Since the photo-finish 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore that introduced the United States to the red-and-blue political map, the struggle between the parties for 270 Electoral College votes has resembled trench warfare. With most states locked down for one party or the other, both sides have overwhelmingly concentrated their resources on the same handful of swing states.
Those traditional battlegrounds, led by Florida and Ohio, are still attracting enormous efforts from the two campaigns. But this year, the geographic stalemate could finally be broken—or at least disrupted—by the sharply divergent demographic coalitions of support that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have assembled in their ferocious contest.
Tonight’s results could crystallize a reconfigured electoral order in which Republicans rely increasingly on preponderantly blue-collar, white, and older Rustbelt states that have mostly favored Democrats in recent years, and Democrats depend on white-collar, diverse, and younger Sunbelt states that as recently as the 1990s leaned reliably toward the GOP. If Trump does as well as seems possible in the Rustbelt, and Clinton still defeats him with big gains in the Sunbelt, this may be remembered as the fast-forward election that compressed into a single cycle those demographic and geographic changes that most people expected to unfold over a decade or more...
Read more at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/campaign-efforts-rustbelt-and-sunbelt/506873/
