This looks like a usefully persuasive argument. It's easy to lie with statistics though, so devils advocate:
Who created it?
Why are those particular seventeen counties examined? Are they objectively somehow 'the best bellwethers'? If they are merely 'some traditional bellwethers', then a chart of seventeen different ones might paint a very different picture.
If indeed those seventeen are a good choice to represent bellwethers as a whole, then this looks like a good persuader.
Yes, I know that at least a few of these are very good bellwether counties. I believe this 17 comes from a Wikipedia list that shows their historical accuracy and details the times each has been wrong/what their streak is. It isn't often.
Wiki says it supposedly has significant issues. I don't recall this tag the other day when I looked it up... Looks like they may have found and dispooted it lmao
Thanks. Then it sounds like this is 'suggestive' but a bigger list could be much more persuasive. I'd like to see data on a longer list of bellwether counties.
With 3141 in total, I think looking at the top 100 'most bellwether' could make a strong case. And I guess define 'most bellwether' as the highest count of win-predictions in the last X presidential election cycles.
Any small cherry-picked list will be attacked, and it should be.
Edit:
Then for all those counties in the 'most bellwether' list:
How many supposedly went this time for Biden, and for Trump?
Then divide that 100-county list into those in 'suspect' states, and the rest. In those two subsets, how many were for B and T?
Testable hypothesis: The bellwether-fail percent among counties in the suspect states will be much higher than the overall bellwether-fail percent.
This looks like a usefully persuasive argument. It's easy to lie with statistics though, so devils advocate:
Who created it?
Why are those particular seventeen counties examined? Are they objectively somehow 'the best bellwethers'? If they are merely 'some traditional bellwethers', then a chart of seventeen different ones might paint a very different picture.
If indeed those seventeen are a good choice to represent bellwethers as a whole, then this looks like a good persuader.
For numeric context, USGS says there are 3141 counties.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-counties-are-united-states?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products
Yes, I know that at least a few of these are very good bellwether counties. I believe this 17 comes from a Wikipedia list that shows their historical accuracy and details the times each has been wrong/what their streak is. It isn't often.
Wiki says it supposedly has significant issues. I don't recall this tag the other day when I looked it up... Looks like they may have found and dispooted it lmao
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_election_bellwether_counties_in_the_United_States
Thanks. Then it sounds like this is 'suggestive' but a bigger list could be much more persuasive. I'd like to see data on a longer list of bellwether counties.
With 3141 in total, I think looking at the top 100 'most bellwether' could make a strong case. And I guess define 'most bellwether' as the highest count of win-predictions in the last X presidential election cycles.
Any small cherry-picked list will be attacked, and it should be.
Edit:
Then for all those counties in the 'most bellwether' list:
Testable hypothesis: The bellwether-fail percent among counties in the suspect states will be much higher than the overall bellwether-fail percent.
Damn. That's a whole lot of data that is probably scattered all over...but the result would absolutely be useful.