I took a look at Cook’s Partisan Advantage Index (PVI) ratings going back to 1994 and ranked the 50 states and the District of Columbia in terms of how much they have changed. The Cook PVI is a measure of how a state or district votes relative to the country as a whole, and it uses the two most recent presidential elections as its baseline. For example, the 1994 PVI was based on the 1988 and 1992 elections, while the 2014 PVI is based on the 2008 and 2012 elections.
What I did was to compare the 1994 PVI to the 2014 PVI. Here are some of things I discovered:
Overall, 25 states have become more Republican in the last twenty years, 23 states (plus DC) have become more Democratic, and two have remained unchanged.
Three states (Arkansas, Missouri, and West Virginia) have moved from a Democratic lean to a Republican one, while four states (Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Jersey) have moved from a Republican lean to a Democratic one. And the movement in the flipping states has been dramatic, as I’ll show next.
The biggest change in the Republicans’ direction was 18 points in West Virginia and 16 points in Arkansas, both of which used to be blue states. The biggest change in the Democrats’ direction was Hawai’i (14 points) and Vermont (12 points), but among flippers New Jersey moved 9 points, New Hampshire moved 7 points, Nevada moved 6 points, and Florida moved 4 points.
The two states that remained constant are Oregon and South Carolina.
Again, this is a measure of movement relative to the country as a whole, which is different than a measure of partisanship. For example, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin have been reliably blue states in presidential elections for the last twenty years, but all of them have grown slightly more friendly to the Republicans relative to the country as a whole. Here’s the list, from most movement to the Republicans to most movement to the Democrats:
1. West Virginia R+18
2. Arkansas R+16
3. Wyoming R+15
4. Oklahoma R+12
5. Kentucky R+11
5. Louisiana R+11
7. Tennessee R+9
8. Utah R+7
8. Alabama R+7
8. Idaho R+7
8. Kansas R+7
8. Missouri R+7
8. Montana R+7
8. South Dakota R+7
15. Texas R+6
16. Iowa R+4
16. Minnesota R+4
18. Alaska R+3
18. North Dakota R+3
20. Arizona R+1
20. Georgia R+1
20. Mississippi R+1
20. Nebraska R+1
20. Pennsylvania R+1
20. Wisconsin R+1
26. Oregon EVEN
26. South Carolina EVEN
28. Colorado D+1
28. North Carolina D+1
28. Ohio D+1
28. Washington D+1
32. District of Columbia D+2
32. Indiana D+2
32. Massachusetts D+2
32. New Mexico D+2
32. Rhode Island D+2
37. Michigan D+3
38. Florida D+4
38. Illinois D+4
40. California D+5
40. Maine D+5
40. New York D+5
43. Connecticut D+6
43. Maryland D+6
43. Nevada D+6
43. Virginia D+6
47. New Hampshire D+7
48. Delaware D+8
49. New Jersey D+9
50. Vermont D+12
51. Hawai’i D+14
There are some things that we know about that have some impact on these numbers. The Clintons were from Arkansas and were much more popular there than your average Democrat. You can say the same thing about Al Gore and Tennessee, although his presidential run isn’t measured here. Hawai’i and Delaware have a Obama/Biden effect. Louisiana was impacted by Hurricane Katrina.
Still, you can see some pretty clear patterns, like a dramatic strengthening of the Dems in the Mid-Atlantic and a catastrophic rejection of the Dems in Appalachia.
What do you see?
Top 14 republican movers all states with predominantly suburban-rural white populations, no large urban areas for the most part.
Good point, and the exception is Louisiana, which lost a good part of its biggest city.
Recent polling that Martin has highlighted indicates that a Hillary run could flip Appalachia. Can’t overestimate the antipathy toward the socialist Kenyan here.
I see a starting point and an end point, but nothing in the middle, just a straight line drawn between them.
In the case of South Carolina and Georgia, I would suspect that a look at the 2002/2004 results would show that it moved dramatically towards the Republicans, and then reversed course and began moving back towards the Democrats (though, obviously, it’s still very red), but the net change since 1992/4 doesn’t reflect this.
South Carolina used to be one of the most Republican states in the country. Now, Barack Obama got a higher % of the vote there than in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahama, Alabama, or Kentucky. The same trend that brought Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida into the Democratic column (the split between the Atlantic South and the Interior South) has been playing out in SC Georgia: it just started from further right.
Well, I looked at your theory and it’s basically wrong.
South Carolina has maintained a R+8 PVI in every cycle since 1994.
Georgia has moved from a low of R+4 (1998) to a high of R+7 (2006 and 2010). In 2002, it was R+6, the same as it is today.
South Carolina has maintained a R+8 PVI in every cycle since 1994.
But the country as a whole is voting more Democratic than it was in 1994. Moving along with the country as a whole since 1994 means becoming more Democratic.
This is the problem with using PVI over time: it treats each election as a zero, even when the results change dramatically.
All it tells you is how a state is moving relative to the whole.
South Carolina has been constant in the sense that they have been 8 points more Republican than average, while the average moves up and down.
You can compare Clinton’s two-party totals to Obama’s if you want to judge how the state has moved in the last twenty years. That tells you something slightly different.
What’s more interesting is to look at the states that have big changes.
In this case, I think the states that haven’t had big changes when they “should” have are interesting, too.
The South as a whole has moved dramatically towards the Republicans, but some states have not. Everyone knows about Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, which have moved strongly towards the Democrats, but fewer people are paying attention to the other Atlantic South states, which have also broken with the Interior South.
that Texas shift
must be generally due to white baby boomers in their prime voting years. The younger hispanic generation growing up there now hasn’t reached that point yet. When they do, the shift will be dramatic, and fast, toward the dems, unless the GOP radicaly changes in the meantime.
Texas Latinos have always voted much more Republican than Latinos nationwide, much as Florida Latinos did because of the influence of the Cuban exile community.
In the last couple of elections, however, young Florida Latinos have broken with their parents and voted Democratic.
I wonder if something similar will happen in Texas.
My kids attend a public school in this very conservative town in east Texas. The school is racially diverse (approx. evenly divided between white, black and hispanic, some Asian as well. My kids tell me that Obama is popular with the majority of their classmates.
It seems very regional to me. The move towards Democratic seems to be going on in the northeastern quadrant and to some extent in the southwest. Nevada might be interpreted as getting more like its neighbor California, but also there’s Colorado and New Mexico.
The move towards Republican is going on in the south and the interior west. I don’t see MN and WI going any further towards the GOP than they are now, but that’s not based on any deep study of the situation. (Full disclosure: my Mrs. is from Minnesota.)
I don’t agree. MI, WI, MN, IL, and IO can all become more republican. IL in particular is going through a huge self-inflicted wound about the pension system. This system has been on a non-sustainable path for 20 years, and now the system has obligations that honestly are hard to comprehend. The state legislature has begun to fix the problem. The fix, however, will not be helpful to democrats. They are putting the obligation back to the local school boards. That is going to set up the kind of anti-union anti-teacher anti-“gilded pension” shit that we have been seeing in MI, WI, and other states. IL is going to be more like WI in 5 years.
I grew up in IL, went to school in IL, lived in IL for 10 years until 3 years ago. I understand that state better than almost any other, and I think that Dems are not seeing the future clearly there. Corruption is more in the headlines than actually in existance, but headlines and comments about corruption in Chicago in particular are common.
One more note about the states: the anti-tax thing plays REALLY well on the local level. In PA, the local reps and senators in the State Legislature do dreadful things, but Dems are going to find it VERY hard to reverse the local climates. The local district gerrymandering is very successful, constitutionally OK, and cannot be reversed for 7 more years. At that point, we need control of WI, MI, PA, IL, IO, OH, and MN to retain the Midwest.
If MN is drifting GOP, why did we just have the best election results for dems in a decade in 2012?
I mean, we handed them their ASSES.
Even in 2010, when the local democratic party, aka DFL, was run by incompetent paperweights, we still swept the statewide offices of secretary of state, attorney general, etc. We have better leadership now.
Any lag on the presidential result is probably (sadly) due to racial issues, which MN has worse than a lot of people realize (largest racial achievement gap in schools in the nation, right here).
But on the state level we’ve had a long dark night under republican rule, and we threw them out, and now we’re going crazy and legalizing gay marriage and raising the minimum wage and doing all sorts of cool shit. It doesn’t feel like it’s getting more conservative here. Even Michelle Bachmann, in the reddest district in the state, barely squeaked by after outspending her opponent 12-1. And don’t tell me it’s because she’s crazy. the GOP base here would vote for a spent fuel rod at the nuclear plant before they’d vote for a dem.
What this is measuring is how Minnesota of 2008-2012 compares to Minnesota of 1988-1992. In an average of the last two elections, Minnesota has D+2 PVI, but in an average of 1988-1992, it had a D+6 PVI.
What that means is that the state is a lot closer to average than it used to be. It still voted strongly for Obama, which is why Dems did well in the state.
My SE Minn. city has begun to lean towards justice and equality, despite the heavily republican efforts of our local newspaper, which will occassionally publish a human LTE.
I was here 40 years ago when Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey represented our state nationally, and they would never have believed what I am seeing here now.
Immigration makes a huge difference, as does evolution.
I’m a native Chicagoan and I think you’re wrong about IL. The pension debacle and Rahmbo’s high-handed corporatism will dampen Democratic enthusiasm but unless the IL GOP transforms itself into a reasonable non-T-Bagger alternative, the yahoos downstate will not have the votes they need out of Cook-Dupage-Lake counties to shift IL further right.
Gidwitz Blasts IL Cons For Blowing 2014 Chances
What is going to work to the GOP’s advantage is the form of reform that the Senate is putting in. By putting pension obligations on the local school boards, the entire bullseye of the anti-union anti-pension argument is squarely on the teachers and on the property tax structure in IL, and as I said downticket, IL has some of the highest property taxes ALREADY in the country.
I was going to point this out. Raising property taxes puts the burden on working people that should be the Democrats backbone. Apparently, the IL Dem party has decided they don’t need us.
A measure of the enormity of the problem is that I heard on the news that the Senate’s alternative plan, which is backed by the Unions is to give each worker a choice of Health Care or COLA’s! OR? This is the best the Unions can hope for?
I voted locally for the Republican for state assemblyman in part because he promised to not screw the teachers or the local taxpayer. He was a Hispanic teacher. My Dem rep was also the chief author or the multi-billion tax break for Sears (greenmail).
Now that the D’s represent huge Corporations and the R’s are starting to represent working people and pensioners (anti-chained CPI, no cheating on state pensions), I am switching my registration to Republican. I think others will too.
I lived in IL from 1952-1957 (child), 1962-1970 (youth) and 1997-2009 (adult). I have always considered myself an Illinoisian. I won’t go back, now. Property taxes in IL are simply out of sight.
The IL D party is living in Dreamland in some ways. The D party is the party of Chicago. The rest of the state, like every state, is republican. 4 y ago, they elected Kirk. The next Gov will be an R as well.
The collar counties have been moving towards the Democrats as well. It’s not Chicago vs. the rest of the state any more.
Due to Gerrymandering only. I was shocked in the last elections to see how many Joe Walsh yard signs there were. On election night I followed the returns on line until the sites froze. At about 1:00PM, Walsh was ahead of Duckworth by about 2 points, most results were in save Elgin. In the morning I saw that Duckworth had won a landslide due entirely, if I recall correctly, by a 90%+ D vote in Elgin. While I’m happy that Walsh was turned out, I had worked against him with CREDO, I can’t say that the district turned (D). Without Elgin, Walsh would have won. With last election’s map, Walsh would have won. The Suburbs are still predominately R because of Chicago, although there has been some movement because of Demographics.
I wasn’t referring to the Congressional districts as much as the actually counties who are getting closer to 50/50 splits where before they were strongly Republican.
the R’s are starting to represent working people and pensioners (anti-chained CPI, no cheating on state pensions)
Sucker.
You know that it was the Republicans who proposed Chained CPI, right?
No, it was Obama. He put it into his budget proposal. No one put a gun to his head. He offered it freely with no promise of a pro quid pro from the Republicans.
That wasn’t the first time it was proposed, it was insisted on by the Republicans during fiscal cliff negotiations and if I remember correctly during the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations as well.
Well then you have to credit Mitt Romney or the Heritage Institute for the Affordable Healthcare Act.
so you are going to equate ongoing negotiations with a plan from the 90s or a law passed in a state years before the President was even a Senator?
If that’s the case why stop there the true credit should go to TR for health care reform.
A budget proposal is not a negotiayion, on-going or otherwise. Chained CPI wasn’t a trade for anything. It was a gift.
The collapse of the white blue collar lower class support for Dems is increasing. And, like it or not, the immigration bill is going to absolutely destroy the Democratic brand in this group. No one in the skilled trades end of things welcomes immigrants. Roofing, tile work, drywall – all of these used to be jobs that a kid with a high-school diploma could do. No longer. The huge influx of immigrants has destroyed these job choices for Americans. And these are jobs that Americans are more than happy to do.
Once the immigration bill passes, we lose the lower class blue collar skilled trades folks for a lifetime. It’s the same deal as LBJ’s loss of the South. The big difference is that we are trading voters for non-voters.
And that is plain and simple stupid.
“No one in the skilled trades end of things welcomes immigrants.”
Not entirely true. There are plenty of brown people in the skilled trades who do, in fact, welcome immigrants.
You might be right that there’s some parallel between immigration reform and LBJ’s loss of the South, though.
I did not discuss students (the H-1b and Green card provisions are going to absolutely destroy employment in the student sector) and blacks. The immigration bill is a horrible disaster.
The immigration bill in the midst of a politically sustained great recession is a disaster. If the economy was generally booming in all sectors, it would be an easier sell. But interestingly, unions are coming late to support immigration because unlike white workers, immigrants are more likely to be sympathetic to unions.
The unions are cutting their own throats on this one. They are picking sides with non-voting non-citizens. What about the citizens? The union position is collapsing in the midwest. WI had a devastating 2 Y for unions. Walker broke the public safety unions away from other unions. Next he will take those on. MI is the same. IL is next. I believe that IL will look very different in 3-4 years due to the pension disaster. As I mentioned, the pension reform is pushing the pension responsibility onto school boards. That means local property taxes are going up, and IL has just ridiculously high local property taxes – they are the highest I have ever experienced (OH, IL, SD).
The immigration bill is furthermore NOT a progressive bill. It helps illegals over citizens. That’s not progressivism, that’s suicide.
It’s a “disaster” that goes nowhere without significant GOTP buy-in. It is not certain that the Democrats will lose significant numbers of skilled blue collar and black workers for a lifetime, if at all.
There is no huge influx – the 11M undocumented workers are already here – and though corporations are lobbying for more H1-B visas, most of that is for STEM and other highly-skilled workers.
Blue collar workers know that the laws as they stand now allow corporations to exploit the undocumented workers to their (US workers) detriment. There are many reasons that unions support immigration reform but none is more salient than stopping the erosion of wages.
Lake Polling Memo
You need to learn about the bill. There is a huge influx of H-1bs. And there will be a massive influx. Once amnesty is granted, the next wave of illegals will begin.
This is my take as well although I’d be happy to be wrong about the next wave. It happened after the ’86 amnesty, and I see no reason why it won’t happen again.
There is huge propaganda for the immigration disaster bill. If it passes, the result will devastate the black employment picture.
I don’t share your concerns about a huge influx – except at the highly-skilled end.
I also don’t think that propaganda has confused union leaders or the majority of Americans who support immigration reform.
If (and that’s still a big if) this bill becomes law, I think the political fallout is uncertain but IMO your conclusions are highly improbable.
Blue-collar workers are unlikely to abandon the only party supporting increases in the minimum wage and giving lip-service to the idea of unions. Similarly, African-Americans will not abandon the Democratic party for a lifetime – thereby necessarily fully empowering the racist, corporatist GOTP – over the immigration issue and you have offered no evidence to support your claims in that regard.
You can’t be serious. The blue collar workers that I know are not supportive of the Democrats. Democrats have not supported economic issues for a long time. Democrats support immigrants over citizens. That is going to bite us in the butt.
I see regional differences hardening.
The first 15 states listed all do poorer than average in measures of science, education, etc.
Most of the ones near the bottom are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
The US is polarizing into creationists vs. rationalists.
What was the movement nationally that is the EVEN point for Oregon and South Carolina? That data is important to any analysis. That’s the trend line that those states are departing from.
Another test would be to assume a continuous distribution, establish the mean and standard deviation, and plot the deviations as 1, 2, 3 standard deviations from the mean. If any are greater than 3 standard deviations from the mean, they are outliers that deserve some explanation.
Geographic regionalization just on the basis of the names and some arbitrarily named regions doesn’t tell you much without some correlating data, such as demographics or economic health or some variety of cultural factors.
Looking a favorite son effects makes sense only after accounting for the variation produced by more geographically general effects. The same is true for anomalies that are known to exist, such as the ethnic cleansing of a portion of New Orleans as a result of policies and actions in response to Hurricane Katrina.
Well, I did this little exercise. It is a very interesting pattern.
The states greater than 2 standard deviations from the mean were all in the Republican direction: West Virginia, Arkansas, Wyoming.
The Republican plus-PVI states that were 1 standard deviation or more from the mean form a continuous region, except for Wyoming. The continuous region is anchored in the east by West Virginia and in the west by Arkansas, the two states that moved the most over the twenty years. It comprises:
West Virginia
Kentucky
Tennesssee
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Louisiana
Does one smell fossil fuel (and its industry) behind this?
The Democratic plus-PVI states with greater than 1 standard deviations from the mean were:
Hawaii
Vermont
New Jersey
Delaware
As for favorite son/daughter effects, consider:
Robert Byrd’s passing and West Virginia
Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s high profiles in Kentucky
Tennessee’s forceful repudiation of Al Gore in 2000, a well-engineered GOP campaign strategy.
The Arkansas Project
The persistence of Dick Cheney in Wyoming
The retirement of Jim Jeffords and his replacement with Bernie Sanders in Vermont
The retirement of David Boren of Oklahoma in 1994.
The popularity of Joe Biden in Delaware and the Tea Partyization of the Delaware US Senate Race in 2010.
The dissing of Christie Whitman of New Jersey by the Bush administration.
Surely you can think of others. But the divergence of refinery and petrochemical New Jersey and Delaware from coal and coal-tar chemical West Virginia is an interesting twist.
Hawaii and Delaware are easily explained by the Obama vs. Dukakis/Clinton and Biden vs. Bentsen/Gore.
New Jersey is just incredibly diverse now. The center through the north of it increasingly looks just like New York City.
Vermont has been a haven for Mid-Atlantic liberals for decades now. And it doesn’t have the Taxachusetts-transfers that New Hampshire gets.
As for the Republicans’ side of it, it’s basically a migration pattern for the Scots-Irish.
County-level would be fun to see if your “migration path of the Scots-Irish” carries over at the same level into the adjacent counties of other states–Piedmont NC, Upcountry SC, North Georgia, Northern Alabama, Northern Mississippi, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Missouri. And more specifically it would be of the Scots-Irish who had at least some generations in the South. And no doubt that correlates with a certain stripe of Calvinism, whether it is manifested in mainline churches, fundamentalist churches, or pentecostals.
Does one smell fossil fuel (and its industry) behind this?
That’s very interesting. Notably, the Atlantic South states don’t have the big coal and oil industries that the Interior South does.
I’ve been thinking about this split in terms of the rightward drift of the Interior South being the baseline, and the movement of the Atlantic states deviating from it, but maybe I’ve got that backwards. Maybe Virginia through Florida are following the general national trend, and it’s the shift of the Interior states that needs an explanation.
My sense is that some of that trend away from the national trend bleeds over into adjacent states–even including Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. But certainly Southwest Virginia, North Georgia, North Alamabama, and North (but not Delta) Mississippi. BooMan’s Scots-Irish hypothesis is a stand-in for certain Calivinist religious and cultural values and a variety of religion forged in the post-Civil War era that coincided with the operation of the KKK (even in Indiana). Ironically, what were the more Unionist parts of the South before the Civil War are now the most rabidly “conservative”. The former large plantation areas being the areas that have a large African-American vote and generally more Democratic, even among whites.
But the areas departing from trend are also those that have least benefited from the Sunbelt economic development of the past 30 years.
It has certainly bled over into Missouri.
Ironically, what were the more Unionist parts of the South before the Civil War are now the most rabidly “conservative”.
Once upon a time, Tennessee was part of the Upper South and North Carolina was part of the Deep South. Now, Tennessee might as well be Alabama, while North Carolina is turning blue.
That reminds me: I want a t-shirt with a picture of a soldier in a Union uniform and the words “Blue States.”
Boo if you are up for it I’d like to see how that list correlates to rates for literacy, HS graduation, infant mortality, inflation adjusted income, etc.
I had a window seat on one of my first flights up the coast from Florida back home. What struck me as I flew wat the enourmous number of new developments that looked like they were catering to yuppies. I knew this was happening in Florida – – and the politics were changing as a result – but as I flew I wondered if we were going to see the South essentially split between the Atlantic South and rest of the South.
A few years later the Emerging Demcoratic Majority came out – and to my surprise it talked about both Virginia and North Carolina becoming increasingly Democratis.
Fast forward – Obama has won Virginia twice, Florida twice and North Carolina once and narrowly lost it once. This is the single biggest development in electoral politics over the last 20 years. The Northern migration into these three states has transformed the electoral college. You can see some evidence of this trend even in Georgia.
The other thing I would mention is Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Liberals expect Texas and Arizona to tilt their way as the Hispanic population rise – but it has not happened. The reason is that the white vote in both states has become increasingly polarized as the Hispanic poulation has grown. There are essentially two ways for the GOP to react to the rise of he Hispanic vote. One is to make peace with them. The other is to try and use the rise of the Hispanic vote to try and polarize the white vote. My guess is they go with the second option.
Which raises the question, why hasn’t the white vote similarly polarized in New Mexico, California, and Colorado?
He mobilized the black vote and students. However, a LOT of students – kids like my daughter – see that most of their classmates who did really well in college now have no jobs, huge debts and a questionable future. We are continuing to increase the number of H-1Bs and other work visas.
These kids are going to be asking “What did I get for my democratic vote?”
Better be an answer. The youth vote will NOT stay democratic if they don’t get jobs, and continue to be stabbed in the back by the Democrats.