Just went with the conservative to liberal scale. Did it on the politics of the residents.
30% shade = slightly liberal/conservative
50% shade = solidly liberal/conservative
90% shade = very liberal/conservative
Illinois and Indiana always look so weird next to each other surrounded by swingies and moderates.
Assuming this map is good maybe Kentucky and West Virginia will swing back if an alternative to the Carbon industry starts to flourish there. The same thing goes for Nevada and New Mexico if Republicans can do better with Hispanics.
This shows why I am much more confident that the ideological change is permanent (generational) in VA/NH than in the Southwest. I would also look for permanent shifting to the right in PA/OH as fossil fuels take off and the population there ages. Note that this map also gets the rhetorical limits on conservatism in Kansas right. This is actually a powerful argument that Republicans need to diversify quickly. ME/MN/MI/OR look like they are just too ideological to flip back in a non-landslide. The Republican path of least resistance to a sustainable majority is probably this, with the major national consequence being moderating on immigration (scary for them initially in the midwest):
Then what's a good route for Democrats if the Republicans do that?
1. Go after the couple of states that are unambiguously getting more liberal (not just more diverse)
2. Go after states that are more Republican than Conservative. Note that I expect CO to remain swingy in this world and to still vote for Dems when they win nationally.
That actually sounds like one pre-Obama strategy I heard one democrat talking about in the late Bush years. That strategy was to maintain the 2000/4 firewall and target rural, secular white voters. Maybe by talking more about fracking and nuclear rather than solar and wind and punt on the issue of guns. Maybe we could talk wind and solar if it was intertwined with talking about hunters. There are limits to this strategy (we can't just totally cave on biodiversity, for example) but there are some reasonably partisan democrats (Freudenthal, Tester, Heitkamp, Salazar and Trauner got very close) would have been successful with this strategy. Maybe advocating a more medical approach on addiction and other social ills would help with these voters, too.
Well, I quite simply don't think getting KY and WV back is worth it if the price is caving on coal. But it would be best to just stop talking about guns as that looks like a no-win situation outside of 60% Obama states. A viable gun control coalition would need another 20-30 years of urbanization to take hold. I am assuming more of a libertine angle on crime here. I think the fact that Obama was seen as insufficiently aggressive in the aftermath of the financial crisis has poisoned the inequality argument for Dems for the foreseeable future, so a populist approach would fail. But the creative class strategy can expand further into the small cities and countryside the next time the GOP has full control and the libertarian/so-con debate heats up again.
Look at the past several elections and consider how much Bush and McCain overperformed and how much Gore and Romney underperformed the economic fundamentals. The party bases are sending a very clear message: the GOP wants religious (preferably Southern) populists and the Dems want aggressive (preferably Northern) social liberals with elite credentials. In many ways 2004 was the actual change election- a Northern elite D vs. Southern populist R for the first time ever- and it provoked record turnout.
