Getty Gallup: Red states now outnumber blue states

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, 35 states were solidly Democratic or leaning that way, according to Gallup's analysis of party affiliation out Wednesday.

What a difference seven years make.


In 2015, the number of Republican or Republican-leaning states outranked Democratic or Democratic-leaning ones for the first time in the eight years that the polling organization has been tracking partisanship by state. Overall, 12 states are now solidly red, with another eight leaning in that direction.

Of those in solid red territory, four are in the South, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau (Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina), four are in the Mountain West (Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming), three are in the Midwest (North Dakota, South Dakota and Kansas), and the other is Alaska. Of those, Wyoming is the most Republican state, with 31.8 percent of respondents over the course of the last year identifying as Republican or leaning Republican.

The eight states leaning Republican are Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, West Virginia and New Hampshire.

The solid Democratic states in 2015 were largely coastal (California, New York, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey), with a few inland outliers (Illinois, New Mexico and Vermont). The only two states that moved in a more Democratic direction in 2015 were New Mexico and Nebraska (which, as stated above, still leans Republican).

Gallup drew results for the analysis from telephone interviews conducted throughout 2015, surveying 177,991 adults nationwide with an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point.