2016 New England Town Map

[Lord_Gulgoth]

That massive swing in Eastern CT is most heartwarming. A ton of those towns hadn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since the 80's.

[Lord_Gulgoth]

It's incredibly hard, though not impossible like, say, a Vermont would be. To win in CT, a Republican would have to appeal to both the Trumpist types in Eastern CT, plus the rich suburbanites in Western CT who swung hard against Trump; and threading that needle has been the CT Republican Party's bane since the 1980's.

All that said, I really do think that it can happen. To do it, I believe it would have to be Trump-type candidate (on policy) that doesn't have a foot in mouth problem and comes across as a gentleman, rather than an uncouth guy yelling about stuff at the end of a bar. It might also require the candidate to be running for his second term, and his presidency to have been objectively pretty good.

I'm really just happy that the era of Republicans calling their opponents 'Massachusetts liberals' and attacking the Northeast seems to be over, at least for now. It's not good for the political health of the nation for political parties to completely write off huge swaths of the country, like the Republicans were doing in the Northeast.