The News
Election Day is upon us and analysts have never been less confident in their guess as to what’s going to happen in the presidential contest. If the race is as close as the polls indicate, it could take days to officially call — but there are plenty of early bellwethers, data points that will tell us which way the battleground states or key voting groups are trending. Here are the 20 counties that we’ll be tracking Tuesday night as part of Semafor’s election coverage — with an eye to which candidate beats their party’s 2020 result.
The Bellwethers
1) Hamilton County, IN
The fast-growing northern suburbs of Indianapolis — the county’s population has doubled since 2000 — have moved to the left, even as Democrats stopped being competitive statewide. Trump’s single-digit win here was the lowest for any victorious GOP candidate, and four years later, Nikki Haley won 34% of the Republican primary vote there, months after suspending her presidential campaign.
2) Vigo County, IN
From 1956 to 2016, the winner in Terre Haute and its suburbs won the presidential election. That pattern broke in 2020, as the 88% white county, which hasn’t seen real population growth in fifty years, stuck with Trump. An early indicator for what’s happening in the places where Trump has always done best.
3) DeKalb County, GA
If Trump has made any inroads with Black voters, four years after trying to overturn the election here, that would show up not just in Fulton County, which includes the vast majority of Atlanta, but also neighboring DeKalb County — less wealthy, more African-American. Turnout for early voting was high here, though it’s not clear yet how those voters moved.
4) Gwinnett County, GA
Hillary Clinton was the first Democratic nominee since Jimmy Carter to win this suburban Atlanta County, and it’s become crucial to a statewide Democratic win — Biden wouldn’t have won had he not more than tripled Clinton’s margin here. If Asian and Hispanic voters in the suburbs are backing Democrats to the degree they did four years ago, they’d be doing it here.
5) Roanoke County, VA
The Republican ticket made two high-profile stops in this region of Virginia — Vance after the GOP convention, Trump over the final weekend. Non-Trump Republicans have out-run him here, and Glenn Youngkin got 66% of the vote in the county in his 2021 gubernatorial election, so there’ll be an early indicator of whether Republicans have even more to gain in rural counties.
6) Mahoning County, OH
Democrats lost Appalachian Ohio during the Obama years; they finally lost northeast Ohio under Biden. Trump was the first Republican nominee for president since Richard Nixon to carry Mahoning, which had been deep blue even outside the city of Youngstown. In 2022, when Youngstown’s own Tim Ryan ran for Senate, he lost the county for the first time in his career, to Republican JD Vance. It didn’t matter that the county’s Chevy plant closed under Trump, or that it saw its lowest unemployment rate in decades under Biden.
7) Union County, NC
The challenge for Democrats in North Carolina is just how many conservative voters live outside of the major cities that Republicans always lose. Just outside of Charlotte, this is one of the GOP’s best vote sinks; Biden trimmed the Trump advantage here in 2020, but not by enough to stop him from losing statewide.
8) Nash County, NC
A very recent bellwether that has gone for the statewide winner in the last three presidential elections, by three-digit vote margins each time. In 2020, better turnout in the majority-white suburbs of majority-Black Rocky Mount gave the win to Biden. Trump made one of his last North Carolina stops here, and Gov. Roy Cooper, born in the county, also made it a priority. Funding for rural broadband in the 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act has largely not gotten results yet, but Cooper prioritized funding for Nash County, giving Democrats a Biden achievement to talk about.
9) Wayne County, MI
The county that includes Detroit is the epicenter of several stories: A place that thrived under Biden, the Arab-American communities that have been most unhappy with the administration’s aid to Israel, and efforts to challenge the 2020 election. Detroit is at decades-low unemployment and crime rates, and turnout is tracking higher than four years ago. Trump campaigned in Dearborn and earned endorsements from the mayors of Hamtramck and Dearborn Heights, and all three cities are set to give Democrats their lowest vote share since before the Iraq War, when Republicans began losing that demographic. (Biden netted more than 29,000 votes in these cities four years ago.)
10) Saginaw County, MI
A GM plant that employed nearly 3000 people in Saginaw was a fairly early casualty of NAFTA. The county, which has lost 10% of its population since then, kept voting Democratic until 2016; Biden won it back by cutting Trump’s margins in the townships outside Saginaw, running a bit worse than Clinton inside the majority-Black and Hispanic city. Republicans sent Vance here to campaign against EV mandates and promise more investment in the traditional auto industry; Harris matched with a visit to a new semiconductor plant. Trump winning again here would be ominous for Democrats trying to win where they’ve brought high-profile jobs, and good for Republicans who’ve opposed the EV transition everywhere.
11) Lackawanna County, PA
Biden won Pennsylvania by out-performing Clinton in the eastern half of the state — except for Philadelphia, where Democrats have been losing a little ground every two years. Both he and Harris campaigned here in the race’s 72 hours; Democrats were unsure, after the ticket switched, if some voters who liked Scranton-born Biden for personal reasons would drift back to Trump.
12) Butler County, PA
Since 2000, the communities north of Pittsburgh have delivered huge Republican margins — Trump gained 10,000 votes here between his first and second campaigns. They became immortal this summer, when Trump was grazed by a failed assassin’s bullet at the Butler Farm Show Grounds. The Harris campaign dispatched Walz here this month, but if there is a surge of support from voters already inclined to support Trump, it would come here.
13) Bucks County, PA
There is no Democratic victory in Pennsylvania without a landslide in every Philadelphia collar county, and Bucks has been the most promising for Republicans. An aggressive voter registration effort this year erased the Democrats’ partisan advantage, and it was Nikki Haley’s weakest county in the region in the uncompetitive stage of the GOP primary; she won just 19% of the vote, significant but indicating that there are fewer frustrated Republicans than in the rest of the suburbs.
14) Waukesha County, WI
Until the Trump years, Republicans typically won 2-1 landslides or better here, cutting deep into the Democrats’ margins in nearby Milwaukee. The advantage has been declining, and the city of Waukesha’s Republican mayor endorsed Harris after declining to support Trump in 2020. Democrats believe there are thousands more voters like that, moderate non-Democrats who won’t want Trump back, and are benefitting from the Biden economy; local unemployment is lower now than at any point in Trump’s presidency. Republicans have fought back with their cultural edge, blaming Democrats for high-profile crimes, and dispatching Vance to call the party anti-Catholic.
15) Dane County, WI
The Democrats’ new behemoth, which now gives them bigger raw vote advantages than Milwaukee County. Biden netted 112,893 votes just from the city of Madison, and there, and Democrats have actually beat his 76% in elections since 2020 – Gov. Tony Evers got 79% here in his 2022 re-election. Neither Biden nor Hillary Clinton was as natural a fit for the progressive city, and there’s been little third party energy or organizing this time. (A Republican super PAC is sending liberal voters mail about Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who’s only held a small voter meet-and-greet here at a bar.)
16) La Crosse County, WI
Can Harris match any of Biden’s numbers in majority-white, more working class counties? This would test that: Biden did almost as well as Obama in this county, and both Harris and Walz have campaigned here, chased by Trump and Vance, with Democrats getting their crowds at the University of Wisconsin campus. But they won the county by sweeping all the surrounding suburbs.
17) Douglas County, NE
Republicans tried and failed to end the electoral vote-by-district system this year, despite endorsements from the entire party elected leadership – including 2nd Congressional District Rep. Don Bacon. He’s now a slight underdog and Harris has led in every poll of the district, which includes all of Omaha and its surrounding county. Walz and Vance have campaigned here, not their running mates, and Democrats expect to win it easily.
18) Maricopa County, AZ
Nearly two-thirds of Arizonans live here, and Biden wouldn’t have won the state without it. Democrats won key statewide races in 2022 by repeating that. That meant winning a landslide Latino vote in Phoenix, winning non-Democrats in Mesa and Scottsdale, and trimming the GOP margin in more conservative cities and suburbs, which Republicans believe they’ve corrected with their ballot chase.
19) Yuma County, AZ
How much has Trump been able to gain with Latino voters since 2020? They make up most of the population here, with most of the vote coming from communities on the U.S.-Mexico border, and Trump improved here from 2016 to 2020.
20) Washoe County, NV
Republicans have lost the state since 2008 by getting crushed in Clark County, where most Nevadans live, and narrowly losing here, thanks to Democratic strength in Reno and Indian reservations. The region has received some escapees from northern California since then, both Democrats and Republicans looking for more affordability, which adds a new wrinkle to the election this time.