in the county, at 29.3 percent to 21.6 percent. And although Terre Haute is very much a college town—in addition to ISU, there is the engineering powerhouse Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College—it was also a Midwestern manufacturing city that faced economic challenges similar to those of other industrial areas through the end of the 20th century.
In 2016, such an area is the base of the Republican party. It is not, however, the base of the changing United States. “And because of that, there will possibly be a greater separation” in the future between the county and the nation, added Bergbower, who expects Trump to win Vigo County (though in his opinion it’s not a “slam dunk”). He specifically noted expected increases to the country’s Hispanic population, proportion of college-educated adults, and amount of jobs in business, finance, and technology.
Some of those changes are already manifesting from east to west. They don’t favor an office-seeker like Trump, whose electoral strength is the deep support of blue-collar whites. While that might be an obstacle across the whole United States, it isn’t in Vigo County, Indiana.
