Wisconsin, followed by PA and then MI. But I'm not entirely convinced anymore that Wisconsin is the most obvious answer here. I could also see MI voting R before PA.
Agreed, but you said something interesting about MI before PA. I understand you're not saying that MI will
certainly go before PA, but you "could see" it, and I'm wondering if you could help illuminate, because I am having difficulty envisioning this scenario.
MI had a narrower margin, which I understand is not necessarily indicative in a vacuum, and PA's margin wasn't anything to write home about either. But consider that Trump still won PA despite the fact that Clinton did better than Obama in every single county in the Philly MSA (except Philadephia Cty itself, which Obama beat Clinton out by a little over 4,000 votes). Consider further that a lot of these voters are probably Never Trumpers, so if even a portion return back to the GOP, the Dems have to find the margin somewhere else. Wilkes-Barre? Scranton? Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties had 24 point swings. Those are pretty dramatic, which to be fair, suggests that something that could move that quickly is elastic and could move back again. Then again, Trump is basically the perfect candidate for these areas, so even if the Dems pull a 180 on their messaging and abandon the SJW/neo-liberal/technocratic platform (which I don't think will happen for a whole host of reasons), but even if they did, I don't see a D candidate in the pipeline that is more Trump-esque than the Donald himself. Maybe in 2024.
Now consider MI. In Wayne Cty, Clinton got 76,000 less votes than Obama. Now some of those will have flipped to Trump, who did better than Romney, but even if we assume that every single new vote Trump got was a former D, that only accounts for about 15,000 votes. Clearly there was a turnout problem, and unlike the problem in PA, this is a problem I think the Dems
can fix without changing their platform or messaging or almost anything at all, one bit. Just running a minority alone might make up those votes, which may sound a little.... uncouth, but might nonetheless be the truth.
Additionally, while it is true that MI had a higher GOP trend in '16, consider that PA has been trending for longer, so they were starting from different places. MI trended D in '08; the last time PA trended D was in '04 and that was a pretty weak trend of 1.3% (PA was in the bottom fifth in the US for trend % that year). I guess what I'm suggesting here is that PA is further along in the "Republican-izing" process than MI is.
None of this is to suggest that PA is going to vote R this next election... as I've stated in the PA thread, making any sure-fire predictions about this state at all is a little foolish. And Dems can absolutely win it. But I see more inherent challenges in PA than MI. Of course, the same structural disadvantage for the Dems that exists in PA also exists in MI... take, e.g., the Detroit MSA, which is one of the slowest growing MSAs in the US, while the city itself has been rapidly shrinking since the 60s and it's on pace to continue losing double digit %s by the next census, suggesting there is very little millennial hipster re-urbanization. But there are still enough Dem voters there for the time being, and I think we're still a cycle or two away before even turnout can't save the Dems.
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