How Have States Shifted in the Past Two Decades

Do you remember what the political map looked like 20 years ago? It looked really different, in many ways. States like New Mexico and Colorado went to republicans, both of these states were called for Biden within minutes of the polls closing. Virginia was the same, being won by Bush in both 2000 and 2004, but voting democratic in every election since then. States like Arizona and Georgia, which were the two closest margins in 2020, were both easily won by Bush. Cutting the other way, Large electoral states like Ohio and Florida were won by Obama in 2012, but both went to Trump by decent margins in 2020.     So why do states shift? It can be mostly explained by two reasons. The first being a shift in demographics. Georgia is a state that has had a double digits shift towards dems in the last two decades. This is largely due to the Atlanta metro area, which has both gotten much larger and more diverse. Most noticeably there has been a large influx of African American voters, a group Democrats dominate. 31.5% of Georgia is made up of African Americans. That’s a large group considering that Biden won 92% of them nationwide. The second reason is a change in a demographic’s voting trend. For example, Ohio contains a huge number of working class white voters. This is a group that Trump turned strongly in his favor, which is what caused Ohio to flip red in 2016, by relatively comfortable margins. Another example is Florida. Florida has always contained a large share of Latino voters, and this is a group that formally supported democrats strongly, but has now shifted towards a moderate level of support for dems. The result? Florida goes from being won by Obama in 2012, to voting for trump by more than three points in 2020.