Path to the White House: which Blue states do the Republicans have a chance to turn?

Politics & Elections
21

Well, I do - but as I said, barring the shit hitting the fan.

  1. The demographic factors that are gradually tilting the table in Presidential elections toward Democrats continue to operate. Each year, the electorate gets a little less white. And the GOP, which lost blacks 50 years ago, continues to do its best to alienate Hispanics and Asians. (Even though none of the GOP xenophobia is directed specifically at Asians, they’re reacting to it anyway, and the GOP vote share of Asians is plummeting.)

Bush got over 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004; think any GOP candidate will come close to matching that in the next few cycles? Me either. Meanwhile, among whites, the Fox News-viewing generation continues to get older…and gradually die off. The GOP’s only game plan seems to be to try to increase its vote share of the shrinking white vote. In general elections, this means they’ve got to grow their share of the pie faster than the pie shrinks. (It’ll keep working fine in midterms.)

  1. In 2004, the GOP had incumbency and a President whose approval ratings were still holding up. This will obviously not be duplicated until the cycle after the GOP takes the White House.

That’s the big stuff, per Exapno. Plus:

  1. Kerry was the worst Dem Presidential candidate since Dukakis and Mondale. We may run a worse one sometime, but it’s hard to see it happening soon.

  2. For 2016, at least, the GOP candidates are so bad, they make Shrub and Romney look good by comparison. And this was the cycle where they were going to show that the year of Bachmann, Cain, etc. was a fluke.

But no: the problem is that the GOP has basically abandoned policy, abandoned any sort of base in fact and reality. They’re left with sloganeering and arm-waving. Not one of this crew is capable of over-performing the fundamentals. (With the exception of Kasich, maybe, but he isn’t gonna be the nominee.)

So everythng’s running the wrong way for the GOP in Presidential elections. Barring economic or terroristic disaster, the best they can do in the popular vote is squeak out a narrow win. So the question is, what states can they flip, given that underlying reality?

While I disagree with the Blue Wall theory - I’ve noted a number of states that I think could be turned by the GOP in a close election, enough to get to 282 EVs - I think the GOP is much more in a position that everything has to break just right for them than the Dems are.

The GOP does have one structural advantage that’s not likely to come into play, but I’ll mention it anyway: in a close election, they only need the 269 EVs that it would take to throw the election into the House.

First of all, they’ve got a big House majority, and are very unlikely to lose it in a close election. Plus, in an election decided by the House, each state delegation gets one vote, rather than each House member getting one vote. So even if the Dems won back the House, the GOP would still almost surely have a majority of the state delegations.

22

I think that the point that UltraVires is trying to make is that it isn’t that much harder to flip five states than it is to flip one. If you do something that improves your standing in, say, Ohio, that’s probably going to improve your standing in Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, too, and it has a decent chance of also improving your standing in the Carolinas, Florida, New Mexico, and Colorado. Sure, you’d rather be five states ahead than one state ahead, and you’d rather either than being five states behind, but there isn’t actually much difference between those.

23

If that’s the point he’s making, then I simply disagree. In terms of flipping (using ‘<’ for ‘is easier than’), Ohio < Iowa < Wisconsin < Michigan and Pennsylvania. in a 50-50 election, it would be one hell of a surprise if the GOP didn’t win Ohio, but it would still be a real shocker if they won Michigan or Pennsylvania. You just don’t get five for the price of one.

24

At any rate, Ultra Vires clearly was arguing that 2004 didn’t act as a ceiling on the potential GOP popular vote, that each election was different. And they are, but in very limited ways compared to how it used to be. As we approach 2016, it’s easy to summarize the differences between the potential 2016 map and the 2000 map in a few sentences. Compare the changes between 2000 and 2012 with those between 1988 and 2000, or compare the close elections of 1960, 1968, and 1976 with each other. We couldn’t have talked about red states and blue states back then because the map kept changing.

25

FWIW this 538 graphic can help inform discussion.

It’s the tipping point states for Obama in 2012. Now of course Clinton may perform differently in each state … for example is likely stronger than him in Ohio and less strong in VA? But it is a good start.

In order from size of Obama victory down were: Florida; Ohio(both less than national average); Virginia (by 0.5% over the national average) ; Colorado (2.2% over the national average); Pennsylvania; Iowa; New Hampshire; Nevada; Wisconsin.

To Romney closest went Georgia.

Electoral votes for each state are listed.

26

Just to make it easy … same relative positions and a general election GOP popular vote win of 2.5% would be an electoral victory for them with 275. It would have flipped through Colorado. A bit more would flip Pennsylvania as well.

A solid general election GOP popular win would likely also carry Iowa and New Hampshire.

But a virtual 50/50 popular vote requires becoming significantly better than Romney level performance in Virginia and Ohio or way better in more than one somewhere else upstream.

27

It was the point I was making, and I disagree with your disagreement. :slight_smile:

You do get five for the price of one because the people who are voting in those states are not fundamentally different. If a GOP candidate takes some popular position or is viewed as having leadership qualities, or gets increased voter support by whatever means in Ohio, then those same things also attract voters in other states.

It’s not like those positive things stop at state boundary lines. And the results of 2008 an 2012 are anomalies because of the increased turnout by people voting for a black candidate. Especially 2008. You cannot deny the enthusiasm of the black community in turning out to cast a vote for Obama. That simply will not be present in 2016.

I’m also not seeing how 2004 was the high water mark for a GOP candidate. Bush, in retrospect, was a terrible candidate. Look at some of the debates against Kerry and how he bumbles and stutters in response to questions. The Iraq war was going to hell and people were starting to question the reasons for starting that war in the first place. His core support was not enthusiastic after he failed to push through social security privatization, his No Child Left Behind federal takeover of schools, and his enactment of a Medicare prescription drug expansion.

If we get a good candidate, with a positive message, and poll about 53 or 54 percent, then it doesn’t matter what is going on in the individual states. The candidate will win those states and others. If in October, 2016 we have 49-48 poll results then we will definitely talk seriously about the electoral college map. But to say that for now and for all time any discussion of the presidential race has to rest upon Ohio, Virginia, Florida, or Colorado, I simply disagree. We are not at that point.

28

Well, you don’t quite get five for the price of one. Flipping one is easier than flipping five. But it’s not five times easier.

All else being equal, to flip one state, you have to make gains equal to the margin in the closest state, and to flip five states, you have to make gains equal to the margin in the fifth-closest state. The margin will be greater in the fifth-closest state, so that’s harder… but it probably won’t be very much greater.

29

I think that’s the genesis of the ‘Blue Wall’ argument: that the GOP has to do a bit better than an even split of the popular vote to win the EC.

FWIW, that post is dated 11/8/2012, so the results are preliminary. Final results are at a bunch of places; I use Dave Leip’s Atlas, because the state results are easily sortable in different ways. Turns out Virginia was right at the national average, and Colorado was only 1.8% more blue, rather than 2.2%.

The argument still stands, but I’d express it more as a GOP disadvantage than a sure thing. If the GOP won the popular vote by only 0.5%, chances are they’d still lose in the EC, but I wouldn’t want to bet serious money on the proposition. (But maybe then we could finally get them on board with deciding the Presidency by popular vote - if that 2000 shoe were on the other foot, the EC wouldn’t be quite as sacred to Republicans anymore. :))
Nitpick ETA: North Carolina was Romney’s closest win, by 2.04%.

30

This. If the Republican candidate wins by +3 or more, he wins the election, period, barring some extremely unlikely series of events spawned by the Democrat skillfully winning a few key states by razor thin margins through microtargeting or some other voodoo.

But in an even race, the Democrat should have the advantage.

As for which states the GOP can flip? CO, VA, PA, FL, OH, NH, IA. Even if the Democrats win, I predict a better showing than in 2008 or 2012 for the GOP nominee. At least two of those states will flip.

31

But they are.

If “the people who are voting in those states” were “not fundamentally different,” then Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, say, would vote practically as a bloc. Instead, Illinois is reliably Democratic in Presidential elections, Indiana is reliably Republican (despite 2008), and Ohio is somewhere in between, having a slight but far from overwhelming GOP lean.

A lot of that can be explained by differences in racial/ethnic and urban/suburban/rural breakdown. Big cities and inner suburbs, for instance, vote heavily Dem, while outer suburbs and rural areas lean strongly GOP. In Illinois, the Chicago area outweighs downstate, and in Pennsylvania, as I said earlier, Philadelphia + Pittsburgh > Pennsyltucky. But Indiana’s much more a state of smaller towns and rural areas.

Surely. But you’re starting from different starting points in each state, depending on the state’s electorate.

Oh, no question about it! But there are limits on how much of a difference that could make. Blacks are ~12% of the population. Between 2004 and 2012, they increased their share of turnout by 8% relative to whites, from 4% less to 4% greater. So they increased their vote share by 0.96%. And Obama won by 3.86%, so his margin without that bonus would have been 2.9%.

Some obvious things, though:

  1. Some of those blacks who didn’t vote in 2004, but did vote in 2008 and 2012, will continue to vote. Call it habit formation, familiarity, reduced barriers, whatever (they’re already registered, they’ve been to the polls before so it’s not a strange thing to them, etc.), but that 0.96% isn’t entirely going away. (Some of it surely will. We just don’t know how much.)

  2. Given the increasing hostility of the GOP towards Hispanics, we can expect Hispanic voters to take up some of that slack.

  3. And finally, while blacks may have turned out more for Obama, there’s a group that might turn out more for Hillary. I refer, of course, to women.

While women aren’t exactly a monolithic bloc the way blacks are, there are a hell of a lot more of them. If there’s a 2% increase in voting among women due to women who want to see one of their own in the White House, that’s 1% of the population, replacing the extra black vote for Obama in one fell swoop.

Will that happen? Surely. The only question is, to what extent.

The campaign as a whole was well-run - and by the time we got to the debates, people had mostly made up their minds. (I remember how little the debates moved the needle. Kerry clearly won all three debates, it clearly didn’t matter, and it’s still a major wince to think on that 11 years later.) What really DID change people’s minds was the Swiftboating during the run-up to the GOP convention, plus the attacks on Kerry at the convention, combined with Kerry’s not responding to the attacks, for day after day after painful day.

That’s when the campaign was decided.

Whatever their enthusiasm, his core support turned out in then-unprecedented numbers. Bush got 50,462,412 votes in 2000; he got 62,039,572 votes in 2004. That’s a fucking staggering increase.

Which is another point for 2004 being a ceiling of sorts: it’s hard to conceive of a better turnout job than the GOP did that year.

(And the attempt at Social Security privatization didn’t happen until 2005, btw.)

Maybe he’s under the sofa cushions with the Iraq WMDs. :smiley:

Let’s see: cut taxes on rich people (and a little bit for you middle class folks, to keep you on board), repeal Obamacare, voucherize Medicare, deport all the Mexicans, bust up unions, deregulate companies that are dumping chemicals into your drinking water, and bomb the fuck out of somebody somewhere in the Middle East.

Yep, sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. :smiley:

And if I had a couple million bucks, I wouldn’t have to show up for work tomorrow.

Given our recent history, it makes far more sense to expect a close election - with a lower ceiling on the GOP side - than anything else.

Not ‘now and for all time’ but certainly for the next couple of presidential elections, minimum. We are at that point; the question is, how long will we continue to be there?

Now as I said earlier, if we get an election where the GOP wins the popular vote but loses in the EC, we might finally be freed from having to think about individual states, because the GOP might finally join the Dems in seeing the wisdom of deciding the Presidency by popular vote. I look forward to the day when a shift of 50,000 votes in California or Texas matters just as much as a shift of 50,000 votes in Iowa…well, I hope I live to see it. :slight_smile: