swing states election history

The last few years have been of big political uncertainty, the political map may have appeared for some to be changing a bit in republican’s direction.

But to really understand the political map you have to look at the bigger picture, so first, let’s take a few steps back and briefly examine the past.

Since world war 2, the country was pretty flexible politicly, although it was basically south for the democrats and the north for the republicans, presidential elections were won decisively for either side, while Johnson won the biggest popular vote landslide in U.S. history, only 8 years later Nixon won 49 states.

Take for example the state of Minnesota, the state voted for a democrat as president in 20 of the last 23 elections since 1932. But a republican won a senate race for 12 times in that time and the governor’s race 11 times.

This continued until the end of the 20^th century.

The 21^st century opened a new pattern of politics in the country, a strictly partisan one. This pattern started in the 2000 presidential election.

The elections in the last 2 decades were predictable to a certain extent, in the last 6 elections (2000-2020) republicans won in every single election 19 states comprising 160-165 electoral votes (depends on the census allocation) and the democrats 14 states with 215-221 electoral votes.

But, this is probably not news for you.

Since 2000 there were several states that swung blue like Colorado; Nevada; New Mexico; and New Hampshire. Those states are by now more or less reliably Blue. Then there is Arizona and Georgia that went from reliably red to purple.

And in the other side there is Ohio and Iowa that that swung from purple to red and Florida and North Carolina that are tilting from purple to red.

And, hoop! You might stop me that there are the Midwest states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota that are going from reliably blue to purple.

But here comes the spoiler, it’s not true.

Those states were light blue all along, they just didn’t get through the finish line before 2016, but if you look on the chart of all state elections in these states since 2000 you’ll see that the line between democrats and republicans was always narrow.