Battleground dynamics shifting in new Electoral College map

» The 2020 census is shifting states’ clout in presidential politics. And although the changes won’t upend the parties’ basic strategies for securing the votes needed to win the White House, they do hint at new paths emerging.

The 2020 census population counts announced this week will result in 13 states seeing a change in their number of votes in the Electoral College, the body that formally elects the president. The overall pattern was clear: Rust Belt and upper Midwestern states will hand some of their votes to Sun Belt and Western states in 2024 and 2028.

Democratic bastions California and New York also lost electoral votes along with a swath of the Great Lakes region. Beneficiaries include Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Oregon, Colorado and Montana.

The changes wouldn’t have done much to President Joe Biden’s Electoral College majority in 2020. If Biden ran under the new count he would have defeated then-President Donald Trump by 68 electoral votes, rather than a 74-vote margin.

But the new numbers show a clear transition afoot. Gone are the days when Republicans held a near-absolute advantage across the southern half of the United States, forcing Democrats to secure victories in the “Blue Wall” throughout the industrial north.

Instead, the two regions are now parallel battlegrounds.

“It’s almost like two trains passing in the night — the Sun Belt trending Democratic and the demographics of the Rust Belt going more Republican,” said Democratic pollster Zac McCrary. “But these things don’t happen overnight, so in 2024 we’re going to see a very competitive Rust Belt and a very competitive Sun Belt — and you could see more splits between the two parties in both regions.”

For Democrats, that offers more paths to the required 270 electoral votes than when they depended on a solid band of states from Pennsylvania to Minnesota.

Now, they can lose Ohio, which has shifted from perennial battleground to a clear GOP lean, and try to win the White House with former GOP bedrocks such as Georgia or North Carolina.

The last two elections showed the evolving balancing act for both parties, with Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 each winning states worth a combined 306 electoral votes.

Biden did it with close wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, while adding razor-thin margins in Georgia and Arizona to flip those Sun Belt states to Democrats for the first time in decades.

Trump had won all five states four years earlier, with his razorthin margins coming in the upper Midwest and wider margins in Arizona and Georgia.

But Biden’s winning map would be worth just 303 electoral votes in 2024, mostly because of California and states across the upper Midwest losing representation. Trump’s winning map from four years earlier would inch up to 307 electoral votes, with his diminished Rust Belt totals shored up by gains in Texas, Florida and North Carolina — three growing Sun Belt states that still tilt Republican in presidential politics.