Bellwether counties are mostly a matter of chance and are now poor predictors of presidential election results.

Those who believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election have held up his victories in many bellwether counties as evidence of electoral fraud. In new research, Bernard Grofman and Haotian Chen argue that the evidence shows that this claim is laughable. They write that the electoral record shows that not only are bellwether counties poor predictors of who will win a presidential election, rising polarization means that their ability to predict long streaks of elections has been in decline over the last two decades.