There weren't many voters in Ventura County back in 1920, but they were a solidly Republican bunch. In the presidential election that year, Warren Harding won 80 percent of the Ventura County vote.
That was the start of a remarkable, nearly unbroken, string of 24 presidential elections in which Ventura County voters have been in sync with national political sentiment. In only one instance over the past 92 years have Ventura County voters sided with a loser — in 1976, when they picked Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter.
For those keeping score, that's 23 out of 24. In presidential elections since 1920, Ventura County voters have been 96 percent accurate.
Over the past nine decades, county voters have gotten even the close ones right — John Kennedy's squeaker over Richard Nixon in 1960, George W. Bush's lose-the-popular-vote, win-the-Electoral-College victory over Al Gore in 2000, and others.
The status of being a bellwether county is decidedly rare in the United States. A Princeton University study, for instance, determined that only eight counties in America sided with the winner in every election from 1960 through 1996. The Association Press reports that just 106 of the nation's 3,033 counties voted for Republican Bush in 2004 and then reversed partisan course and voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008.
How did Ventura County come to be such a bellwether county?
As much as anything, it is a tale of demography.
A 20-year string of Democratic presidents that began in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt trounced incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover, coincided with Ventura County's first population boom — one that was triggered by the discovery of oil in the Ventura Avenue oil fields.
"Beginning in 1926, there was a huge influx of people who came to work in the oil fields," said Charles Johnson, research librarian at the Museum of Ventura County. "Those oil folks, they tended to come from the heartland."
Perhaps because of their connections to the Depression-ravaged heartland, those newcomers were big supporters of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Roosevelt carried Ventura County in all four of his campaigns, as did Harry Truman in 1948.
By then, another development had changed the county's demographics. The Navy bases along the Oxnard coast had brought with them a growing presence of active military personnel and World War II veterans, and county voters sided, albeit very narrowly, with Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.
Kennedy carried Ventura County in 1960 by the same margin by which he won nationwide, less than 1 percentage point. Lyndon Johnson won here, as he did most everywhere, in a landslide in 1964.
By then, the demographic face of Ventura County was dramatically changing once again. The eastern county cities of Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks began to grow by leaps and bounds, attracting commuters who worked in Southern California's booming Cold War aerospace industry.
Among them were Dave and Peggy Sadler, who came to Simi Valley in 1963. It didn't take Peggy long to become a Republican volunteer extraordinaire, a role she still carries out today.
"Young families were coming in and buying homes here they could afford," she said. "As you're raising your children and start paying more attention to what's going on, you become more Republican."
For whatever the reasons, those newcomers either were or became Republicans after they arrived, fueling a 20-year run of GOP candidates carrying Ventura County. Over that period, the Republicans' winning margins in the county grew progressively larger, topped by Ronald Reagan's 69 percent in 1984.
That period, of course, coincided with a national tide that saw Republicans winning five of six presidential elections, interrupted only by Jimmy Carter's win in 1976 — the one that Ventura County, in its bright red political phase, missed.
Bill Clinton carried the county narrowly in 1992 and 1996, both times helped by significant support from county voters for Reform Party candidate Ross Perot. Similarly, George W. Bush won here by a whisker in both 2000 and 2004.
By 2008, another demographic trend signaled a shift in Ventura County politics — the rising significance of Latino voters that coincided with political developments that attracted Latinos in large numbers to the Democratic Party.
In early 2008, Democrats overtook Republicans to gain a plurality among registered voters in Ventura County. That fall, Obama carried the county by 12 percentage points.
"A lot of younger people started becoming more politically active, and that certainly started swinging things toward the Democratic Party," said former Supervisor Susan Lacey of Ventura.
So, how will bellwether Ventura County go on Tuesday?
Sadler seems certain that Mitt Romney will prevail here, which in her view would keep the county's string of picking winners intact.
"I think he'll carry Ventura County," she said. "I've been working these campaigns every four years for 40 years, and I'm cautiously optimistic. People are still coming into the Republican headquarters, taking signs and asking what they can do." Lacey is equally confident that Obama will carry both Ventura County and the nation, which would keep alive the county voters' winning streak.
"Again, I base that on the youth involvement that I'm seeing," she said. "It's very encouraging."
Within a few days, the identity of the next president will become clear. And, based on 92 years of history, it might be a safe bet to predict that as Ventura County goes, so will the nation.
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