The New Electoral Map Isn't Very New, But Biden's Lead Keeps the Battleground From Shrinking

We're now in the home stretch of the 2020 presidential campaign, with millions of ballots already cast via early and mail-in voting. The two candidates and their advisors are now making final decisions about where to allocate resources—ad spending, voter mobilization operations, and travel by the nominees and their running mates, spouses‚ and top surrogates—based on their current appraisals of optimal electoral college strategy.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton actively contested 14 states between them in 2016, collectively casting 32 percent of the nation's electoral votes. In the wake of the last election, however, most analysts expected the geographic scope of electoral competition to shrink in 2020. Trump's comfortable victories in Ohio (by 8 percentage points) and Iowa (by more than 9), along with his unexpected strength across the rest of the Midwest, seemed to signal that these two perennial battleground states were no longer pivotal and might be justifiably conceded to the Republicans in the future, while the pro-Democratic shift evident in sections of the Sun Belt from 2012 to 2016 wasn't clearly strong enough yet to push traditionally "red" bastions like Georgia and Texas into legitimate partisan competitiveness.

These expectations were all perfectly reasonable extrapolations from the 2016 results. But they rested on assumptions of another tight contest in 2020, rather than the clear and consistent Democratic lead—now flirting with double digits in the national popular vote—that actually emerged. Joe Biden's overall advantage has allowed him to remain viable in Ohio and Iowa despite their recent Republican leanings while also mounting an incursion into Georgia and Texas, both uncontested by Democratic presidential candidates since the 1990s. The only two states to drop out of the battleground category between 2016 and 2020 were Virginia and Colorado, both already swiftly moving in a Democratic direction but put altogether out of reach for the Republicans by a poor national climate for the party this year.

Contrary to previous suggestions of a shrinking battleground map, then, the presidential campaigns are once again contesting 14 states in 2020 (plus the single electoral vote awarded to the winner of Nebraska's 2nd congressional district). The replacement of Virginia and Colorado with the more populous states of Texas and Georgia means that the candidates are actually fighting over more presidential electors than last time—in fact, as the figure below demonstrates, the battleground this year is the largest in terms of electoral votes since the 2000 election:

Figure adapted from Red Fighting Blue: 

How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics

It's often hard in the moment to separate short-term variation from long-term trends, to distinguish changes that are harbingers of the future from those that are merely temporary deviations from the norm. The assumption that 2016 foreshadowed a more permanent fading of Democratic fortunes in the Great Lakes states as the party built a new regional base in the metropolitan South and Southwest was reasonable enough, but may well turn out to be at least a bit premature. Predictions that the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee would perform better in Arizona (carried once by the party in the last 17 presidential elections) than Wisconsin (carried seven times in the past eight elections) aren't consistent with the polls so far; as of today, the FiveThirtyEight polling average shows Biden leading Trump by 8 points in Wisconsin and 4 points in Arizona. 

Polls so far indicate a fairly uniform swing between 2016 and 2020. Biden seems to be improving on Clinton's performance by a roughly comparable margin pretty much everywhere, though it wouldn't be surprising if this shift turned out to be a bit bigger in the Midwest than the Sun Belt given that he is apparently doing a better job winning back senior citizens and non-college whites from Trump than he is in outperforming Clinton's showing among young voters and racial minorities.

At the same time, it's a legitimately important development that Arizona, Texas, and Georgia are all potentially competitive states in federal elections, even if (at least for now) it requires a 10-point national popular vote margin (and a record-breaking fundraising haul) for Democrats to put all three in contention. The changing partisan alignments of a few individual states should be understood in the proper context of what is overall a historically stable electoral map. But in an era of closely-matched and highly polarized national parties, even small shifts in geographic coalitions can have big consequences for the outcome of elections and the governance of the nation.

"New" States Get the Hype, But the Electoral Map Hasn't Changed Much in 2020

To a certain type of election-watcher, there are few things more exciting than witnessing a state that was once loyally partisan transform into a fiercely contested battleground. Recent public opinion surveys suggesting that Joe Biden is running a close race against Donald Trump in Texas and Georgia—two traditional Republican bastions that have not been competitive in presidential elections since the 1990s—and now leads in Arizona, which has voted Democratic for president only once (1996) in the past 70 years, have, unsurprisingly, received widespread attention from political commentators.

But the complete picture of the emerging electoral map in 2020 reveals far more continuity than change. The current era of presidential elections is distinguished by a historically unmatched degree of consistency in state-level partisan alignments, as depicted in this chart from my book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics:

Of the 37 states (plus the District of Columbia) that voted for the same party's nominees in each of the five presidential elections between 2000 and 2016, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas seem to be the only plausible candidates to break their streak in 2020—unless the next few months turn so dramatically in Donald Trump's favor that he manages to carry Minnesota or Maine. But even the potential addition of new Sun Belt territory to the familiar Midwest-centered battleground state map doesn't mean that there has been a significant partisan realignment of the South or Southwest over the past four years. What the close recent polls in these states really indicate is not that Trump has developed an unusual regional weakness, but rather that Biden now has a national lead strong enough to pull a few Republican-leaning states into the "competitive" category.

If we compare the two-party popular vote outcome in 2016 with today's two-party polling margin as estimated by The Economist's daily forecasting model for the 16 states where both parties received at least 45 percent of the vote in the last election, we see (after accounting for sampling error and variations in data quality) what looks like a fairly uniform pro-Democratic shift nationwide:

New Mexico	Clinton +9	Biden +13	Change: +4 D
Virginia	Clinton +6	Biden +11	Change: +5 D
Colorado	Clinton +5	Biden +14	Change: +9 D
Maine	Clinton +3	Biden +10	Change: +7 D
Nevada	Clinton +3	Biden +7	Change: +4 D
Minnesota	Clinton +2	Biden +9	Change: +7 D
New Hampshire	Clinton +0	Biden +6	Change: +6 D
Michigan	Trump +0	Biden +8	Change: +8 D
Pennsylvania	Trump +1	Biden +5	Change: +6 D
Wisconsin	Trump +1	Biden +6	Change: +7 D
Florida	Trump +1	Biden +4	Change: +5 D
Arizona	Trump +4	Biden +3	Change: +7 D
North Carolina	Trump +4	Biden +2	Change: +6 D
Georgia	Trump +5	Trump +0	Change: +5 D
Ohio	Trump +9	Biden +1	Change: +10 D
Texas	Trump +9	Trump +3	Change: +6 D
Iowa	Trump +10	Trump +2	Change: +8 D
NATIONAL	Clinton +2	Biden +8	Change: +6 D

Polling estimates are, of course, inexact, and all three of the new Sun Belt battlegrounds had already swum against the national tide by becoming "bluer" between 2012 and 2016. But the best recent evidence indicates that these states remain more Republican than the national average, and are currently competitive mostly because Biden is well ahead in the overall popular vote. Even so, Biden appears to have a consistent lead only in Arizona, and he still trails Trump in Texas.

If Biden's current advantage is changing the electoral map in some ways, it's working against change in others. After Trump won Ohio and Iowa by unusually wide margins in 2016, some analysts speculated that both states would lose battleground status in 2020, conceded to the GOP from the start of the campaign. Ohio and Iowa remain clearly Republican-leaning in 2020 compared to the nation as a whole, but Biden's overall lead allows him to keep both states in play (at least for now), and the Trump campaign is indeed spending money to defend them.

A scenario in which Biden maintains or expands his current margin would allow Democrats to consider deploying campaign resources into these states in pursuit of a decisive national victory and gains in downballot offices. But if the race starts to tighten, diverting attention to red-leaning states will be considerably less appealing, and Democratic dreams of "expanding the map" will need to wait for a future contest. Either way, the electoral college outcome in 2020 is still likely to pivot on the four states that Trump carried by narrow margins in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida. And there's nothing new at all about those particular states deciding who the next president will be.

Could Texas Be a Swing State in 2020?

The well-regarded survey research center at Quinnipiac University released a poll of Texas on Wednesday that attracted some attention around the political world. It showed Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in the state by 4 percentage points (48 percent to 44 percent) in a 2020 trial heat, with other major Democratic candidates slightly trailing Trump by margins of 1 to 4 points. Texas has not been actively contested in a presidential election since 1992, and Barack Obama lost the state by 16 points as recently as 2012. But the Republican margin narrowed to 9 points in the 2016 election, and Beto O'Rourke's 2018 Senate campaign attracted more than 48 percent of the vote—the best statewide showing by a Democratic candidate in decades. Has Texas's long-predicted shift from red to purple finally arrived?

There are reasons to believe that Texas will be less enthusiastic about Trump's re-election than other traditionally Republican states. It contains both a large non-white population and a substantial number of white-collar voters residing in large metropolitan areas—a segment of the electorate that has been trending Democratic for years but is especially anti-Trump. Texans are also young, relatively speaking; the state has the third-lowest median age in the nation at a time when the partisan generation gap is at a record high.

In theory, the ability to put Texas's 38 electoral votes in play would be a major advantage for the Democratic Party; adding it to the states carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016 would give Democrats an electoral college majority without the need to flip Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Florida back from the Republican column. But it's much more likely that Texas would be a "reach" state at best for the party: still more Republican-leaning than the average, and truly up for grabs only in a situation where the Democratic ticket is already heading for a comfortable national victory. The state's very size will also dissuade Democrats from building an active campaign unless they really think they have a good shot at winning: to actually compete in Texas requires a multimillion-dollar investment in advertising and field organization. O'Rourke raised an astounding $79 million for his Senate race last year, and yet amassing the nation's biggest campaign war chest still wasn't enough to deliver him a victory.

It's more likely that any further immediate change in Texas's partisan alignment will register most visibly in the House of Representatives. In 2018, Democrats captured two seats long held by the GOP and held ten other Texas Republicans to 55 percent or less of the popular vote. A continued pro-Democratic drift in the suburbs of Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio would itself put enough new districts into play to provide Democrats with a valuable boost in their quest to protect or expand their national House majority in 2020.

For this reason alone, a Republican presidential administration would normally be reluctant to push too hard on policies that disproportionately hurt the Texas economy in advance of a major election. But the Trump White House, which (among many other idiosyncracies) lacks a conventional political shop with influence over top presidential decisions, is poised to impose tariffs on goods from Mexico as soon as next week, even though Texas ranks second in the nation in its economic dependence on Mexican imports. Texas is still very unlikely to actually turn blue in 2020. But if it were to occur somehow, such actions will look in retrospect like textbook cases of political malpractice.