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Trump Moving Politics to the Center, Bringing Dems With Him
As Donald Trump returns to the White House, he has built the most formidable foundation of Republican electoral strength since the Ronald Reagan era in the 1980s. Over the course of his political career, 25 states have voted for Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns. That’s the most states either party has won in three consecutive presidential elections since 38 states backed Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and his vice president and successor, George H.W. Bush, in 1988. Trump’s two wins (and one defeat) haven’t approached the heights Bush and especially Reagan reached in their consecutive victories: Trump has won the national popular vote only once (and has never crossed 50%), while Bush and Reagan crossed that threshold each time, with Reagan even nearing 60% in 1984.
Trump’s strong grip on half the states has provided Republicans “a really solid base in the country,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based GOP consultant. “This sets Republicans up well in presidential elections, even in a post-Trump environment. It sets them up well in the Senate. It is a really strong base to launch from, and on the other side of the coin, the Democratic brand has become toxic in those 25 states.” The Trump 25, as these states might be known, cut a distinctive and consistent profile. Compared with the other 25 states, the three-time Trump states generally have fewer immigrants and more White Christians; fewer college graduates and more rural residents; fewer people employed in information-age computer, science and engineering jobs and more in manufacturing. The Trump states generally have more families with young children, but also more kids without health insurance, more kids in poverty and more teenage births.
In the Trump years, these states have become virtually impenetrable for Democrats. Democrats can still win the White House without carrying any of the Trump 25 states because these states award a total of 235 Electoral College votes, still well short of the 270 required for election.
But all projections indicate the Trump 25 states are likely to add more Electoral College votes after the 2030 census, perhaps substantially. And even in the meantime, many Democrats agree the party cannot achieve any durable hold on power in either the White House, the House or especially the Senate if it effectively concedes half the country to the Trump-era GOP.
Democrats must “come to the point of view that they are going to need to be competitive in more places, and own that fact, and then ask some of the hard questions about what is preventing them from competing them in those places,” said Michael Halle, the battleground states director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the campaign manager for Pete Buttigieg’s run for the 2020 Democratic nomination.
The state breakdown
The Trump era in presidential politics has sorted the states into three clearly demarcated buckets. Nineteen states have voted against Trump in each of his three campaigns, a list that includes the three West Coast states, New Mexico and Hawaii; 10 Northeastern states from Maryland to Maine; Illinois and Minnesota in the Midwest; and Virginia and Colorado, two prosperous states at the forward edge of the burgeoning information economy. These states, plus the District of Columbia, offer a combined 226 Electoral College votes, though Republicans usually peel off one of them in Maine, which awards some of its electoral votes by congressional district.
Six states have flipped at any point in the three races: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted for Trump in 2016, switched to Joe Biden in 2020 and then reverted back to Trump in 2024; Nevada voted for Clinton and Biden before falling to Trump last November. Those states offer another 77 Electoral College votes.
The remaining states — the Trump 25 that have backed him in all three races — are centered in four geographic areas. The largest concentration of them is in the South: North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Another big concentration runs through the outer South and southern edge of the industrial Midwest: Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana. A third group is in the Plains and agricultural Midwest: North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. The Mountain states provide the final big grouping: Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Utah. Alaska completes the list. These states offer 235 Electoral College votes, though Democrats usually peel off one in Nebraska, which, like Maine, also awards some of its electoral votes by congressional district.
That’s still well below the 38 states Reagan and Bush won in the three elections of the 1980s, when they not only exceeded 50% of the vote each time, but also crossed 400 electoral votes in all of those races. Trump’s Electoral College highpoint — the 312 he won in 2024 — pales by comparison, and also lags far below the peaks for Bill Clinton in 1996 (379) and Barack Obama in 2012 (370).
But since the 1980s, the most states either party has won in at least three consecutive elections has been the 22 won by Republicans in all four elections from 2000 through 2012. Democrats won a smaller group of states over a longer span: They carried 18 states in every presidential election from 1992 to 2012, creating what I termed the “blue wall.”
But Trump has both expanded and reinforced the Republican foundation he inherited in several important ways. First, Trump has greatly enlarged the Electoral College value of the solidly Republican states by annexing onto the GOP base five states that voted for Obama in one or both of his elections, many of them large prizes: Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Indiana and North Carolina added 80 more Electoral College votes (as of 2024) to the collection of reliably red, but mostly smaller, states that Trump inherited. (On the other side of the ledger, Arizona and Georgia, which had been among those backing the GOP in all four elections from 2000 to 2012, slipped into swing-state status under Trump, subtracting 27 electoral votes from the solid GOP base.)
Second, since 2016, Trump has shifted almost all of these states even further to the right. In 2024, he soared past 54% of the vote in every Trump 25 state except North Carolina, the only state among them that Democrats tried to be competitive in at all. (And even in North Carolina, he won an unexpectedly comfortable 183,000-vote victory.)
Perhaps most significantly in shifting the Electoral College map, Trump has tipped Ohio and Florida — the two most fiercely contested large battlegrounds of American politics from 1992 to 2012 — solidly into the Republican camp. Last year, he won nearly 55% of the vote in Ohio and 56% in Florida. That was a big jump over Trump’s vote share during his 2016 race of 51% in Ohio and 49% in Florida.
Data from the AP VoteCast survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, underlines Trump’s dominance of these states. The VoteCast attempted to measure voting patterns in every state. It found that Trump carried at least 60% of the vote among White people in 20 of these states, with his lowest showing a still robust 57% in Iowa and Alaska (Kansas, Montana and Ohio were the other states that fell below 60%). Among men, Trump carried at least 60% in 23 of these 25 states, with North Carolina (57%) and Ohio (59%) the sole exceptions. The new president’s numbers in November weren’t quite as high among women in the Trump 25, but he carried most women in each of them except North Carolina. And Trump consistently gained ground among non-White voters in many of those same states.
“This is the dream coalition,” said Jim McLaughlin, a lead pollster for Trump’s 2024 campaign. “This is the coalition Reagan talked about. This is the coalition W. Bush and (Karl) Rove talked about. But Donald Trump is doing it.”
The third major way Trump has buttressed the GOP base of the early 2000s is helping Republicans consolidate their control of down ballot offices in these GOP-leaning states. The trend of down-ballot offices in states increasingly following the direction of their preferences in the presidential contest long predates Trump, but he has unquestionably pushed that trend to new heights in these states.
Democrats now hold only three of the 25 governorships across the Trump 25 states (in Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina). In states where Democrats not long ago at the least remained competitive for governor and other statewide offices (most prominently Florida and Ohio, but also Montana, Iowa and Louisiana), Republicans have routed them in elections during the Trump era.
Most important has been the GOP’s success at consolidating Senate seats across these 25 states. After Trump’s initial victory in 2016, Democrats still held seven of their 50 Senate seats, a number that grew to eight after Democrat Doug Jones won a 2017 special election in Alabama. But, even in a difficult election climate, Republicans beat four of those Democratic senators in 2018 (in Florida, Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri), ousted Jones in 2020, and dispatched the final three Trump 25 Democrats last year (beating incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, and capturing the open seat vacated by Democrat-turned-independent Joe Manchin in West Virginia.) Now Republicans hold all 50 of the Senate seats from these states.
That dominance reflects the fundamental shift in the underlying dynamics of US elections that has vastly reduced the number of voters who “split their tickets” between the parties. “Increasingly the Senate races are determined by party strength and presidential partisanship,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. Even after Reagan and Bush won their three consecutive elections during the 1980s, Democrats still held a majority of the Senate seats in the states that voted for them each time, including both Senate seats in a dozen of those states. Today, not only do Republicans dominate Senate seats in the pro-Trump states, but so do Democrats in the states that have consistently voted against Trump: Maine’s Susan Collins is the last Republican holding a Senate seat in those states.
The problem for Democrats, of course, is that just 19 states voted against Trump three times, while 25 supported him three times. Democrats have stayed competitive for the Senate majority only because they hold 10 of the 12 Senate seats in the six states that have flipped at any point in the three Trump elections. But that isn’t enough to overcome the GOP stranglehold on the seats from the Trump 25 states — and sustaining such a lopsided advantage in the states that swing at the presidential level won’t be easy for Democrats, either.
“I don’t see a world in which Democrats control the Senate without winning a handful of these (Trump-leaning) places that have become really hard to win,” said Dan Kanninen, the battleground states director in 2024 for the Biden and Kamala Harris presidential campaigns.
To Halle, that brutal Senate math encapsulates the larger problem with allowing the concrete to harden around the Republican control of the Trump 25 states. As he points out, the GOP edge in so many states leaves them on the brink of a majority without winning anything else for whatever source of political power is at stake: governorships, attorneys general, state legislatures, US Senate seats. Ceding so much ground, he says, “is not sustainable.”
Mackowiak points to a tangible impact of the entrenched GOP advantage in so many places. This political partitioning, he notes, guarantees that even when Democrats control the White House, the executive branch and the House and Senate, there will always be an irreducible core of red-state elected officials fighting the Democratic agenda in Congress and the courts or through state policies. “It reduces the risk of unified Democratic control fundamentally changing the country,” he said.
That was vividly apparent during Biden’s first two years, when Democrats held unified control of both congressional chambers and the White House. Despite that strong hand, Republican senators from these states blocked many of his legislative aspirations through the filibuster; GOP governors and attorneys general launched waves of lawsuits against his executive branch actions; and state legislatures passed laws that moved policy in precisely the opposite direction as he was pursuing at the national level on issues from abortion to LGBTQ rights and voting access. Of the 25 Trump states, 18 have banned or restricted abortion, 24 have prohibited transgender girls from participating in high school sports, 24 allow residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit, and 20 rank among the states where local laws make it the most difficult to vote.
The rift between the Trump 25 and the states that back Democrats
Demographically, culturally and economically, the chasm could hardly be wider between the 25 states that supported Trump all three times and the 19 that consecutively voted against him.
Neither group is entirely homogenous. The anti-Trump collection includes some New England states that are predominantly White and heavily rural (New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine), while the Trump 25 include a few states that are very racially diverse and heavily urbanized, particularly Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Ohio.
But there are clear patterns that define each grouping. That starts with their demographic composition. Among the Trump 25 states, 20 rank in the bottom half of all states for the share of their residents who are immigrants. Twenty of the Trump states also rank in the bottom half of all states for the share of their residents who hold at least a four-year college degree. (Unless otherwise specified, the data comparing states in this section comes from the Census Bureau tables ranking states on a variety of measures.)
By contrast, 19 of the 25 Trump states rank in the top half of states for the share of their residents who live in rural communities, according to calculations provided to CNN by the Center for Rural Strategies. Surveys by the Public Religion Research Institute show that 18 of the Trump states rank in the top 25 for the share of their residents who identify as White Christians, and that number rises to 21 in the top half of states with the largest share of White evangelical Christians (only Alaska, Utah, Texas and Florida fail to make that list).
In their social life, the Trump 25 states bend toward traditional patterns of family formation: Twenty-two rank in the top half of states for youngest median age at which women marry for the first time (with Florida, Ohio and Mississippi as the only exceptions). Nineteen of them rank in the top half of states for the highest share of households that include children younger than 18.
While these states have relatively more families with children, the outcomes for kids in them are usually poorer than elsewhere. Fifteen of them rank among the top half of states with the largest share of kids living in poverty, with Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky and four other Trump states all placing among the 10 states with the absolute worst record on that measure; 19 of the Trump states also rank in the top half of states with the largest share of kids who lack health insurance. (Except for Wisconsin and Georgia, where Republican-controlled legislatures have balked, the other eight states that still have refused to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act are all among the Trump 25.)
The Trump 25 also lag on other key measures of health and well-being. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 19 of them rank among the top half of states with the highest rates of teen pregnancy. Twenty of them rank among the top half of states where the most residents of all ages lack health insurance. Nineteen of them in CDC data rank among the 25 states with the shortest life expectancy at birth for residents, including all eight with the worst record (a dubious club that features Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma ). Twenty rank in the bottom half of states in their average median income (with most of the exceptions being states that benefit from lucrative energy production: North Dakota, South Dakota and Alaska).
On almost all of these measures, the 19 states that have opposed Trump three times present a mirror image. Sixteen of them, for instance, rank in the top half of states for the highest share of immigrants in their population (all except the New England trio of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont); 18 rank in the top half of states for the highest share of college graduates (with New Mexico as the sole exception); 17 of them (all but New Mexico and Maine) rank in the top half for the highest median income; and 17 rank among the half of states with the smallest percentage of White evangelical Christians in their populations (with only Minnesota and Maine as the exceptions). Apart from the northern New England trio and New Mexico, almost all of the anti-Trump states rank near the bottom in their share of rural residents.
Seventeen of the anti-Trump states rank in the top half of the states with the longest life expectancy, including Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and the next six states at the absolute top of that list. Sixteen of them rank among the half of states where women wait the longest before first marriage, and just New Mexico, New York, Delaware and California (plus Washington, DC) rank among the half of states with the highest share of kids living in poverty. Just New Mexico, New Jersey and Colorado rank among the top half of states with the largest percentage of people lacking health insurance.
The economic contrast between the pro- and anti-Trump states is profound, too. Most of the Trump 25 states still substantially revolve around at least one of the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: agriculture, manufacturing and energy extraction.
“The red-state economies are fundamentally production oriented,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank. “This is an economy that harkens back to the historical basis of the US economy as a whole.”
Many of the consistent anti-Trump states, by contrast, are at the forefront of the transition to an information-age economy centered on computing, communications and sophisticated services, Muro notes. “These are places that are based on large, diverse, inclusive technology- and business-oriented downtown establishments,” he said. “They are clearly better educated.”
Census data supports Muro’s portrayal. Sixteen of the Trump states rank in the top half for states with the largest percentage of their workforce in manufacturing; just six of them (Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Utah, Missouri and Kansas) rank among the top half of states with the biggest share of workers in engineering, science and computing jobs. For the anti-Trump states, the proportions are essentially reversed: Just seven of them rank near the top in manufacturing, while all of them except Hawaii, Maine and New York place in the upper half for engineering, science and computer workers. The Trump states almost all rank near the top of the states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output, a key measure of how integrated states are into the existing fossil fuel economy; the anti-Trump states almost all fall near the bottom of that ranking.
Because the information-age industries are catalyzing so much of the nation’s growth, the 19 anti-Trump states drive more of the national economy than the Trump 25. Calculations by Brookings Metro exclusively for CNN found that the states that voted against Trump three times generated 48% of the nation’s total economic output in 2023, compared with 38% for the states that have supported him each time. The gap is especially wide on venture capital investments, which usually flow to the most cutting-edge technology: nearly $9 in every $10 of such investment in 2024 flowed into the anti-Trump states (mostly California, New York and Massachusetts), Brookings found.
The anti-Trump states, Muro said, still represent “the core economic activity of the country — and maybe will even more so with the AI explosion and other technology developments.”
That picture, though, could be evolving, Muro says, in a way that allows Trump to tap into more of the country’s economic vibrancy than he did in his first term. As Brookings Metro has documented, Trump compared with 2020 made gains in a number of Sun Belt counties with a growing presence in the information economy, from North Carolina and Florida through Texas and Arizona.
The “toehold” (as Muro calls it) that Trump established in red-state technology centers is contravening the expectation of many analysts (myself included) that the economic vibrancy bringing more young college graduates into the Sun Belt metros would bolster the overall Democratic position in these states. Instead, Muro says, the 2024 election showed evidence that a conservative model of technology-based growth may be taking root in the red states, symbolized by figures such as Elon Musk and Trump’s other Silicon Valley allies.
“The new formula of a technology-driven red-state economy is a change in the curve we were on,” Muro said. “It could be a temporary outcome, but it could be part of some realignment — a different formula.”
One potential change that should worry Democrats
Today, the 234 Electoral College votes Republicans can rely on in the consistently pro-Trump states provide the GOP only slightly more electoral votes than the 225 the 19 anti-Trump states dependably supply to Democrats. For that reason, Trump’s dominance of half the country has actually caused fewer problems for Democrats in the race for the White House than on other fronts, such as the Senate and control of state legislatures.
But that respite may be short-lived.
In December, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University issued an apocalyptic projection for Democrats that forecast the Trump 25 states could gain 11 more electoral votes after the 2030 census, with Florida and Texas each adding as many as four. Meanwhile, the Center forecast that the consistently anti-Trump states would lose 10 electoral votes and the swing states would suffer a net loss of one. If those projections hold up, a Democratic presidential nominee would fall short in 2032 even if he or she won all three of the former blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin while maintaining the 19 core anti-Trump states.
Bill Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, says the latest census population results showing some recovery for blue states post-pandemic suggest the actual shift may not be so drastic. “Post-pandemic migration and immigration patterns could shift things so that the South does not gain as many votes, and California loses fewer,” he wrote in an email.
But, given the growth in Florida and Texas alone, it seems inevitable under any scenario that the Trump states will gain and the anti-Trump states lose electoral votes in the next census. That prospect — plus the unforgiving math of the Senate — increases the urgency for Democrats to find ways to compete in at least a few of the states that have shifted toward the GOP in the Trump era.
The party has put most of its hopes on that front into North Carolina. But while Democrats have consistently elected governors and other statewide officeholders in North Carolina, they have not won a presidential or US Senate race there since 2008. Their next chance will come in the 2026 race for the seat held by GOP Sen. Thom Tillis. “We really have to win next year in North Carolina,” said Eric Hyers, a Democratic consultant who has directed winning gubernatorial races for the party in the Trump 25 states of Kentucky and Montana. “You don’t have an equal chance to win every red state, but the ones that you do, you just have to capitalize.”
Halle says the next best prospect for Democrats after North Carolina would be to try to restore the modest but measurable momentum they established in Texas from 2014 to 2020. But that, he says, would require the party to move toward more centrist positions on immigration and energy production, shifts that might face substantial internal resistance. To ever seriously contest Texas, he says, “we need to mitigate the damage on both of those issues.”
Utah, with a history of skepticism about Trump-style Republicanism and a well-educated tech-oriented economy similar to the blue-state model, strikes some Democrats as another possibility, at least for independent candidates who might caucus with the party in Congress. Other Democrats, squinting hard, see flickers of opportunity to compete again in Iowa.
The common thread from party strategists eyeing all these possibilities is that Democrats must improve their performance among the voters across racial lines without a college education who are more plentiful in almost all the states leaning toward Trump.
“You simply cannot win a majority in the Senate and you have a really hard time drawing an inside straight in the presidential unless you get back to those voters,” Kanninen said.
As Democrats seek to reestablish a beachhead in the Trump 25 states, Trump and his allies are not standing still. After his stronger performance across wide swathe of blue states and cities in November, they see an opening to advance in states where he has struggled before, including New Hampshire, Virginia and Minnesota.
“History says the Republicans are screwed in the midterms,” McLaughlin said. “But if Donald Trump can come in and be a successful president and the Democrats are still going to keep doubling down on stupid and extreme, I think the Republicans have a real chance to expand.”
As his commanding performance in his 25 three-time states demonstrated, Trump over the past eight years has cemented Republicans’ hold on the places that already leaned toward them. The pervasive discontent with Biden’s record has provided Trump a much greater opportunity than in 2017 to reach far beyond that terrain into places and voting groups that have long resisted him.
But it’s still an open question whether Trump has the skill, or even the inclination, to court voters beyond his base more effectively in his second White House term than he did in his first.
