That’s true, and is why I keep saying things like “somewhat” and “to one degree or another”.
But in addition, it’s hard to sort out the extent to which the states are shifting due to deep rooted underlying changes, from the specifics of a particular election.
I’m attempting to be a little more specific about the extent of those effects.
Also true.
The thing is, though, that to the extent red states are growing in population (and electoral votes) because they’re gaining new voters who are young, Latino, transplants from the Northeast to the Sunbelt, etc., then those red states become purple states. The Republicans need the red states to grow in population solely by adding more cranky old white males, and I don’t think that is happening.
No, it doesn’t.
Margin of error is based on sample size. As the number of polls increases, the number of people sampled increases. So if the numbers remain the same as the sample size increases, it is no longer an issue of ‘margin of error’ and more representative of true numbers.
True, but if they’re ahead by 30 points somewhere, they can let it go to 10 (for example) before it becomes purple.
Long term, you’re right of course that the Repubs are facing a serious demographic issue. (Although I disagree with you about “young”. Young people age.)
Actually, I don’t think it is. As states become more populous, this population growth is, most likely, happening in growing urban areas, and due to an influx of relatively minority-heavy populations. Both of which (urban and minority) tend to vote Dem. It’s no a coincidence that some of the growing formerly-red states are now purple or blue – it’s built in to the very mechanism of their population growth; and eventually they tip blue.
I’m not sure whether a Republican is going to win Virginia again in the foreseeable future, for example.
ETA: Or, what MEBuckner said
Yeah, “young” is tricky. The danger to the GOP, I think, is that the young voters of 2012 may imprint as Democratic Party voters and be hard to dislodge even as they get older. Not impossible, but harder.
Romney won my state (Georgia) 53% to 45%. He won Arizona by 55% to 43%. Those are solid numbers but they’re far from Wyoming solid. And it’s those states that are growing in electoral votes and that the Republicans have to worry about in the medium-term. Here’s a pretty harsh analysis of the GOP’s demographic prospects from the Electoral-Vote.com guy–mind you, while he’s a member of the reality-based community when it coms to forecasting elections, he doesn’t make any secret of being a liberal.
I’m skeptical as to whether the “imprinting” phenomenon exists to more than a marginal extent.
I think the GOP will adapt and keep things competitive. They will gradually change their platform to find a balance between ideology and practicality. Probably by becoming more immigrant tolerant, and trying to appeal to Latinos on religious grounds.
Note: I’m talking long term, 8+ years from now
Although margins of victory in a state is often what’s cited as making it a “swing state”, I for one never really believed that PA, MI, WI, IA, NV or MN(!) were ever in doubt. For me, the fact that the Dems have routinely won most of these states over the past 20 years was the determining factor; unless the GOP can truly challenge the Dems on their “home turf”, the swing states become an all-or-nothing proposition, and that’s a tough nut to crack.
I’ve said this before but it needs an update: The Democrats have 242 electoral votes just in those states they have won for the past six presidential elections. And again, none of these were particularly close this time around, with PA being the thinnest margin at 5 points. Add in NM, IA, NV, and NH–all of which Obama won in this election by 5 or more points and which seem to have become fairly reliable blue states–and the total becomes 263 EV’s. Barring some calamity, these look pretty safe for the Dems in at least the next two election cycles.
That leaves CO, OH, NC, VA, and FL; the GOP has to will all of these to keep the Dems from 270. That’s a tall order–and given the diverse interests in these true swing states, ISTM the GOP will need to do more than run to the right to grab all of these.
No. The polling methodologies are different, and they are done at different times. They cannot be treated as one event.
No, but they absolutely and definitely reduce the margin of error. This is not a serious question.
Any given polling agency is going to use it’s own polling methodology and label states as “battleground” if they are within the margin of error or whatever they use to determine it (the number is probably going to be a bit more than the actual margin of error of the poll). If you want to combine different polls, you’ll need to figure out the math of how the margin of error is affected. It does not “cease to be a ‘margin of error’”, per the first post I responded to.
OK, I thought when he said “it ceases …” he meant that specific number ceases to be the margin of error, in that it’s reduced. It’s clearly reduced, to some smaller interval.
But in any event, I agree with the poster above who distinguished between battleground state and toss-up state. A toss-up state is one in which either candidate is pretty much equally likely to win. A battleground state is one in which one candidate may be ahead at this time, but the margin is close enough that campaigning and advertising might change the outcome.
Texas will never be a swing state, or at least not for more than a single election. It’s just too big: If Texas goes blue, without a corresponding change the other way (say, New York or California going red), it would be so devastating to the current Republican party that they would cease to exist. The new party that rose from the ashes might end up still using the “Republican” name, but it would be so different from the current one that all of the lines would need to be redrawn.
Oh, please, Chronos, that didn’t happen to the Democrats when they lost California to Reagan in '84. Such silliness.
Addressing what Marley23 and CJJ* said about the 19 states:
We should keep in mind that the analysis about these 19 states assumes that the Republicans don’t run someone with a significant popularity. After all, the demographics of those states in the 80s wasn’t sigificantly different from the demographics of the 90s, or the 00s. The very popular Reagan, and the tail-coatingly popular Bush I were able to turn many, indeed almost all in Reagan’s 1984 case, “red”. It’s been one of the difficulties of the Republican party for the last 5 election cycles that they’ve had fairly mundane candidates, about whom energy could not be maintained with the electorate.
Now, if we are talking situations much like those last 6 elections, then yes, that’s a very troubling statistic for the Republican party and its efforts to control the White House. And it won’t take much more demographic change before there will be about 22 states with a total of 270+ votes regularly voting for the Democratic candidate in the absence of a popular Republican on the ballot. And it isn’t going to get better for the Republicans without a change in their paradigm. As Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC said last night, “We’re not losing 95 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough.”
They’ll have to find someone significantly more popular with young voters, gays, Latinos, black voters, women, or some other mix of groups they have not done well with in the last couple of elections. And that could happen, but it would require them to make some real changes instead of doubling down on being super-conservative again.
These two facts may not be entirely independent. The populations of red states may be increasing with the addition of more blue people. I’m not sure which states went up in population, but I’ll bet the population of Texas has increased in the Hispanic proportion.
Details here. The population of the U.S. is still growing, so the population of every state went up save one - Michigan. But in terms of electoral votes, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington each gained one vote. Florida gained two and Texas gained four. Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania each lost one electoral vote and New York and Ohio each lost two.