The Democratic landslide wasn’t just a rebuke of President Donald Trump, it may have permanently redrawn the electoral map in ways that leave Republicans scrambling for a path back to the White House, according to a new analysis.
“The red-and-blue presidential map as we know it is crumbling,” wrote Jonathan Martin, Politico’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief.
It starts in Texas, where, Martin wrote, “after more than a decade of rosy predictions of blue, the GOP Alamo finally fell” as Democrats flipped a Senate seat by double digits, won nearly every statewide office and took control of the state House.
“It’s plain as day: The GOP’s largest presidential prize is now an unambiguous swing state,” Martin wrote. “And if they can’t retain Texas’s 40 electoral votes, Republicans have virtually no path to the presidency.”
Democrats are now closing in from both coasts in what Martin called a “pincer maneuver.”
In the West, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs won re-election by 13 points, Democrats flipped Nevada’s governorship, and Colorado’s Democratic governor-elect won by nearly 30. In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton ousted a sitting Republican senator by 5 points, and Martin suggested the state could become the new Missouri as the Kansas City suburbs boom.
Iowa, which Trump carried three times, elected a Democratic governor by 10 points, flipped a Senate seat and sent Democrats to three of its four House seats. Democrats also won Ohio’s governorship and a Senate seat while easily holding the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Martin noted that the Midwest hasn’t looked this blue since 2006, the year before Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide.
The South offered little relief. Georgia Democrats swept every statewide office, with Sen. Jon Ossoff winning by 18 points. Roy Cooper won North Carolina’s Senate race by 20, and South Carolina elected its first Democratic senator since 1998. Even Florida, “the last bulwark of big-state Republicanism,” stayed red by less than 3 points.
In New England, Sen. Susan Collins’s loss leaves Republicans without a single senator in the region for the first time since the party was founded.
The math for Republicans is grim, Martin wrote, as only six reliably blue states hand Democrats 135 electoral votes, halfway to 270.
“If the Sun Belt, including Texas and Florida, is up for grabs there is no obvious path for Republicans even in a slightly better political environment,” Martin wrote.
He allowed that Tuesday might be a low point, driven by “an increasingly despised president, unpopular war and the high gas prices it wrought.” But he questioned whether the GOP’s problems with Hispanic, Black and suburban voters will improve while Trump still controls the party.
Without a “post-Trump reformation,” Martin warned, “Georgia and Arizona will become what Virginia and Colorado are today.”