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WASHINGTON / BOSTON: From the coastal towns of Pinellas, Florida, to the suburbs of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Wall Street will be watching a few dozen counties closely Tuesday night for clues as to who will win the presidential race. from the United States.
Investment firms, faced with the prospect of a chaotic election complicated by an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, have hired political analysts and analyzed the voting data to try to identify crucial counties and Senate races that could point them to where the vote is heading.
Pinellas, home to St. Petersburg-Clearwater, has chosen the winner of every presidential election since 1980 except for the disputed 2000 ballot. Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, is seen as an indicator of suburban enthusiasm for the contender. Democrat Joe Biden.
The calculation is in no way final or complete. Given that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote early, for example, initial results from some counties could show a strong Biden lead that moderates or reverses as ballots are counted in person.
“They’re trying to find the signal for the noise. It can seem overwhelming,” said Andy Lewin, who works with financial services clients for Washington lobbyist BGR Group.
He looks to Pinellas and another Florida county, Sumter, as benchmarks for older voters. If Biden beats Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, in Pinellas, or if President Donald Trump loses his 2016 margin of victory in Sumter, the Republican is unlikely to be re-elected, he said.
“They are excellent representatives of investors on where the election is going,” Lewin said.
A spokesman for Biden’s campaign declined to comment for this story. Representatives for Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Several investment strategists singled out Florida as critical to Trump’s reelection. The state, with 29 Electoral College votes out of 538, was vital to Trump’s surprise victory in 2016.
“The most important thing to watch on election night is what happens in Florida,” Ben Melkman, director of hedge fund firm Light Sky Macro LP, told Reuters during a recent online forum.
Florida, along with North Carolina, Ohio and Texas – all states that investors are closely monitoring – has already begun processing mail-in ballots. Election experts say these states will likely be able to count the majority of their votes by the end of the night.
AFRICAN AMERICANS AND SUBURBANITES
Biden leads Trump in national opinion polls, but the race is close in various battle states, which can lean either side and decide the race.
Noel Dixon, a global macro strategist for State Street Global Markets, said he was looking at Bladen and Granville counties in North Carolina as indicators of African-American participation. A raise would be a good sign for Biden.
Ed Mills, Washington’s managing director for politics at Raymond James, sees North Carolina’s Mecklenburg, Wake and Durham counties as indicators for suburban voters.
The state also has a close race for the Senate seat from Republican Thom Tillis. If North Carolina opts for Biden and Senate challenger Cal Cunningham, it would likely be a Democratic sweep, Mills said. But if Trump wins by more than a few percentage points, he would be “thinking about a repeat of 2016.”
Other battlefields, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, don’t begin processing absentee ballots until Election Day, so experts say the initial results will likely skew Republicans and the full recount could take days to complete. complete.
For an advance reading on Pennsylvania, investors can look to Ohio, said Libby Cantrill, director of US public policy at bond fund manager PIMCO. The two states have similar voter demographics and both changed in 2016 for Trump.
If Trump wins Florida and Arizona, the outcome will depend on Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, said Alec Phillips, chief US political economist at Goldman Sachs, in a recent call to clients.
Kent County in Michigan, where Trump beat Clinton by 3 percentage points, is on the watch list of Jon Lieber, managing director of the Eurasia Group in the United States, as is Bucks County in Pennsylvania, which was narrowly for Clinton.
Garrett Roche, chief market strategist at Uxbridge Capital, a New York-based private investment adviser, said he will be looking at Macomb County in Michigan, where Trump outperformed Mitt Romney by 6 points in 2012, and where Clinton underperformed former President Barack Obama by 10 points. .
In Wisconsin, Roche said it was monitoring Kenosha County, which voted for Obama by double digits before narrowly going to Trump.
Other investors said they were keeping an eye on Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous. The former Republican stronghold has a growing Hispanic population leaning toward Democrats.
Whatever the outcome there or in other leading counties, it is clear that investors have been looking for an edge, even if the results are far from certain.
It’s “hard to know what to focus on,” said BGR’s Lewin, “so everyone has their own secret sauce.”
(Reporting by Lawrence Delevingne and Pete Schroeder, editing by Paritosh Bansal and Tiffany Wu)
