The Democracy and the ‘bellwether belts’

Shortly after the 2012 election, Jacopo della Quercia defined Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio as the ‘Bellwether Belt’, because these four states’ collective behaviour had tended to predict election outcomes over a historically long term. However, there are a number of possible groups of states whose collective behaviour has predicted election outcomes, so I will be using ‘bellwether belt’, in a general sense, to refer to any such group of states.

Perhaps the oldest ‘bellwether belt’ is the ‘Route 30 states’. Route 30 runs from the Atlantic to the…