Seismic Shifts

This is an interesting chart in USA Today that I came across that shows the net change in vote margin for President across the United States between 2012 and 2016. The darker the red, the bigger the shift to Trump from Obama. The darker the blue, the more votes moved from Romney to Clinton.

This piqued my curiosity to compare the actual changes in vote margins in various states to better understand what is happening on the ground in a number or states. What type of seismic shifts were going that the headlines might have missed?

In this election we heard a lot about the big battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa that paved the way for the Trump victory. However, bigger shifts were in play in other states that we did not hear much about. What happened there may have ramifications in the future even though it may not have meant much in the electoral college vote in 2016.

First, let's look at the key states that swung to Trump in 2016 from Obama in 2012 and how the vote margin shifted. All vote data is from www.uselectionsatlas.org.

You can see from the chart that even though Florida and North Carolina rightfully received a lot of attention on election night for shifting to Trump, the bigger voter swings were in the Midwest.

However, removed from the headlines of that night were other states that saw meaningful voter margin shifts to Trump. These shifts did not matter in the electoral college math this year but they may become meaningful in the future.

Every one of these states, except South Dakota and New York, has a Democrat senator (or an independent that caucuses with the Democrats) up for re-election in 2018. Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota, Joe Manchin from West Virginia, Claire McCaskill from Missouri and Joe Donnelly from Indiana would appear to be particularly vulnerable as all these states were won by Trump by no less than 19 points. In fact, it would not surprise me if Joe Manchin switches to the Republican Party in the near future because there does not appear to be any future for a Democrat in West Virginia right now.

There also were states where voter swings away from the GOP occurred. These largely appear to be driven by changes in Hispanic demographics. The outlier here was Utah who never liked Trump like they loved Romney, but still delivered the state to the GOP by a 19 point margin.

Texas, California and Arizona show the Hispanic effect. Georgia, Virginia and Washington also saw shifts to Clinton compared to Obama but all of these shifts to the Democrats were much more modest swings than went the other way.

On the subject of the Hispanic vote, I also found this chart in USA Today interesting showing fewer Hispanics supported Hillary than Obama. The converse of that is that Trump got more support from Hispanics than either McCain or Romney. Notice that USA Today did not title this chart, "More Hispanics supported Trump". Media bias can be very subtle in furthering an agenda.

Thus, despite all of the noise that Trump's position on immigration was going to mean disaster for the GOP, the fact was that his support was not much different than it has been for Republican candidates for the last 25 years.

It seems that there are a lot of legal Hispanic immigrants who value the rule of law and the security of their adopted nation just as much as anyone else. Why should that be a surprise to anyone?