Which blue states do the Republicans have a reasonable chance of turning to win the Electoral College vote next year?
Maybe Nevada and Virginia. Possibly, possibly, New Mexico or Ohio.
I think they think Ohio is achievable, hence putting the RNC here, in Cleveland, no less.
Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, New Mexico and Florida seem like good targets, since the Republicans have won high-profile Senate or Gubernatorial races in those states in recent years, and most of them have a good-sized collection of working class voters turned off by Democratic policies. Virginia also seems sensible. Though the Republicans haven’t won state-wide elections there in the past few cycles, they’ve tended to lose only by razor-thin margins.
Colorado is a purple state, not a blue one. Colorado is a state that can simultaneously have a Democratic governor and also recall two state senators because they voted the Democratic party line on gun control.
I think one has to start with purple states. For a Republican to win the White House, I think you’ve got to start by assuming the GOP wins back Florida and Ohio. After that, my best guesses would be (a) Virginia, which is trending blue but isn’t all the way there yet; and (b) aging Rust Belt states like Iowa and Wisconsin, the latter of which actually qualifies as a blue state in Presidential politics.
If the GOP picked up all of those, it would have a 282-256 win in the Electoral College.
Purple-to-blue states I think are more of a longshot for the GOP in 2016:
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New Hampshire: it’s been trending blue for awhile. I think 2000 was the last time it went GOP, and that needed a Nader assist.
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Pennsylvania: the GOP always thinks it’s got a chance here, but it’s always wrong. Philadelphia + Pittsburgh > Pennsyltucky.
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New Mexico and Nevada: Have been trending blue in Presidential elections as well, plus the Hispanic vote is going to be more solidly Dem this time than in the past.
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Colorado: again, trending blue, and same comment about the Hispanic vote, but it’s a less solid thing than NM and NV. If the GOP can flip any of these three Southwestern states, this is the one.
Going the other way, I’d say that the Dems shouldn’t give up on (a) North Carolina, which they won in 2008, and only lost by 2% in 2012, and (b) Arizona, again because of the Hispanic vote.
The Dems did pretty well in AZ in the 2006 midterms, then kinda gave up on the state once McCain got nominated in 2008, and don’t seem to have put much effort into the state since. The Dems talk about how someday demographic changes will turn Texas blue, but that’ll happen with Arizona a lot sooner than Texas. Obama lost AZ by 8.5% in 2008 and 9% in 2012, which is a nontrivial margin, but even if it’s out of reach for 2016, aim for 2016 to win it in 2020.
I’ve been waiting for someone to ask this sensible question, which is the only one that matters, to force me to spend time running the numbers.
Obama won 332 to 206, meaning that the Republicans have to pick up 64 electoral votes at minimum.
They can do that by turning the four closest races in 2012:
Florida 29 0.8%
Ohio 18 1.9%
Virginia 13 3.0%
Colorado 9 4.7%
If they miss any one of those, they have to go deeper:
Pennsylvania 20 5.2%
Iowa 6 5.6%
New Hampshire 4 5.8%
Nevada 6 6.6%
Of course it also means that the Republicans have to keep all their close states, a much easier task, since there is only one:
North Carolina 15 2.2%
Quinnipiac is the only pollster who seems to put out regular polling for swing states, which for them are Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio with 67 total votes, more than enough. The latest set of results are from August 20. They have Clinton doing badly in all three states against Rubio, losing two to Bush, and one to Trump. This is a clear downturn from their June 17 polling, where she won most races (against a different set of opponents, although she lost Ohio to Kasich.)
Individual polls at this point have minimal meaning or predictive ability, and trend lines are almost as meaningless. It does seem reasonable to say that Florida will be in play if either Bush or Rubio is the nominee and that Ohio is more likely if Kasich is.
North Carolina, however, consistently polls for Clinton. That’s a big loss. Even assuming Republican wins in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, that would require at minimum both Virginia and Colorado to swing. If North Carolina is lost and the Democrats keep any one of the big three states, taking all seven of the eight closest won’t be enough.
Forget all talk of a national campaign. Everything will be going into these four states.
As a new Floridian, I eagerly anticipate my vote mattering, but I dread the advertising. At least the campaign will bump some of the ambulance-chasing lawyers’ ads off TV.
This is hugely misleading point. The two state Senators were defeated in a special election, with only that on the ballot. It was heavily funded by the NRA and Democrats just aren’t all that energized by gun control. In the next general election, the two NRA funded Senators were handily defeated.
{Piper bows.}
Doesn’t this math suggest that the Republicans need a major game-changer of some sort to shift enough states to win?
My 8-ball says yes. But they will argue that without Obama fewer blacks will turn out, that the problems with the economy will work against the incumbent party, that whoever becomes the Democratic nominee will have major issues to overcome, and that they can energize their base. All they need to accomplish is a change of a total of 265,000 votes in the three big states. Random chance could account for that many.
TRUMP 2016! 
I’m fond of pointing this out to one particular poster here (not the one you’re responding to) when he asserts that Colorado has turned back into a safe Republican state. I also include the fact that the Democratic governor was re-elected, and that the “gun control” law is still law.
I believe that the vote in these states will rise or fall with the national approval ratings. I reject the idea of a “blue wall.”
For example: Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Since 1988, there have been six elections. Four were comfortable Dem wins. In the two close elections, the Republican candidate lost them closely. In an election where a Republican can win semi-comfortably (as defined by national polls) then Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico are GOP wins.
This electoral college analysis is simply a holdover from Election 2000 and 2004 where everything is razor thing. When it isn’t so close, it doesn’t matter.
You can take Michigan off that list. Republicans’ dominance in recent elections is misleading. We’ve got a Republican governor simply because the democratic candidate the last two times out have either been a weak candidate or run a shitty campaign. Pubs have the state house only because of gerrymandering. They also have a majority of Michigan’s Congressional districts because of gerrymandering. Democrats get more votes for Congressperson, state rep and state senator, but the districts are obscenely rigged. No way a Republican wins the state in a presidential election.
That sounds awfully circular to me. Of course a Republican will win when a Republican will win. (Although in 2004 Bush still managed to lose Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. In 2000 he lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa.)
Why would anyone think that 2016 will be an election that a Republican can win semi-comfortably?
I’m not saying that the 2016 election will or will not produce a semi-comfortable win for a Republican. All I am saying is that if the Republican nominee is sufficiently more popular to the voters than the Democratic nominee, then such popularity will be reflected in the vote of the mentioned states (and others).
There is no blue wall.
Other than a sudden collapse of the economy, or a significant terrorist attack on the U.S. or one of its embassies, it’s hard to see the circumstances that would lead to a ‘semi-comfortable’ GOP popular vote win.
In 2004, with the advantages of incumbency, an opposition party that still didn’t know what to say about the Iraq war, and an opponent who couldn’t campaign his way out of a paper bag, Bush won the popular vote by only 2.5%. The last time before that that the GOP Presidential candidate won the popular vote was in 1988.
So barring major shit hitting the fan, I think it’s safe to say that if the GOP wins the popular vote next November, it’ll be by a pretty thin margin. And any rational discussion of what states the GOP can flip should proceed from that assumption.
Each election will have candidates who will be judged on their own merits. It will not be Bush v. Kerry in 2016. The issues will be completely different. Nobody will be debating the Iraq war, social security privatization, or a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
I don’t see how we can extrapolate the results from 11 years ago to state that such a number will act as a ceiling for all future GOP presidential candidates.
Neither do I. Nor does anybody else in this thread. We’re looking back a mere 3 years and at the current political environment. It would be extremely foolish not to look at the last election.
You’re the only one to use the term “blue wall” and I had no idea what you were talking about. After searching I find that it’s also a circular term that refers to the states that Democrats have won in past elections and projecting that into the future. The earliest uses I saw were all derisive ones on Republican sites after the 2014 midterms.
Well, anyone who uses the midterms to project to the presidential races deserves to be mocked unmercifully. We spent the run-up to 2012 doing so here and will do so again this campaign if we can find anyone that ideologically idiotic.
Issues are of minor value in predicting a presidential race. They are secondary to the perceptions of the two parties and of their candidates. Issues per se make up a piece of these perceptions but only as part of broader sound bites. Parties and turn out matter orders of magnitude more.
There is no blue wall. There is no invisible pink unicorn in the garage either. So what to both.