In order to win a Presidential election, the Republicans need more friends. The salient question is what color these friends should be. The conventional wisdom is that Republicans must reach out to Latino voters. However, Sean Trende and other Republican analysts think Republicans could win by courting “missing white votes.” This strategy might actually work. The cool kids -- those who live in swing states -- are still overwhelmingly white. However, it would mean reaching out to a type of white voter Republicans have increasingly ignored.
This is the first of a multi-part series explaining, in geographic, detail what the "missing white votes" strategy would require.
Presidential elections are won and lost in swing states. While the identity of swing states changes over time, it changes slowly enough that candidates can identify which states are likely to be critical early in an election cycle. A state might go from “leaning” towards one party to being a battleground within a single election cycle, as Virginia did between 2004 and 2008. However, it is very rare for a ruby red or sapphire blue state to turn purple in the course of a single election. Thus, by picking a somewhat generous sample, it is possible to identify which states will be critical in the next election. In the following states, the winning candidate had a margin of 8 points (e.g. 54-46) or less in 2012.
State |
2012 Dem. Margin |
Minnesota |
7.7 |
Wisconsin |
6.9 |
Nevada |
6.7 |
Iowa |
5.8 |
New Hampshire |
5.7 |
Pennsylvania |
5.4 |
Colorado |
5.4 |
Virginia |
3.9 |
Ohio |
3.0 |
Florida |
0.9 |
North Carolina |
-2.0 |
Georgia |
-7.8 |
Obama won far more of the close states than Romney, but he also won many more states than he needed to. Romney had only 174 electoral votes in “safe states,” while Obama had 205 such votes. Thus, Obama could have ceded Florida, Ohio, and Virginia to Romney, and still squeaked out a 270-268 victory in the electoral college. It would have taken a uniform swing of 5.4 percent in the margin of victory to cost Obama the election. In other words, if 2.7 percent of the electorate in each state had switched their votes from Obama to Romney, the election would have been tied.
However, two of the above states have dubious battleground credentials.
Georgia has long exhibited “inelastic” voting patterns in which almost all statewide races fall within a very narrow band of outcomes. This is a polite way of saying all of blacks vote for the Democrat, and almost all of the whites outside of I-285 and Clarke County vote Republican. I once ran a regression showing that 88% of the variance in Georgia's Presidential vote across individual precincts can be explained by racial demographics and whether a district is urban, suburban, or rural. The Democrats might win Georgia, but only in an otherwise decisive election where they attract substantially more whites in the Atlanta suburbs.
Finally, Nevada should be out of reach for Republicans because it has a large and increasing Hispanic population and already went for the Democrats by almost 7 points. A margin that big can be reversed, but rarely in the face of a strong, demographic headwind. Nevada is in the same position California was 20 years ago. It will only go Republican in a strong Republican year and should steadily trend away from the national tipping point.
This gives Republicans 191 safe electoral votes and Democrats 211. In addition to having 20 more safe electoral votes, the election will be fought on Democratic turf as Democrats carried 9 of the 10 battleground states in 2012.
The Demographics of the Swing Electorate
While America is becoming more diverse, the 10 swing states are roughly four election cycles behind this trend. In other words, the swing states in 2016 will have a similar racial composition to the nation as a whole in 2000!
|
10 Swing States (2016) |
U.S. (2016) |
Non-Hispanic Whites |
76.3% |
69.0% |
Blacks |
12.7% |
13.1% |
Hispanics |
7.9% |
12.2% |
Asians |
2.1 |
4.1% |
Other |
1.0% |
1.6% |
These numbers are based upon the number of voting age citizens in each group. I obtained these data, which closely track the eligible electorate, from the 2010 Census and then applied an annual growth rate to each group. I used the annual growth rates for each group’s total population from 2000 and 2010 and projected it forward, yielding growth rates of 0.1% per year for whites, 1.4% for blacks, 3.6% for Hispanics, and 1.6% for Asians. I assumed that each group’s citizens of voting age will increase at the same rate as that group as a whole. These projections are not exact, but no projections are.
Because the swing state electorate in 2016 will be much like the electorate that elected Bush in 2000, a strategy of running up lopsided margins among white voters remains a mathematically plausible path to an electoral college victory. In the next installment, I will begin showing what this path would look like at the state level.