SARANAC LAKE — Essex County’s status as a U.S. presidential race bellwether did not last long.

Though unofficial election night totals showed it as one of only two counties in the U.S. to vote for the winning presidential candidate in all seven elections since the year 2000, updated, certified vote totals show the county actually voted slightly more for Democrat Kamala Harris than President-elect Republican Donald Trump.

Essex County Deputy Democratic Commissioner Jennifer Fifield said the new votes are absentee mail ballots that arrived within the seven-day window after the election, as well as military and overseas citizen ballots and affidavit ballots not scanned on election night.

After the Nov. 5 election, Washington Post data analyst Dan Keating set out to see which counties have voted for the winning candidate in every election since the turn of the millennium. Using a file of data he’s been collecting ever since he joined the Post in 1999.

Initially, it appeared that Essex County kept its streak alive this year with 72 more votes for Trump than Harris. But after adding the 841 ballots which were counted after election night, the certified election results shows 96 more people voted for Harris than Trump in the county.

With a total of 19,529 ballots in Essex County, 9,629 voted for Harris, who got a slim majority of 49.3% of the vote over the 9,533 votes which gave Trump 48.8% of the vote. Write-in candidates, void ballots and blank ballots made up 1.9% of the vote.

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Paring it down

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There are around 3,000 counties in the United States.

Of these, 2,439 were left in Keating’s contest after voting for Republican George W. Bush in 2000. Most did the same in 2004, leaving 2,372.

Then, there was a major drop. Only 272 counties voted for Democrat Barack Obama after voting for Bush two elections in a row. Fewer still voted for Obama’s second term — 129.

Republican Donald Trump’s election in 2016 came with another drop to 58. When Democrat Joe Biden was elected in 2020, the list fell into the single digits — just nine counties.

Election by election, Keating was finding fewer and fewer counties each time. Those that remained were counties which consistently switched back and forth between Republican and Democrat — always on the winning side.

When the Enterprise reported that Essex County and Blaine County, Montana were the only two remaining, a question was left. In the 2028 presidential election, would they maintain their status, lose it or would one drop out, leaving the other the only one still standing?

But people don’t have to wait that long. Blaine County is now the only county in America to still have always voted for the winning presidential candidate this millennium.

Blaine County, around 1,600 miles away from here, is a rural grasslands region on the border of Canada with a population just under 7,000 compared to Essex County’s 36,775. Blaine County is around twice the size as Essex County. Its status as always voting for the victor in 21st century presidential elections is stable after its election has been certified.

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What’s it all mean?

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Fifield said election officials here didn’t really think much of the county’s unique status when it was announced. For weeks after the election they were focused on certifying the election results.

The certified results swinging slightly different than the election night result supports Keating’s interpretation of the data and the concept of bellwether counties.

When a county is as balanced between political parties as Essex County, he said it’s really a “coin-flip” over which way it will vote — “random chance.”

“To me the point of my piece is that some people have said the counties that always pick the winner have some magic that makes winning them really important,” Keating told the Enterprise. “But to me it’s just random and I hope the idea that these are some kind of magic bellwether places will go away.”

Keating’s article can be found at tinyurl.com/2tzkkvpa.