One-county state wins
This list seeks to enumerate all the instances in which one county handed a state to a presidential nominee from 1880 on. It also lists the counties, each of which individually handed a given state to a nominee in a given election. Sometimes (often, actually), there is more than one county which gave the nominee a larger raw-vote margin than he or she won the state by. If there is only one, that may be significant, as the Orange County Register alluded to after the 2016 election: As of this writing, Clinton’s lead in the popular vote nationwide was 1.7 million. Clinton’s lead in California was 3.5 million. That means, when all the votes are counted and Clinton’s popular-vote edge is official, it probably will in a manner of speaking have hinged entirely on the results in California. This is rare: In the Bush-Gore election, four states gave Gore vote margins larger than his 543,895-vote national margin. The last time a single state’s voting accounted for a candidate’s national vo...