I’m always surprised how Republican-leaning Ohio and Indiana are. Ohio has numerous urban areas and a huge university. Indiana is small in population but is also famous for its colleges and universities, and is in the general part of the country that is mostly blue. Similarly, I’d expect Minnesota and New Mexico to be much less Democratic-leaning, both mostly due to their location within the Lower 48.
Any others? Admittedly, some simple research on the demographics would probably explain why.
These are good examples, and the reasons they defy expectations aren’t so clear cut — a lot of idiosyncratic history behind each case.
I would add West Virginia. I’d expect it to be rather more Democratic than it has been for decades. The state owes its existence to breaking away from the rest of Virginia because they WEREN’T slave owners! So, why are there so many racists there?
This encapsulates Trump’s (and before him, Tea Party, etc.) attraction to white less-educated rural Americans.
A great study by an economist showed that Obama did most poorly in 2008, compared to Kerry in 2004, in a rather small region centered on where West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania about join. The same study found a high proportion of racist Google search terms there.
This also partly explains the Ohio dilemma you mentioned.
I think Minnesota is trending red, it just had further to go than PA, WI, and MI. The last time Minnesota went red was in 1972, with even Reagan losing it twice. Indiana is mostly rural outside of Indianapolis. Even the college towns like Mayor Pete’s South Bend aren’t very large. With Ohio, my guess is that the rural parts, especially in the southeast, are probably redder than the rural parts of Wisconsin and Michigan, due to it being part of Appalachia.
The one that surprises me is Vermont. Not only is it a blue state, but they keep re-electing Bernie Sanders. Yet it’s a small, rural, largely white state. I think the natural tendency would be for Vermont to look more like New Hampshire, yet it’s probably the bluest state in the lower 48.
Everyone always talks about how red Ohio is, and I don’t know why. The state is basically a microcosm of the nation, with about the same mix of urban/rural and other demographic divides, and so it unsurprisingly tends to go in the same way as the country as a whole in Presidential elections. Yeah, right now, we’re slanted a little red, but it’s not like we’re Nebraska or anything.
I once asked a West Virginian about that; and he replied that, no, see, at the time of the breakaway, West Virginians were the Virginians who couldn’t afford slaves.
While I’m not surprised that it’s still “red,” one state that I would expect to be “bluing” faster is Texas. For all its reputation as a rural state, only 15% of the population is classified as rural. Over 75% of the population lives in the “Texas Triangle” bounded by Houston, San Antonio and Dallas/Ft. Worth. It’s an ethnically diverse state, with non-Hispanic whites accounting for about 41% of the population. And for decades the state has been experiencing enormous in-migration from other states and internationally.
Yet Democrats have not won a statewide race since 1994. In 2018, Senator Ted Cruz got something of a scare in a Democratic wave year, but even then our Governor and other Republican state officials were cruising to reelection. And this year Senator John Cornyn smashed his opponent. Democratic prospects in 2022 are dismal, they’ve got essentially no bench to draw from in a year that all the state offices that will be on the ballot – Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, etc.
The main reason is the motivation and focus of the Texas Republican Party. Say what you will about Texas Republicans, but they have not fallen into complacency like long-term majority parties in other states. They bust their asses in every election organizing and getting out the vote. They’ve pushed through voting changes to help cement their majority – Voter ID, limiting balloting options in urban areas, etc. And they’ve done a pretty good job shutting down too-far-out candidates in primaries to ensure that voters can choose strongly conservative – but not certifiably insane – politicians.
And of course the flip side is the perennially pathetic state of the Texas Democratic Party. They’ve floundered for years, seemingly content with their few reliably Democratic state house and Congressional seats and counting on the changing demographics of the state to just kind of naturally make them the majority. They actually seemed to be getting their shit together in recent years, but this last election was a debacle. They won no competitive Congressional seats. And astoundingly they lost ground in South Texas, one of the most reliably Democratic bastions in the state. Ultimately, I think the attention and money that poured into Texas this year was the worst thing that could have happened to Texas Democrats – suddenly they thought they were competitive everywhere instead of concentrating their resources and efforts on a few targeted races that could have, for example, swung the state house majority their way.
Considering how socially intolerant Republicans have become, I’m surprised Utah is such a reliably red state. Most Mormons must see the parallel between Islamaphobia and attacks on their own religion. Because of missionary work, a large portion of their electorate has traveled outside the US which is an experience that tends to skew Americans to the left. There’s also the fact that it was the Democrats who made a Mormon Speaker of the House.
Typically it is only the Elders, not the Sisters who go on mission which may have something to do with it. More importantly though, is that when out of the country they stay in LDS compounds and are highly chaperoned. It’s not at all like backpacking through Nepal on your own at nineteen.
Having recently moved back to Kentucky after many years living in Ohio, I’m surprised that Kentucky is such a red state. That wasn’t true in the mid-'80s, when the legislature was solidly Democratic and both U.S. senators (Huddleston and Ford) were Democrats. Since then, the state’s Congressional delegation has swung over to mostly Republicans and we’ve been saddled with two of the more right-wing members of the U.S. Senate (Rand Paul and He-who-shall-not-be-named). Trump beat Biden in Kentucky by 27 percentage points.
A lot of the state’s rural, but Democrats run well in the larger cities (Lexington and Louisville) and eastern Kentucky should be a fertile ground for Democrats, in part because of persistent poverty and resentment of big coal mine owners. It hasn’t helped that the Democratic Party is hostile to coal as an energy source and HRC was positively gleeful at the prospect of putting miners out of work.
*Kentucky’s first senators (John Brown and John Edwards) were from the Anti-Admin Party, which probably would have gotten them tossed off the Dope.
**I was able to overcome the temptation to get a black “Friends of Coal” specialty license plate, but just barely.
***Ohio has a long record of being a swing state. A romance with Trump has put it temporarily in the Republican camp, but given the state’s history and the bumblings/corruption of Republicans controlling the state legislature, I expect it to be more competitive for Democrats in the near future.
In 2008 and 2012 it pretty much matched up with the rest of the US, but the last two elections Ohio has been 10 and 12 points redder than the rest of the US. That’s a pretty big swing.
Of course, she was no such thing. Now Republicans have tried to paint her - and other Democrats - as such, and she did a poor job fighting that perception, but ‘gleeful at the prospect of putting miners out of work’ is a poor way to summarize ‘realistic about the effects of coal use and looking for options to transition coal country to other sectors’ are really quite different.
Nebraska has this coming, sigh…
Never ceases to surprise me how we Nebraskans repeatedly shoot ourselves in the foot by our political choices. We keep doing the same things and expect a different result.
Gives frontier stubbornness a new definition.
Not just one large university–several large universities. Notably, the large cities and university towns in Ohio are all blue. Ohio went blue twice for Clinton and twice for Obama. It went red twice for Bush and twice for Trump. I think it’s a matter of turnout.
However, there is also a huge brain drain in Ohio. People like me, educated in its excellent universities, have left for the coasts.
Indiana is similar to Ohio, except that it has fewer large cities and fewer large universities. So it is much more heavily rural.
Female mormon missionaries can now wear pants!! And they are more common now since they can serve at 19 since many get married at 21.
California is the one that surprises me. In federal elections they are pretty solidly Dem, but at the state and local level the Repubs have a slight lead. One day the R’s will find a candidate for Pres. that CA can stomach and that’ll be the election!
Ohio is bleeding population, especially its college educated and younger population. What’s left behind? An older, conservative population as well as those who refuse to leave even if their situation looks hopeless.
I lived in Columbus when I joined the SDMB and volunteered for the Kerry campaign. Now I’m gone a and just about everyone else I knew from that time period. Who’s left? A friend of mine who is still bouncing from job to job with at least 2 DUIs and will always pick weed over work even now that he’s almost 40
It is the bluest (66-31), even more that Cal and Mass (and leaving out DC). One way it differs from NH is that a lot of wealthy Bostoners live in southern NH.
West Virginia underwent perhaps the biggest shift a state has ever undergone in just twenty years. It went from voting for Bill Clinton by 15 percent in 1996 to going for Trump by 42 percent in 2016.
That’s a 57-percent shift.
When my son arrived at ND for a Masters’ program, my wife (who has become a liberal activist here in SoCal) was very excited to learn that the Clay Democratic Club was across the parking lot from his apartment, and we decided to visit, thinking we’d meet some local like-minded folks and maybe get some swag.
It turned out to be a very smoky, private, very blue collar bar. Disappointed, we did a little research and found stories like this:
Not sure how many members are actually Democrats, but it seems to me that the term means something different in Indiana than California.
There’s rural, and then there’s rural. Just because someone may live somewhere that’s “urban” in a census sense, it doesn’t mean that they live in an urban area in the sense of somewhere that reliably votes blue.
I mean, in D/FW, Dallas County reliably votes blue, but Collin County just to the north votes red as often as the super-rural Panhandle counties, even though the vast majority of Collin County residents live in the cities of Plano, Allen, McKinney and Frisco.
On top of that, the Texas districts have been victim to some 30 years of relentless and shameless gerrymandering intended to either dilute or concentrate minority votes and conservative white votes.
And finally, one thing to not underestimate is that the conservative white middle class segment of the electorate seems to be extraordinarily motivated to come out and vote, when compared to other segments.