As they carve their turkeys this year, Republicans can be grateful for Donald Trump, mapmaker.
He’s redrawn America’s political geography – not only winning back the White House for himself but pointing the way to victory for his party four years from now.
Before Trump, the major industrial states touching the Great Lakes were out of Republicans’ reach.
Only Ohio was winnable for the GOP, but it was a battleground, voting twice for George W. Bush and twice for Barack Obama.
Republicans dreamed of a “solid South,” yet that too eluded them: Florida was another battleground, one Bush came within a Supreme Court decision of losing in 2000.
The brief window when a Republican like Bush could compete for the White House had closed by 2008.
The problem was that even Bush’s one clear win – his 2004 reelection – depended on an electoral map his party couldn’t recreate, as states like Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico moved into the Democrats’ column, where they’ve stayed since 2008.
Republicans were in a dire predicament, but few dared admit it.
Instead of recognizing the flaws in their own strategy, GOP campaign gurus resorted to exaggerating the other side’s strength: They accepted the progressive myth of Barack Obama as a once-in-a-generation political genius.
Who could blame the GOP for losing to a phenom like Obama?
Donald Trump could and did.
Instead of fighting his elections on the map Republicans had been using, and mostly losing on, since 2000, Trump drew his own.
Nothing Republicans had tried since Ronald Reagan left office had succeeded in piercing the “Blue Wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Even if some Republican other than Trump could have won Ohio and Florida in 2016 – when both were still hotly contested swing states – no one else had a clue how to win the Rust Belt, and those blue-since-the-’90s states would have been enough, on top of what she did wind up winning, to make Hillary Clinton president.
GOP nominees before Trump campaigned heavily in Pennsylvania to no avail.
Mitt Romney had Michigan roots but couldn’t win there in 2012, just as his running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, was unable to deliver his home state.
Trump, on the other hand, turned his adopted home of Florida from a battleground into a reliably red bastion.
Thanks to Trump, Florida and Ohio aren’t swing states anymore. He won each three times, and neither seems like a realistic prospect for Democrats in 2028.
To be sure, Gov. Ron DeSantis and others deserve credit for Florida’s red shift, too.
But the Trump effect is unmistakable: He’s moved the old battlegrounds into the Republican column and made new battlegrounds out of formerly impregnable Blue Wall states.
He’s also put in place the two things his party needs to win those Rust Belt battlegrounds again in 2028: a new attitude toward trade and labor, and a vice president named J.D. Vance.
Just how far Trump will go in returning America to the kind of wide-ranging tariff regime the nation had in the 19th century remains to be seen, as does the effect his policies will have on the industrial workers he’s courted.
But voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have given Trump the benefit of the doubt twice now, and Vance – an Ohio native himself – is the kind of Republican they’re most likely to trust to keep pressing a pro-worker agenda.
To counteract Vance’s appeal to the Rust Belt, Democrats may have to attempt in 2028 what the GOP tried in 2012: running candidates with regional ties.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are the most plausible contenders.
Anyone else – a California yuppie like Gov. Gavin Newsom or a semi-libertarian like Colorado Gov. Jared Polis – could find the Blue Wall has become a Red Wall.
Democrats can ill afford to hope that Republican screw-ups will help them win in 2028, the way George W. Bush’s follies, culminating in the Great Recession and ensuing bailouts, propelled Obama to the White House in 2008.
The Trump map was already put to the harshest of tests four years ago – when COVID, the recession triggered by the pandemic and the riots following George Floyd’s death created ideal conditions for Democrats, and in Joe Biden they had a candidate with Pennsylvania roots.
Despite all that, Trump lost Pennsylvania by a little more than one point and Wisconsin by less than one.
Without another pandemic, Democrats may have to reinvent themselves as drastically as Trump reinvented the GOP if they want to beat his map.
Republicans shouldn’t be complacent, but they can give thanks that the great political cartographer of our age isn’t Barack Obama – it’s Donald Trump.
