However, as was true in the first four states we looked at, there has been a slow yet noticeable move to the right in these four states over the last several elections. FiveThirtyEight’s forecast anticipates that some of these states, like New Hampshire and Wisconsin, might bounce back slightly to the left in 2020, but also that others, like Minnesota, may continue to shift to the right. One explanation for why these four states moved so suddenly to the right is that they each have a large share of voters (at least 55 percent2Of the population age 25 years or older.) For one thing, these states are more racially and ethnically diverse than most of the other states we’ve looked at — Arizona and Texas have large Hispanic populations, for instance, while Georgia has a sizable Black electorate — and people of color tend to vote more Democratic. With the help of Swing Left—a national grassroots organization founded after the 2016 election—we can make a difference by paying attention to the 12 Super States, a.k.a. Swing State Map Tightens, But Biden Still Leads Trump The big change is that Florida has gone from leaning in Joe Biden's direction back to its traditional spot as a toss-up state. Goddard Media LLC | Privacy Policy, Political Wire ® is a registered trademark of Goddard Media LLC, « Next Relief Bill Must Deal with Coronavirus, Pompeo to Keynote Florida Christian Event, Biden Compares Trump to Nazi Propaganda Chief, Judiciary Committee Hearings Begin October 12, The Real Reason Trump Is Picking Amy Coney Barrett, With Barrett, Supreme Court Would Have 6 Catholics, Trump Threatens Integrity of the Election, ‘Was That a Display of Lying, Ignorance or Insanity?’, Democrats Will Shift Focus In Supreme Court Fight, Philadelphia Treasurer Faked His Marriage, Trump Says Abraham Lincoln ‘Wasn’t Big’ on Hispanics, Eric Trump Says Father Would Concede Landslide, Wisconsin GOP Leaders Try to Stop Ballot Collection, Member Briefing: Jeffrey Toobin on the Election Legal Fight, The Big Three, the Sun Belt and the Landslide Indicators. At present, the FiveThirtyEight forecast anticipates these states will lean similar to how they did 2016, although further shifts to the left are plausible. For Democrats, the hope would be that those three states trend in ways similar to Colorado and Virginia, two formerly red states whose diverse and highly educated electorates have moved them to the left over the past two decades. who are non-Hispanic white with less than a bachelor’s degree, a bloc that moved sharply toward the GOP in 2016.

On the other end of the spectrum, some 2020 battleground states moved to the left — considerably so — in the last election. It has an elderly population that usually leans toward the GOP, but it also has a large Hispanic and Black population that leans Democratic -- with the caveat that a large share of its Latino vote is Cuban American, a group that has shifted toward Democrats over the last decade but remains far more Republican-leaning than other groups of Latinos. According to the 2016 presidential elections, 48.2% of the citize… The term can also be used to describe a state whose electoral votes have a high probability of being the deciding factor in a presidential election. Georgia and Texas further to the left? Or should we expect more of a reversion to the mean? We zoomed in on how 16 battleground states have voted relative to the country as a whole since 2000 — or how much more Republican or Democratic they are relative to the nation1For instance, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by about 2 points in 2016, but President Trump won Florida by about 1 point in the same election, so Florida was about 3 points more Republican than the country. FiveThirtyEight’s forecast currently expects these states to step slightly to the left in 2020, but there’s a lot of uncertainty here, especially in a state like Maine where the error bars are particularly large. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t gradual (and sometimes, not so gradual) shifts underway. In other words, 2016 marked a significant departure from how these states had voted in recent years; each state swung 7 points or more to the right, the biggest swings in that election. Filed Under: 2020 Campaign. This is all to say that 2020 will be a pivotal year in understanding underlying trends within the Electoral College. The consensus electoral map now shows Texas as a Toss Up. Democrats won a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona for the first time since 1988, while Republicans only narrowly won Texas’s Senate race and Georgia’s gubernatorial contest. These states predominantly lie in the South and West, and the following trio of traditionally red states could all be up for grabs this November. Colorado’s population is about one-fifth Hispanic and Virginia’s is about one-fifth Black, and both are only about two-thirds white. This offsets the rest of those states, which usually vote far more Republican. — and we found an electoral map undergoing a series of changes, some steady and others abrupt. But these fairly urban states have also seen their major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix become increasingly Democratic because of the surge in college-educated voters. The name of this state was derived from the Colorado River which was named by the Spanish travelers as Rio Colorado. These states are usually targeted by both major-party campaigns, especially in competitive elections. From one presidential election to the next, the battleground states that make — or break — the election remain largely the same.

What explains the leftward shift in these traditionally Republican states? / A New Swing State on the Map. July 13, 2020 at 10:20 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment. Driven by increasingly Democratic vote shares in suburban and urban areas — especially around Denver and Washington, D.C. — Colorado and Virginia have moved far enough to the left that, in an environment in which Joe Biden leads by about 9 points nationally, they lie at the periphery of the competitive states. Take Iowa and Ohio, which went from uber-competitive states to near blowouts for President Trump in 2016. have at least one large metropolitan area that votes heavily Democratic. The state of Colorado is classified as one of the mountain states; this is mainly because the state encompasses the majority of the southern Rocky Mountains. The next five states also shifted to the right in 2016, but they didn’t veer quite as far as the previous four did. Recent Posts.