Spoiler Alert: Donald Trump is going to win Indiana, easily. But that doesn’t mean that a few, very red counties in this state whose polls close at 6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, won’t give us an indication how the whole presidential election is going to play out.
These seven counties went hard for Trump in 2016. In each of them, his win percentage, compared to Mitt Romney’s in 2012, increased—from 2.81% in Johnson and Hancock Counties to 6.47% in Clark County.
But some of the Trump Magic was gone in 2020
In Clark County, he slaughtered Joe Biden, just as he slaughtered Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Trump slaughtered Joe Biden in that county by 2.18% less than Hillary Clinton. Moreover, his 2020 win percentage in Johnson, Hancock, Bartholomew, Kosciusko and Elkhart Counties fell even more than in Clark County, which closely followed the national trend.
On Election Night, we will probably see nearly complete results in all five counties before Pennsylvania’s polls close at 8:00.
If the numbers in these counties look like 2016, you can bet the rest of the night will look like 2016 everywhere else.
But if the Trump vote is close to or worse than it was for him in 2020, he will have to get busy immediately declaring that the election was stolen.
And if the results in these counties are a little worse for Harris than they were for Biden but not a lot worse (as many polls are showing), then we’re probably in for a long night and maybe a few long days or even weeks before we will know who the 47th President is going to be.