As Nation Waits for Presidential Result, Oregon’s Bellwether County Sticks With Trump

Tillamook County has voted with every presidential winner since 1992. It’s staying with Trump as bigger counties flip.

A jellyfish remnant along the shoreline in Tierra del Mar. (Alex Wittwer)
By Nigel Jaquiss

Tillamook County stuck with President Donald Trump on Nov. 3, an inauspicious sign for Democrats anxiously awaiting the final counts in states around the country.

Voters in the north coastal county voted for Trump 47% to 42% over Hillary Clinton in 2016. They stuck with Trump this year, albeit by a narrower 50% to 48% margin.

Tillamook is a small county, with just over 27,000 residents. But as WW reported recently, Tillamook County picks presidential winners with uncanny accuracy, casting the majority of its votes for the winner in every election stretching back to 1992.

Related: Tillamook County Usually Picks the Presidential Winner. Its Residents Are More Polarized Than Ever.

With nearly all Oregon votes counted, former Vice President Joe Biden is on track to win the state's popular vote 57% to 40% over Trump. That's about 6 percentage points larger than Clinton's margin of victory in Oregon in 2016.

Although the state's map of presidential votes looks overwhelmingly red again, because Demcorats are clustered in urban areas in a few counties and Republicans tend to dominate in sparsely populated rural areas, two of the state's largest counties—Marion and Deschutes—actually flipped from red to blue.

In 2016, Marion County voters chose Trump by a 5,500-vote margin. This year, Biden carried the county by about 2,000 votes. The swing was more pronounced in Deschutes County, where Trump won by 3,200 votes in 2016 but lost by 10,000 votes this year.

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