Team News Riveting
A less analysed and interesting aspect of the US election was Donald Trump winning a historic number of 16 counties out of 39 that were considered significant.
This is probably the first and shows the level of polarisation in the US that even bellwether counties got divided in Trump and Biden camps, almost equally – Trump won 16, Biden won 23.
There are 39 significant bellwethers in the US. Since 1980, 27 of them have only deviated once, 11 of them twice and one county has always voted with the winner of the election.
Bellwether constituencies are those areas of population that vote in alignment with the winner of an election, usually for long periods of time. They deviate very rarely and are thus the best predictor of the mood of the nation as a whole. Obviously, these areas aren’t considered to be ideologically in sync with any one party and vote based on issues.
Though all the pre-polls and media reports predicted a sweep for Joe Biden and a humiliating defeat for Donald Trump, it was one of the closest elections in US history with the latter losing three battleground states he won last time by less than one per cent and one other by just 1.2 per cent votes. Additionally, Republicans are likely to retain control of the Senate (the upper house of the legislative branch) and end up with an increased tally of more than 10 seats in the lower house.
The winner of the Presidential election in the US is decided by the electoral college which is basically a “winner takes all“ method. Every state is assigned a set of electors based on population and whoever gets more votes in the entire state gets all the electoral votes of that state.
