How the Republican Electoral Map Moved Across Four Eras from 1896 to 2016

The Republican map has done something no sensible mapmaker would sign off on: it has turned itself inside out. A Republican from Maine or Vermont in 1900, who could not imagine voting for anyone else, would be astonished at the party's chances in his home state today. A Republican from 1900 dropped into a county convention in Alabama or Texas in 2016 would be astonished the other way. The states Republicans count on now are, to a surprising degree, the states they wrote off a century ago, and the states they once owned are now the places they struggle.

That is the story of the map. It has moved, in big jumps, four times since 1896, and each move has a cause. I will set out the four eras in one table, then walk through each, then give you the cautions you need before you read anything into a map. Because maps are seductive. They look like facts. They are really summaries, and summaries leave things out.

The four maps side by side

Look at the table as a whole and one thing jumps out. The Republican Party has never been tied to a place. It has been tied to coalitions of people, and the people have moved around the map.

Era one: the Northeast and Midwest (1896 to 1932)

William McKinley's victory in 1896 gave the Republicans the industrial states of the Northeast and the Midwest, and they would hold most of them for a generation. The voters were factory owners and factory workers, bankers, merchants and many Midwestern farmers, united by the protective tariff and the gold standard. William Jennings Bryan, the Democrat, carried the South and much of the Plains and Mountain West. McKinley took California and Oregon on the coast. The final tally was 271 electoral votes to 176. We compare the two campaigns in McKinley and Bryan in 1896 Compared as Two Ways to Run for President.

Notice the South. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, the white South voted almost uniformly Democratic, and it kept doing so for decades. The label "Solid South" stuck. There were exceptions. In 1928, with a Catholic Democrat on the ballot, Herbert Hoover carried several Southern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Texas. It was a hint of the future that vanished in the Depression.

The era also had its split. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt's third-party candidacy divided the Republican vote and gave the White House to Woodrow Wilson, an event we describe in Taft, Roosevelt and the Convention Fight That Split the Party in 1912. A map of that year looks very different from the maps on either side of it, and the reason is a feud, not a realignment.

Era two: the New Deal and the long wilderness (1932 to 1964)

The Depression broke the first map. In 1932 Hoover carried six states: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Franklin Roosevelt won 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59. In 1936, the Republican nominee, Alf Landon, carried Maine and Vermont and nothing else, for a total of 8 electoral votes against 523. The New Deal coalition of Southern whites, big-city machines, immigrant and Catholic voters, unions and, increasingly, Black voters in the North had arrived. Two of its stories are told in The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness and Why Black Voters Left the Party of Lincoln for the New Deal, in Questions.

Then came Dwight Eisenhower, a popular general who ran in 1952 and 1956 and won big, 442 to 89 and then 457 to 73. His map was striking because it ignored the old lines. He carried suburbs. He carried parts of the South, including Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida in 1952. He was personally popular, and he ended the Korean fighting. What Eisenhower did not do was change the basic loyalty of most voters. Democrats kept control of Congress for most of those years, and the South continued to elect Democrats to state and local office for another generation.

The Northeast, meanwhile, was still a Republican region in the 1950s, home to the moderate wing of the party. That moderate wing is the one that faded in the decades that followed.

Era three: the South and West arrive (1964 to 1988)

In 1964 Barry Goldwater lost forty-four states, but he won Arizona and five states of the Deep South, and the map had begun to tilt. He had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on constitutional grounds, a position that appealed to a part of the Southern electorate and that historians still debate. See The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future.

The change was not simple. In 1968, George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, carried five Southern states, splitting the vote in a way that complicated Richard Nixon's math. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a Georgian, won every Southern state but Virginia. The South was in motion, not settled. In 1972, Nixon won forty-nine states with a message aimed at the "silent majority," including many blue-collar workers in the industrial North, a story told in Nixon's 1972 Landslide and the Birth of the Blue-Collar Republican. His result was 520 electoral votes to George McGovern's 17.

Then Reagan assembled the map that the party's grandfathers would have found strange: the South, the Mountain West, California, the Sun Belt and a good chunk of the industrial North. He won 489 electoral votes in 1980 and 525 in 1984. In 1988 George H. W. Bush won 426, carrying California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut. The Reagan Democrats of Michigan are profiled in The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides.

So why did these states move? Several forces overlapped, and honest historians disagree about how much weight each deserves. The civil rights revolution changed the Southern political calculus. Economic growth and migration brought new voters to the Sun Belt. The religious right organized. The Democratic Party's own shifts mattered. Our piece The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows tests the simple version of the story against the evidence, and I recommend it because the simple version is wrong in important ways.

Era four: suburbs, the Northeast and the Rust Belt (1992 to 2016)

Here the map reshuffled again. In 1992, the six large states Bush had won four years earlier, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut, all went for Bill Clinton. Of those six, Pennsylvania and Michigan did not return to the Republican column until 2016. Through that year, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut had not gone Republican in a presidential race since 1988.

The South went the other way. In 2000, George W. Bush carried every state of the old Confederacy, including Al Gore's home state of Tennessee and Bill Clinton's Arkansas. West Virginia, long a Democratic stronghold, went Republican too. Meanwhile some western and southern states drifted toward the Democrats as their populations changed: Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, and Virginia, which no Democrat had carried between 1964 and 2008.

Then came 2016. Republicans won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states that had not voted Republican for President since the 1980s, plus Ohio, Iowa and Florida. These states had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Count the shift: Obama had 332 electoral votes and Mitt Romney 206; Trump pledged 306. We worked the arithmetic step by step in How to Count to 270 an Electoral College Worksheet with the 2016 Map, and the story of the flips is in How Donald Trump won the three states Republicans had lost for a generation.

Why did the Rust Belt move? One widely discussed pattern is the education divide: over several decades, voters without a college degree moved toward Republicans, and those with a degree moved toward Democrats. The states with many non-college voters in manufacturing and small towns became more Republican, and the suburbs of big metro areas, with high concentrations of college graduates, became more Democratic. Trade, the decline of manufacturing jobs, and cultural identity all played a part. The wider picture is in The Trump Coalition in Historical Context, from Country Club to Cracker Barrel.

Three states that tell the story

Averages hide the drama, so follow three individual states across the whole span.

Pennsylvania voted Republican in every presidential election from Abraham Lincoln's in 1860 through 1932, with one exception: in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt's third-party ticket carried it. Hoover held it in 1932, even as he lost almost everything else. Franklin Roosevelt won it in 1936. Pennsylvania then swung back and forth for decades, went to George H. W. Bush in 1988, to the Democrats from 1992 through 2012, and to Donald Trump in 2016. A state that was once the keystone of the Republican arch became a battleground the party had to win back one election at a time.

Texas is the mirror image. It was part of the solid Democratic South in 1896, and it stayed Democratic through the New Deal years. Eisenhower carried it in 1952 and 1956, and between 1960 and 1976 it voted Democratic in every election but one, including for Texan Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The exception was Richard Nixon's landslide in 1972. From 1980 on, it has voted Republican for President in every election through 2016. The same state, with a different coalition inside it.

Virginia shows how fast a change can come. It voted Republican in the Eisenhower years, and in every presidential election from 1968 through 2004. In 2008 it voted for Barack Obama, the first Democrat to carry it since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and it voted Democratic again in 2012 and 2016. The causes were population growth and change in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, not a sudden change of heart in the rest of the state.

What do the three have in common? Nothing about the land changed. The people did, and the issues they cared about did, and the parties moved to meet them. That is the best one-sentence summary of the electoral map I know.

What each era teaches

• 1896 to 1932: a party tied to an economic idea (the tariff) can dominate for a generation, and it can lose everything when the economy breaks.
• 1932 to 1964: a party can win the presidency with a popular candidate while losing the country below the top of the ticket. Personal popularity is not a realignment.
• 1964 to 1988: a party that builds in a growing region gains seats for decades. The Sun Belt's growth was a gift that came from demography, not strategy alone.
• 1992 to 2016: coalitions are rented, not owned. Voters can leave. A state that was solidly yours one decade can be competitive in the next.

Cautions before you overread any map

Here are six, and I want you to keep them handy.

1. Winner-take-all hides closeness. A state won by half a point and one won by twenty points are the same color. The maps of 1960, 1976 and 2000 look decisive and were not.
2. Third parties distort the picture. Roosevelt in 1912, Wallace in 1968 and Ross Perot in 1992 all changed maps without changing what most voters thought. A map with a strong third-party candidate is a poor guide to the party's base.
3. Electoral votes drift with the census. Texas cast 15 electoral votes in 1896 and 38 in 2016. A bigger Texas changes the weight of the South, whatever the voters do. Comparing a 1900 map with a 2016 map without that adjustment is comparing different yardsticks.
4. A single map is a snapshot. Candidates matter. Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan each won landslides that their parties could not repeat without them.
5. Party labels carry their history. Calling a state "Republican" in 1900 and in 2016 uses the same word for different coalitions, different platforms and different voters. Compare people and issues, not just labels.
6. A map of land is not a map of people. County maps look overwhelmingly red because the land is large and sparsely populated, while cities are small on the map and large in votes. Always ask how many people live in the colored space.

The bottom line

• The Republican map has moved four times since 1896, from the industrial Northeast and Midwest, through the New Deal wilderness, to the South and West, and to the Rust Belt breakthrough of 2016.
• The shifts followed voters and issues: the tariff, the Depression, civil rights and the Sun Belt, and the education divide. No state belongs to a party forever.
• Be skeptical of every simple story. "The parties switched" and "the red states always were red" both leave out most of the evidence.
• Read a map with the margins, the third parties and the census in view. If you can't see them, you do not yet have the whole picture.
• For your own county, pull up the returns from the last four elections at your county clerk's or the state's election site. You will learn more from your own numbers than from any national map. Our elections page can start you.