A whole generation of young Americans may be growing up with the impression that the nation’s electoral map is locked into a rough balance between the Democrats and Republicans, with their states sharply etched in shades of blue and red.
It is an understandable impression. After months of campaigning and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, only three small states shifted sides from the razor close presidential election of 2000 to the high-stakes shootout of 2004. Iowa and New Mexico moved to the Republicans; New Hampshire switched to the Democrats–a trio that together offered a paltry 16 electoral votes. It was the smallest movement of states from one presidential election to another in almost a century.
But the dramatic success of the Democrats in 2006 may be a harbinger that our familiar red and blue shadings are poised for a perceptible rearrangement in 2008. For not only did the Democrats run well in the party’s strongholds on the two coasts and the battleground states of the Midwest, but they made significant inroads in the Republican heartland as well.
While we have a nearly 50/50 nation in the aggregate, recent elections have shown most of the country to be solidly in one camp or the other. Republicans dominate in the L-shaped interior that includes the South (the states of the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma), the Plains states and the Mountain West (including Alaska). Twenty-six states in all, the Republican “L” gave President George W. Bush all 232 of its electoral votes in 2004.
The Democrats control the two coasts (the Northeast and the Pacific West). Sixteen states plus the District of Columbia, they gave Kerry 194 electoral votes in 2004 to Bush’s five, with West Virginia the lone outlier.
That has left only the industrial Midwest, from Ohio west to Missouri, as a prime regional battleground in recent presidential elections. The eight states in this highly competitive sector broke slightly for Kerry last time–58 electoral votes to 49 for Bush–but not by a margin large enough to give Democrats the White House.