Biden's underdiscussed bad performance in Hawaii

[ProgressiveModerate]

The state that will swing the furthest to the right in 2020 is not Utah. It's not Florida. It's Hawaii, which will swing nearly 3% to the right.

Biden will be the first Democrat to win Hawaii by less than 30% since John Kerry in 2004.

From 2008-2020, Hawaii has swung 15% to the right.

On top of that, Cook Political says that Hawaii will see the largest votes cast surge compared to 2016, casting 34% more votes in 2020 than in 2016, which indicates that Trump won most new voters,

The sudden GOP shift in Hawaii should worry Dems.

No. The state is still overwhelmingly Democratic and will continue to be for a long time. Why should Dems worry about Hawaii? They should worry about trends in Hawaii that apply to other states, like Asians in Nevada and Texas for instance. Utah is trending Dem long term but it's going to be decades before they go Dem at the presidential level so...

States, especially smaller states can go from being safe to competative faster than people expect sometimes though. I agree for the foreseeable future, Dems will prolly continue to win HI, but Republicans winning a Senate seat there in a good year doesn't seem entirely out of the question this decade if they can bring the state back to Bush '04 levels.

[Asta]

I'll take HI as dark horse possibility.

Yea I called it back then that this is possibly a state where Trump may most outperform his 2016 numbers. Hawaii has a pro-incumbency bias and its large Asian population gave me a sense that it will swing toward Trump.

[Progressive Pessimist]

It's under-discussed because Hawaii's pro-incumbent swing was expected by many. It's also a titanium D state where any shift away from Democrats is negligible and doesn't really matter. To me it's the same thing as why Biden doing a fraction of a percentage worse than Clinton in Washington D.C or was unable to reach Obama margins in certain states are barely worth discussing. It really is largely noise, and the same is true for Arkansas, California, Nevada (to a lesser degree though), Illinois, Ohio, and Utah.

Really, there's a reason why Miami-Dade and the Rio Grande Valley garner the most attention of all the swings to the GOP from the 2020 election. They are more alarming and consequential for Democrats' electoral future, especially Florida. The swing may have been smaller than in Hawaii technically but it was for far more concerning reasons in a vital state soon to be worth 31 Electoral Votes.

[UncleSam]

To quote Orson Welles: ‘I expected to lose 3 points in Hawaii last election, and I expect to lose 3 points in Hawaii next election, and the one after that. And at that rate I’ll lose Hawaii in...40 years.’

A 3 point R trend in this state is meaningless.

[One Term Floridian]

The Republican trend in Hawaii from 2008 to 2020 is easy to explain by a loss of Obama's home-state advantage, consistent pro-incumbent swings in Hawaii, and Asians swinging Republican in 2020. While it's not a concern for the immediate future, Hawaii could get interesting if it continues trending Republican for the next decade.

It's kind of like a reverse Utah; majority party candidate gets a big de facto home-state boost to win >70% of the vote in 2012, state has massive swing toward the minority party after their favorite son is off the ballot but remains safe for the majority party in 2016 and 2020, state's majority demographic group is a small minority of the population in the other 49 states.

That’s honestly a really scary way of looking at it for Dems because I could see UT going blue fairly soon if current trends hold up