sentences:  Republican Abraham Lincoln won the county in his landmark 1860 election, and from then until the Great Depression Macon County became solidly Republican, only giving a narrow plurality to Woodrow Wilson in 1912 when the GOP was mortally divided by Theodore Roosevelt's splinter–party run.The FDR-era New Deal saw the county turn Democratic again due to its strong industrial base, although Macon was a perfect bellwether between 1932 and 1996 apart from the Catholicism-influenced 1960 election and the 1988 election heavily influenced by a major Midwestern drought.Al Gore did narrowly hold the county in 2000 despite losing the election due to a razor-thin loss in Florida, but since then the county has trended Republican.