Until then, the recipe was well known: to find out the results of the US presidential election before Election Day, all you had to do was take a look at the polls in Clallam County (Washington State), at the westernmost point of the continental USA. Since 1980, “the most undecided place in the country” had always designated the winner of the presidential election, 11 times in a row. This statistic is no longer valid as of this Thursday, November 7, after Donald Trump’s victory.

Vice President Kamala Harris has a 10 percentage point lead in this locality over Donald Trump with around 71% of votes counted, according to unofficial results. The Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz leads with 53.13% of the vote, while Republican duo Donald Trump and JD Vance obtained only 44.28%.

In this generously forested and copiously watered mountain country, separated from the Canada and Seattle by inlets, the majority of the 78,000 inhabitants had not been mistaken for nearly fifty years and the election of Ronald Reagan. At the time, he voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976.

Demographic change

From 1980 to 2016, only 19 of the more than 3,000 U.S. counties had managed to nominate all the presidential winners. But in 2020, Clallam was the only one to choose Joe Biden. The area is overwhelmingly white, at 80%, with a lower proportion of college-educated residents than the national average, and a lower average household income too.

With such a profile, he could have chosen in 2020 to re-elect Republican Donald Trumpwho attracts the votes of working-class whites. But Clallam has the particularity of being neither red, the color of the Republicans, nor blue, that of the Democrats and of their candidate Kamala Harris. The Americans used the qualifier “purple”frequently used in the USA to designate places that lean neither clearly to one side nor the other.

To explain this “miss”American analysts don’t consider it to be a reliable indicator of the direction of the United States as a whole, but rather a demographic shift. The arrival of retirees from California at first, then from elsewhere in the U.S., attracted by the rather affordable cost of living and temperate climate, set a more progressive tone for the county. Diversity of political opinion, one of the local strengths, has diminished.