Some formerly purple states are no longer battlegrounds.

[Garrett78]

We shouldn't give up on Florida, but some former battlegrounds seem to no longer be in play. I'm thinking of Missouri, Ohio and Iowa.

On the flip side, Virginia and Colorado seem to have shifted leftward. Some progress has been made in North Carolina. I keep hoping demographics will drive Texas, Georgia and Arizona to become blue.

What shifts do you foresee?

[madaboutharry]

1. Iowa just flipped two republican house seats.

I wouldn’t give up on Iowa yet.

[Garrett78]

3. Trump winning Iowa by 10 points and Steve King winning re-election makes it hard...

...to have much hope for the state as a whole.

[Bettie]

9. His district swung 20+ points toward blue

but, apparently there are a lot of nazis there.

[StuckInTexas]

2. Texas is fools gold

We just had the single best democratic candidate for a statewide election in a generation against the most hated senator in the United States and still lost by 3. White people in Texas are becoming more radicalized. There is no statewide democratic infrastructure, which make it even more unlikely to ever carry this state in a presidential election. Honestly, if we put even one nickel of funding into presidential campaign money in Texas it would be a gross mishandling of campaign funds.

[LonePirate]

4. We need to start somewhere, perhaps in a few state house districts and slowly expand from there.

We also need some deep pockets to start registering Hispanic voters across the state. Texas voter turnout is still pathetic and one of the worst in the country largely due to Dem friendly voters sitting at home.

[StuckInTexas]

8. This is exactly right

This momentum needs to be focused on the local levels, ie school boards, judges, county clerks, etc. Build it up over the next 25 years with a bottom up approach. Statewide infrastructure and the rabid white racist base are too much too overcome right now at the macro level.

[budkin]

5. No, it isn't

I've lived here 20 years... we've closed the gap every damn cycle. So just stop.

[StuckInTexas]

6. Did we really?

Outside of Beto's campaign and him pulling some congresswomen and congressmen across with him (which is fucking awesome), we still got DESTROYED in the gov's race. 71% of white males voted for Cruz and nearly 60% of white women, which is a gap that is INCREASING each cycle. All the demographic gains in the world wont matter if white people counterbalance it with a more radicalized racism. Unless these white men start moving or dying, it is redneck racist repuke state.

[Barack_America]

11. Pfft. -3 in Texas is a win. I'd double down on it.

[misanthrope]

17. "Radicalized?"

Wow, considering Texas and the Deep South have had an abundance of the most radicalized white folks in the nation since the mid 19th century, that's saying something. I would be willing to say the type Republicans who have become the nationwide standard in the last ten years are basically just versions of what dominated Southern politics for centuries.

[Polybius]

18. He made two mistakes

1) He should have been silent on Kavanaugh, and said something like “I need to see what the Senate Judiciary Committee has seen before I can say.” Yet he flat-out said he wouldn’t vote for him.

2) He sided with NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem. As much as we cheered, this is poison for Texas swing voters.

Sometimes we have to dodge the questions to win in such a red state. Sad, but true.

[lunasun]

7. More hope in the future out west imo than Ohio or Missouri now . Nevada-Colorado lookin better

[Barack_America]

12. That's correct. Got to focus beyond OH and FL.

I'd personally write off OH as solidly Southern for a good while. The southwest and TX have more promise, IMO.

[Garrett78]

16. Yep, as I said, CO is a state that's moved in our direction. NV remains a battleground state.

Virginia has also moved in our direction. I'm hopeful that North Carolina will as well, though the state legislature in NC is infuriating.

After decades of being a bellwether, Missouri became out of reach quite a while back. Ohio doesn't seem to be in play for the foreseeable future.

Florida has been maddening, but it's still a battleground and has a lot of electoral votes.

We obviously need to make sure PA, MI and WI go back to being blue in 2020.

[RhodeIslandOne]

19. The problem is NV and CO didn't vote for Trump last time

We now have to find more than that.

[LeftInTX]

10. We can't count on Demographics to change Texas.

[Ohio Barbarian]

13. Don't give up on Ohio, either. Just don't nominate Democrats who aren't starkly different from

Republicans, as was mostly the case this year. We could have run Dennis Kucinich, but nooooo...we got Richard Cordray with his A rating from the NRA. And Dewine is a Kasich-style Republican, not a Trump-type. As far as most Ohio voters were concerned, we got a bunch of no names for statewide office from the Democrats.

The only exception? Sherrod Brown, with a proven track record. Besides, his Republican opponent was real slime. Multi-millionaire who made his money off of for-profit nursing homes; how sleazy is that?

OTOH, my home state has a LOT of older, uneducated white people who think of the 1950s as a mythical Golden Age, so there's that.

[rockfordfile]

14. No you don't write off any state.

[Garrett78]

15. Sure you do. It would be foolish, for instance, for our 2020 pres. candidate to invest in Idaho.

That's the reality.