On Tuesday, voters took a wrecking ball to that map, electing Democrats in states that were long considered reliably Republican. For a decade, the political map has been largely stagnant, locked into the same half-dozen or so political battlegrounds, reflecting a polarized, evenly divided country.
Kansas, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio and Iowa — all states that President Donald Trump easily won two years ago — backed Democrats for the U.S. Senate and, in several of them, for governor, too. Only California has more electoral votes. For Democrats to hold onto their gains in the red center of the country, they would likely need to embrace causes like the farm bill that are vital to voters there but not on the mind of your typical liberal activist.
“Even though Democrats haven’t won Texas in a presidential race since Jimmy Carter, last night’s historic results may entice them to make a real run at the state’s robust 40 electoral votes,” said Texas Republican strategist David Polyansky. Such a shift would also signal a sea change in the way political parties function, said Joshua Huder, a Georgetown political scientist.
He doesn’t expect it to last. “Supporters of each party perceive the other side as a threat to their way of life. But Abramowitz and others noted that the dynamic that fueled the historic election will still be around in 2028. Democrats have for months hoped to repeat the successes of the 2006 and 2008 elections, when they won back Congress and then, two years later, expanded their margins in Barack Obama ‘s first presidential run. Jim Messina, who worked on that 2008 campaign and managed Obama’s 2012 reelection team, said Democrats will now be able to build up their local apparatus in Texas while taking a careful look ahead of 2028. That’s why the analysis begins now in states such as Ohio, Iowa and Texas, said Democratic pollster John Anzalone, President Joe Biden’s chief pollster and senior adviser in 2020 and pollster for Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
“It clearly was some type of a breakthrough; the level of discontent with Trump and his policies was so strong,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. “We remain very polarized, despite what happened in this election,” Abramowitz added.
