National Journal ^ | May 10, 2012 | Ron Brownstein,
As Democrats have solidified an upstairs-downstairs constituency of affluent, socially moderate white suburbanites and minorities (many economically strained), they have established a durable hold on states shaped by rising education levels and diversity. As Republicans have become a more monolithically conservative party, especially on social issues, they have tightened their control over heavily religious Southern and heartland states but watched more cosmopolitan states move at varying rates toward the Democrats in presidential races. “All of this is squeezing [and] compressing the map for Republicans,” says Steve Schmidt, the campaign manager for GOP nominee John McCain in 2008. In fact, since 1992, Republicans have won a smaller share of the available Electoral College votes outside the South than in any five-election sequence since the party’s founding in 1856.
Central to this role reversal is the rise of what I’ve called the “blue wall”: the 18 states that have voted Democratic in at least the past five consecutive presidential elections. Democrats have not won that many states so often since Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman carried 22 in each election from 1932 to 1948.
The blue wall encompasses the 11 states from Maryland to Maine (except New Hampshire); the three West Coast states; and Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Hawaii (plus the District of Columbia). Republicans carried 12 of these states at least four times from 1968 to 1988. But common factors have shifted almost all of them toward the Democrats since then: a growing minority population and a tilt away from the GOP among socially moderate college-educated white voters. Over the past five elections in these 18 states, the GOP presidential nominee has finished within 5 percentage points of the Democrat just 10 times out of a possible 90 results.
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