The Patriot Post® · Swing States Shrink in Number

It’s all about the swing states. That’s what talkingheads on cable news harp about every presidential election cycle.

Swing, or battleground, states are defined as those that “represent roughly equal numbers of registered Democrats (blue) and Republicans (red), making them enticing settings for political campaigns to try to sway voters,” according to Case Western Reserve University’s Daily.

The candidate who claims victory in most or all of these swing states tends to win the White House, but the number of these states — those that are reasonably contested by both Republicans and Democrats — is shrinking.

For example, The Washington Post reports: “During the last election, just 10 states and two congressional districts were targeted by Republican or Democratic nominees’ campaigns. It was a precipitous drop from the 26 states on average that were targeted each year between 1952 and 1980, according to a forthcoming book by political scientists Daron R. Shaw, Scott Althaus and Costas Panagopoulos. The research is based on internal campaign documents, interviews with campaign leaders and media reports.”

Some states make the list every four years — including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Other states, like Ohio and Florida, are now strongholds for the GOP. In fact, Republican presidential candidates hardly spend any time in the Buckeye State anymore.

According to CNN: “For about 100 years, Missouri was the ultimate bellwether in presidential elections, voting for the winner in 25 of 26 elections between 1904 and 2004 — within the lifetime of most of today’s voters. Florida and Ohio, both of which are now red states for presidential purposes, were hotly contested battlegrounds until this election cycle. Virginia and Colorado, which were battlegrounds in roughly the same era, are now essentially blue in presidential years.”

Now that the 2024 results are in, it’s noteworthy just how well Donald Trump performed in typically deep-blue states. For example, Trump came within five percentage points of Kamala Harris in Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. Whether these states remain competitive for Republicans in future elections is too early to tell, but it does reveal the ever-changing nature of the electorate.

A New York Times study found that one reason why there are fewer battleground states might be because we’re self-sorting — moving to states with more like-minded voters. The reasons for doing so range from racial diversity for Democrats to lower taxes for Republicans.

“Our analysis suggests partisanship itself, intentional or not, plays a powerful role when Americans uproot and find a new home,” The Times reports, adding, “Their very personal decisions about where to resettle help power the churn of migration that is continuously reshaping American life at the neighborhood level and contributing to a sense that Americans are siloed in echo chambers, online and in their daily lives.”

Still, the percentage of Americans moving for political reasons is very small, so there must be other reasons why blue-state residents are beginning to lean more toward Republicans.

“Some conservative scholars argue that residential moves from blue to red areas show a political preference or at least an attraction to the results of conservative policies,” adds The New Jersey Monitor.

Another theory suggests that Democrats have moved so far to the left that they’re hemorrhaging working-class voters, a group they owned not that long ago. As Politico reports: “In the 2012 presidential election, Obama won 60 percent of the voters earning less than $50,000. Four years later, Hillary Clinton secured just more than 50 percent of lower-income voters. The swing to Trump by lower-income voters outweighed a swing to Clinton among those in higher-income brackets. Last year, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44 percent named Trump compared to just 12 percent for Biden.”

Even socialist Bernie Sanders harshly criticized Democrats this week for having “abandoned working-class people.” When the Democrats lose Sanders, you know their party is a sinking ship. Maybe that’s why some Reagan Democrats are coming back to the party of common sense, something that became evident as Tuesday’s election results were tallied.

Traditional swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin may eventually follow Ohio and Florida and lose their swing state status simply because more people in those states now see the Republican Party as representing their concerns and values, something the Harris campaign began to worry about even before the first votes were cast.

Nearly two weeks before the election, National Review’s Jim Geraghty reported, “Kamala Harris’s presidential-campaign staffers whisper to NBC News that they’re not certain they can beat Trump in Wisconsin or Michigan, and they’re lowering their expectations in North Carolina. Meanwhile, a new poll in Georgia shows Trump ahead by the kind of margin that feels like a landslide these days.” Hot Air echoed the same worries coming from the Harris campaign.

And when the votes came in this week, The New Republic reported, “Trump has now knocked down the so-called ‘Blue Wall’ Great Lake states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — as he did when he cruised to victory in 2016.”

Of course, no one’s claiming these states are becoming permanently red, but there’s definitely movement toward the right in these traditionally blue states. We hope Republicans can continue building on this momentum and make these swing states less swingy in 2028 and beyond.