The county that gave Clinton only 5 votes
By Reid Wilson - 07/11/17 06:00 AM EDT Hillary Clinton won just five votes from Texas’s King County in last year’s presidential election, a stunningly low total from what was once a true-blue source of votes for Democrats.
John F. Kennedy won 77 percent of the vote in King County in 1960, three years after the town of Guthrie was immortalized in “On the Road.” Author Jack Kerouac would have visited a deeply Democratic bastion when he rushed through Guthrie, but more than 50 years later the area has turned almost completely against Democrats, highlighting a dramatic change in voting patterns that both parties are struggling to manage.
Clinton’s five votes in King County represented her lowest total of any county in America. Trump received 149 votes in the county, which is an hour and a half east of Lubbock.
When Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968, he scored a narrow plurality over Hubert Humphrey in Prince George’s County, Md., just across the Anacostia River from the nation’s capital. Forty-eight years later, Donald Trump won 8.4 percent of the vote there, his worst performance outside Washington, D.C., where he won just 4.1 percent of the vote.
As the American electorate grows more diverse, and as a rising generation of millennials begins supplanting formerly dominant baby boomers, two nations that live side by side are increasingly walling themselves off from each other.
That divide is a conscious choice, one that experts say influences how we interact with each other, where we move, what news we consume and, increasingly, how we vote.
This is the ninth part in The Hill’s Changing America series, in which we explore the trends shaping society and politics today. Those trends — the rising success of large metropolitan areas contrasted with the struggles of rural counties, the diversity of millennials and the political polarization of boomers — have conspired to create what demographers call the Great Sort.
And all signs indicate the Great Sort is intensifying.
Nearly 59 percent of Americans — almost 187 million of us — live in counties that voted for Clinton or Trump by 20 or more percentage points. An incredible 1,559 counties gave Trump more than 70 percent of the vote in 2016, and 99 gave Clinton the same percentage.
That’s a marked contrast from the 2000 election, when another Democratic candidate also won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College. That year, George W. Bush took 70 percent of the vote in just 546 counties. Al Gore won the same percentage in 46 counties.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/341373-changing-america-the-county-that-gave-clinton-only-5-votes
