Mark J. Rozell is dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Whet Smith is an attorney and former GOP nominee for the Texas state assembly.

A common lesson drawn from this November’s presidential elections is that to win the presidency, the Democratic Party has to start paying much closer attention to white working-class voters in the Midwest states who delivered the Electoral College majority to Republican Donald J. Trump.

Three weeks after election day, and the once-renowned “blue wall” of Democratic states in the Midwest is in shambles — Trump is the first Republican nominee since the 1980s to win either Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, and not since Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign has a Republican won all three.


But Trump’s Midwestern victories shouldn’t have shocked anyone. Democrats have been struggling there for a generation. Wisconsin has elected Democrats in just two of their last eight gubernatorial elections, and the GOP has held a state assembly majority for 19 of the last 21 years. In Michigan, Republicans have won five of the last seven gubernatorial races, and have held an uninterrupted state senate majority for more than 30 years. Even in Minnesota, which Clinton won, Democrats have won just two of the last seven gubernatorial elections.

The Midwest isn’t safe Democratic territory, but truth be told, the hand-wringing about the Democrats’ woes misses a larger truth. Lost in much of the analyses this year is just how significantly the Trump-Pence ticket underperformed among many traditionally Republican-leaning groups and in some GOP-dominant areas — and of what this possibly portends in future elections. Voting trends suggest a possible realigning of the electorate at work that can bring back the big prize to the Democrats despite their increasingly difficult Electoral College status.

There is an alternative, more likely path for Democrats to regain the presidency, and it does not run through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, or even Ohio. Rather, it is comprised of a Southwest/West and East Coast coalition. Building it would require Democrats to pivot away from the Midwest to focus their efforts in the southwestern and southeastern states that showed cracks in the Republican Party’s Electoral College red wall.

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Trump underperformed previous Republican nominees among better-educated whites and minorities of all types. He lost Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado, states that fit this demographic and which George W. Bush won twice. He underperformed the normal Republican margins in Georgia and Arizona as well, due in large part to his low support among college-educated voters in those states.

Perhaps no state demonstrated this countertrend more than Texas, where, for a decade, Democrats have predicted a demographically driven realignment in a state that had previously shown no sign of budging from its hard Republican position. This year, we began to see movement. Trump changed rural Texas from strongly Republican into overwhelmingly Republican, and in some places, he received more than 90 percent of the vote — including a 94-3 victory in King County. But so few people live in those counties, those margins were overcome by Trump’s big falloff from previous Republicans in the metropolitan areas, particularly Houston. Trump turned Romney’s tie in Houston’s Harris County into a 54-42 shellacking for Republicans, and suburban Fort Bend County flipped Democratic for the first time in living memory. The end result was that the GOP’s statewide margin of victory in Texas was cut in half from 2012: Mitt Romney won the state by 18 percentage points, while Trump carried it by only nine.

Significantly, down-ballot Republicans outperformed Trump. Indeed, his running behind “Straight Republican” clearly demonstrates a number of otherwise reliable Republicans who refused to vote for him. However, historically there has been a trickle-down effect to shifts in voter preferences. That is, voters have shifted their behavior at the presidential level before changing their down-ballot behavior. That was certainly true in the shift of Texas to the Republicans a generation ago. This year appears to have broken the automatic Republican voting habit of a good many normally GOP voters in the state, portending the beginning of a possible partisan shifting again.

This shift was seen elsewhere, too. In Georgia, Democrats have been increasingly optimistic about their chances after being shut out of statewide elections for years. In 2014, national trends favorable to Republicans helped put down two well-funded Democratic candidates, gubernatorial nominee Jason Carter (grandson of President Jimmy Carter) and senate candidate Michelle Nunn (daughter of former Senator Sam Nunn), but the state is now competitive in a way few could’ve imagined just a decade ago. For a time, it appeared that Hillary Clinton would even win the presidential race there, and though she fell short of that, Trump carried the state with just 51.4 percent of the vote.

Further, like in Texas, Georgia’s Democrats have the demographic wind at their backs: the state has a growing population of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. Exit polls from November show that 40 percent of Georgia’s voters were nonwhite, and 83 percent of them voted for Clinton. Where Clinton fell short was among white voters: she won just 21 percent of white Georgians. It’s a problem for Democrats: in 2014, both Carter and Nunn fell short of 25 percent support from whites in the state. If Clinton had been able to get the support of just 26 percent of white voters in Georgia, she would’ve won the state by a full percentage point.

For much of 2016, Arizona looked like it would be a tossup. And though Trump ultimately carried the state handily, his margin of victory was just 4 percentage points — less than half the amount Romney won by in 2012 — and that while the makeup of the electorate was whiter than in 2012 (75 percent, as opposed to 72 percent, according to exit polls). But a larger, longer trend is at play demographically, which may help to flip Arizona blue in four years’ time: The state has a growing Latino population which is becoming increasingly mobilized politically. In 2008, roughly 291,000 Latinos voted in the state’s general election; this year, that number was approximately 550,000, an increase of 89 percent.

In Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and the rest of the country, as the demographics continue to turn, as more Latinos come of age and register to vote, and as more Latinos join the voting public, Republicans will find themselves in a quandary. This year’s exit polls in both Michigan and Wisconsin show that 12 percent of voters identified immigration as the single most important issue facing the country; in both states, those voters overwhelmingly supported Trump: 71-25 in Michigan, 75–23 in Wisconsin. If the GOP continues to try to appeal to those voters with Trumpian stances on a border wall and deportation, then they will be effectively writing off their party’s chances in growing states like Texas, Arizona and Georgia. If, however, national Republicans choose to compete for Latino votes in those growing states, they risk alienating the enthusiastic supporters who helped Trump flip Midwestern blue states.

The Democrats’ immediate task is to tie the Republican Party as a whole to Trump and the attitudes and positions that contributed to his underperforming in longtime GOP states — and to provide reinforcement and further encouragement to voters who took the first step in knocking down the red wall.

If a Trump administration cements the voting trends apparent this year, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Minnesota could become red states. But by 2020 and 2024, Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada may well become solidly blue, with Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and even Florida and Texas trending that way as well. It will take some time, but these trends will favor the Democrats in the long term, especially since these latter states are likely to gain House seats reapportioned out of the Midwest — thus giving these growing states increasing power in the Electoral College.

Quite possibly, promoting a Southwest/West and East Coast coalition will pay greater dividends for Democrats than trying to woo back the Upper Midwest’s former Democrats who delivered the recent election to Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean writing off the Midwest or ignoring it, but simply understanding that contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is the Democrats, not Republicans, who in the future will have to reconfigure their electoral strategy to win the White House.