The most important paragraph in Dan Balz’s Washington Post piece on the Electoral College is the one that serves as a major caveat for the rest of his argument.
The electoral map is never truly static for long. Before the Democrats’ “blue wall” there was the so-called “Republican lock” on the electoral college. Years ago, California, Illinois and New Jersey were presidential battlegrounds. Today all are solidly Democratic. Missouri long was considered a bellwether state. Trump won it by almost 19 points.
This variability should be constantly kept in mind when trying to predict the result of the 2020 presidential election. But it’s especially important if you’re trying to make the case that the upcoming election with see a historically low number of truly competitive states.
With some minor exceptions (notably, Indiana in 2008), the red-blue divide that developed in the 2000 election was remarkably stable through 2012 and didn’t provide shocking state-by-state results. The collapse of the Blue Wall in 2016 showed that the basic divide wasn’t stable, however, and the demographic shape of the electorate has shifted significantly in the era of Trump. This latter point was demonstrated very clearly by the results of the 2018 midterms which saw the Democrats take control of the U.S. House of Representatives despite its districts being drawn in a way that should have precluded that possibility.
That result came from a collapse of Republican support in the suburbs which flipped dozens of districts into the Democrats’ column, but the largest percentage-loss of GOP support came in safely Republican seats where the difference wasn’t enough to change the outcome. In statewide elections like those that decide the Electoral College, a vote is a vote regardless of from which district it is cast. That’s why Trump isn’t safe in states like Ohio and Iowa where he presumed to be the beneficiary of increased suburban/rural polarization in the national electorate.
In one sense, Balz is indisputably correct. Trump’s path to victory is so narrow that he’ll fight on a pretty narrow battlefield. He can’t afford to play defense in states he won in 2016. He’s going to need to win Florida and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and he’ll want to fight for at least one vote out of Maine which awards its delegates both by district and statewide results. But those areas may not even be competitive for him. The true battle may be taking place Georgia and Arizona and Texas and Iowa and Ohio. That doesn’t mean that a lot of resources will be put into those all of those states by the Democrat or that they’ll spend a lot of time campaigning in them. But they may nonetheless represent the true battleground states, meaning that they’re the ones that will be decided narrowly and can turn on small differences in investment and tweaks in strategy.
If you want to really think outside the box, you might consider Utah as a potential battleground state, since the president is remarkably unpopular there and most Utahns want a change. But that will only happen with a general collapse of Trump’s support reminiscent of the Democrats’ debacles in 1972, 1980 and 1984. It’s hard to say how likely that is to happen at this point, but I think mentioning it is worthwhile to help demonstrate a key point. The very concept of a battleground state seems to be premised on the idea that an election will be close enough for individual states to matter. That presumes a kind of red-blue divide which may not exist anymore.
At the moment, it’s hard to conceive of Trump winning any states he lost in 2016. Maybe he could win Maine outright. Winning New Hampshire seems like a fantasy at this point. He’s pretty well locked in to trying to repeat his state-by-state performance from 2016. But the Democrats are not limited in the same way. They’ll probably win or lose this election on a national basis, meaning that the country will make a decision that is far more decisive that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing. While the Democrats could easily win a repeat of 2016 simple by doing infinitesimally better in just a few states, it’s equally possible that they could just sweep the map with the exception of some very red states in the Deep/Appalachian south, prairies and Mountain West.
Nothing about Trump is normal, so I think it’s somewhat counterintuitive to expect a normal or expected Electoral College outcome in 2020. His ceiling appears so limited that we can see the shape of an election he wins. What I think we have a hard time imagining or predicting is the shape of an election he loses.
Trump’s plan is to go where the suckers are.
Exactly. If Trump’s electoral college “wall” holds, he’ll be reelected by a narrow margin (despite losing the popular vote by millions). If the wall is breached however, he could be trounced.
A mere 100,000 well-placed votes in MI, PA, and WI flips those states—and the electoral college majority—blue. If that’s accompanied by a “brown wave” across the South and Southwest (AZ, FL, GA, TX), then there are no “swing states”, just an electoral college (and popular vote) wipeout on the scale of Clinton’s 1996 victory over Dole…with the difference being that in 2020 Dems (in this scenario) would likely increase their House majority and stand a chance of winning a (narrow) Senate majority.
As for Maine, Trump won the 2nd CD by 10 percentage points in 2016, but lost statewide by 3 points. Given the results in Maine’s 2018 elections (Dems swept everything—governor, both congressional seats, both houses of the state legislature), it’s hard to envision Trump winning the state next year. (Added factor: Local Dems energized to beat Sen. Susan Collins who is not loved by her party’s base.)
Der Trumper can’t win the popular vote and his National Trumpalist movement doesn’t make the slightest pretense that he can. He can (at best) barely replicate his (three state/100,00 deplorable) electoral college “win”; and this necessary means that if the nation’s hapless “independents” go decisively against him he gets annihilated in the ec as well. All well and good.
But even the Blue/Red divide of the 21st Century is somehow shattered this time (and both of the last two Repub prezes lost the popular vote in their “wins” in 2000 and 2016), the election of Der Trumper means the American system and its institutions have utterly failed, catastrophically so. A return to “normalcy” (i.e. a democratically legitimate prez) does not put an end to the matter. The danger is that a (somewhat) more solid repudiation of Der Trumper will allow the complacent citizenry to believe “the system works!”, when it most obviously does not–Der Trumper is Exhibit A here. Further, it will not be a surprise if there are statewide election challenges in 10 or more states this time around, due to the apparent decay of Repub monopoly power in states like TX and GA. More evenly balanced, once purple states like FL and OH where Dems cannot win a statewide election are also dependent on judicially-sanctioned Repub election rigging/game-playing.
Until the Great Satan of “conservatism” is politically annihilated and new pro-democratic reforms are built into the federal election laws and Constitution, we are a failed state, simply awaiting the plutocrats’ next Trumper iteration.