Blue wall (politics)

Ronald Brownstein claims to have coined the term "blue wall" in 2009.[5] After the 2012 presidential election, Paul Steinhauser called "blue wall […] the cluster of eastern, Midwest and western states that have traditionally gone Democratic."[6] The earliest description of the forces creating the blue wall comes from a Houston Chronicle blogger, Chris Ladd.[7] A Republican, Ladd wrote in November 2014 that the seemingly impressive Republican win in the 2014 mid-term elections had overshadowed another trend apparent in the results – a demographic and geographic collapse. The blue wall was a Democratic demographic lock on the Electoral College resulting from the Republican Party's (GOP) narrowing focus on the interests of white, rural, and Southern voters. Ladd's analysis became popular when MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell featured it on a post-election episode of his show The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell.[8]

A similar "red wall/sea", behind which lie states solidly Republican, has also been posited to exist. But, having fewer votes, it would be theoretically easier for a Democratic presidential candidate to win without breaching it, as had been done in 2012.

Behind this "blue wall" lay states, many carrying a relatively high number of electoral votes, which appeared to be solidly behind the Democratic Party, at least on the national level, and which a Republican presidential candidate appeared likely to have to write off, seeking a total of 270 electoral votes from other regions. States behind this wall lay generally in the Northeastern United States, and the West Coast of the United States, and included some of the Great Lakes states. In each of the 6 presidential election cycles prior to 2016, the Democratic Party had won 18 of these states (as well as the District of Columbia), totaling 242 of the necessary 270 votes need to win. The "big three" Democratic stronghold states include California, New York, and Illinois.

States falling behind this blue wall generally included those the Democrats had carried since the 1992 presidential election until the 2016 presidential election[6][9] that included (in order of decreasing population and followed by current number of electoral votes): California (55), New York (29), Illinois (20), Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16), New Jersey (14), Washington (12), Massachusetts (11), Maryland (10), Minnesota (10), Wisconsin (10), Oregon (7), Connecticut (7), Hawaii (4), Maine (4), Rhode Island (4), Delaware (3), and Vermont (3), as well as Washington, D.C. (3); this is a total of 242 votes. The last time any of these states cast their votes for the Republican presidential candidate before 2016 was when George H. W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1988 and carried California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, Delaware, and Vermont. New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, Hawaii, and Rhode Island have voted Democratic since Ronald Reagan's landslide in 1984. One of these states, Minnesota, has not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. (The District of Columbia has voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since it was admitted to the electoral college for the 1964 election.)

States that traditionally voted blue (Democratic), but voted Republican in 2016 are marked in red. Minnesota (a historic blue wall state), was won by Democrats by only 1.5% and Maine by 3% in 2016. Additionally, a congressional district in northern Maine gave the GOP one electoral vote.

The Democrats' "lock" on these states had been called into question between 2012 and 2016, as several had been competitive in recent elections, and many had Republicans currently holding elected statewide office, generally either senator or governor.[10] Blue wall states with a Republican senator included Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maine. Those with a Republican governor included Massachusetts, Maryland, and Vermont. In addition to these 18 states, three others, Iowa, New Mexico, and New Hampshire, had only voted for the Republican once in the same 6 election cycles, giving their votes to George W. Bush in either 2000 or 2004, whilst Oregon saw Bush lose by only 7,000 votes in 2000. If included in the total, the votes behind the blue wall numbered 257, just 13 short of what is needed to win. In 2016, the blue wall showed some cracks, and went down from 242 electoral votes to 195. Some in the mainstream media did, however, suspect the Democrats might lose Pennsylvania.

Nate Silver had criticized the idea of the blue wall, pointing to a larger "red wall/red sea" of states that voted Republican from 1968 to 1988. He argued that the blue wall simply represented a "pretty good run" in elections, and that relatively minor gains in the popular vote could flip some of its states to Republican.[11] This was seen in the 2016 election, where voters from manufacturing states traditionally behind the blue wall voted for Donald Trump, providing him the victory in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine's 2nd congressional district.[12] Others have also posited that the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had never definitively been "safe" for the Democratic Party, citing the close margins in those states in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections and opining that the outsized margins of victory secured by Barack Obama in the elections of 2008 and 2012 may have created a false impression of their safety for Democratic candidates.

During the 2020 United States presidential election, Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, however only by 1–3 point margins, which put the states well within reach for future elections, putting the new "blue wall" in jeopardy and negating its safe blue status.[13] Biden also broke into the red wall by winning Arizona, Georgia, and the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska.[14][15][16] However, Maine's 2nd congressional district voted for Donald Trump.

In many ways, the blue wall has not died, but rather shifted in recent years from containing all the states that John Kerry won in 2004 (with the exception of New Hampshire), and instead replacing Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with New Mexico, Colorado, and Virginia. While they have only been carried by a democratic nominee for four straight election cycles, Joe Biden won all three of those states by more than 10% in 2020, and the demographic changes in all three of those states continue to bolster the strength of democrats in those states.

Red wall states, 1980–2020

Red wall states, 2000–2016. Note that this map is outdated as of the 2020 election, when Democrat Joe Biden carried the states of Arizona and Georgia.

The states which Republicans have won in the last eleven elections (from 1980 to 2020) include Texas (38), Alabama (9), South Carolina (9), Oklahoma (7), Mississippi (6), Utah (6), Kansas (6), Nebraska (4) (but not Nebraska's 2nd congressional district), Idaho (4), South Dakota (3), North Dakota (3), Alaska (3), and Wyoming (3), giving a total of 101 votes. States with a 10-out-of-11 (from 1980 to 2020) Republican record include North Carolina (15), Indiana (11), and Montana (3), whose 29 electoral votes added to the 101 of the preceding thirteen red sea states make for a total of 130 electoral votes. Much of the Southern United States are also probably safely Republican, as six other states, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana (the six states totaling 48 electoral votes), from that general region have not voted for a Democrat since southerner Bill Clinton in 1996, and in the Deep South the Republican Party is dominant in statewide elected offices.

Presidential votes in blue wall states since 1876:

Key

Bold denotes candidates elected as president

• Bible Belt
• Jesusland map
• Political culture of the United States
• Red states and blue states
• Rust Belt
• Sixth Party System
• Swing state
• Solid South
• Red wall (British politics)

• The Detroit News: Mich. GOP eyes plan for cracking 'blue wall'