While President Donald Trump famously shifted several states in the Democrats' Midwestern "Blue Wall" into the GOP column in 2016, his candidacy also shifted many longtime GOP strongholds significantly to the left -- although not by enough to benefit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
An analysis posted at FiveThirtyEight shows that Arizona, Georgia, and Texas have all moved to the left in the age of Trump, although they're by no means locks for the Democrats to win in 2020.
"Arizona, Georgia and Texas all moved at least 4 points to the left in 2016, and it’s possible they’ll move even farther in 2020," FiveThirtyEight writes. "After all, the 2018 midterm elections showed these states could elect Democrats statewide, or at least, come very close. Democrats won a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona for the first time since 1988, while Republicans only narrowly won Texas’s Senate race and Georgia’s gubernatorial contest."
The website then explores possible reasons for this change.
"For one thing, these states are more racially and ethnically diverse than most of the other states we’ve looked at -- Arizona and Texas have large Hispanic populations, for instance, while Georgia has a sizable Black electorate — and people of color tend to vote more Democratic," FiveThirtyEight argues. "But these fairly urban states have also seen their major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix become increasingly Democratic because of the surge in college-educated voters."
The hope among Democrats is that these states go from being purple to more reliably blue, which is what has happened in Virginia and Colorado over the past 20 years.
