I was curious about certain states that have been deemed "pointless to campaign in" or ones that people "know" will vote one way or the other. This is probably an inaccurate way to think about it, but nonetheless I was curious which states actually matter. By that I just mean which states don't have a foregone conclusion of a party that they're almost inevitably going to vote for. Because I know voting against the grain in certain states can feel like fighting gravity. So anyway, all this resulted in the following table:
Here are some clarifications and interesting takeaways from this:
- The "other"s in 1948 and 1968 are Thurmond ("States' Rights Democratic") and Wallace ("American Independent"), respectively.
- Arguably the most important thing to note about these trends is "The Switch," i.e., the point at which the Republican and Democratic parties basically switched places. To give this some context, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana all voted Democrat more than 75% of the time between 1916 and 1964 and less than 30% of the time since then. On the reverse end of that spectrum, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, Minnesota, Vermont, and Maine all had at least a 25 percentage-point increase in the amount of times they voted Democrat if you compare those same two time periods.
- While Ohio and others get all the press for being the swing state(s), Nevada actually has the best record of picking the eventual-winner. 24 out of the 25 elections depicted in this 100-year period went the same way as Nevada voted. The only time they went off-track was 1976 when they voted for Ford instead of Carter. On the other end of that spectrum, Mississippi has the worst record for matching the national result as they've only done so 12 times in this period. This makes them the only state to vote for the eventual winner less than 50% of the time.
- In the past 9 elections (so, dating back to 1980's Reagan over Carter), 14 states have voted for the same party every time. These states are Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. You have to go back 13 elections - or 1964 - before 0 states have voted the same every time.
- Speaking of the 1964 election...The most Republican-voting state is Alaska which has voted red in 93% of these elections; all but Johnson's landslide win in 1964. As for the most Democrat-voting state, there's a 3-way tie between Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Rhode Island at 72% or a record of 18-and-7.