Nate Cohn claims that, if “the country’s growing diversity dooms the modern Republican Party, then Florida will be the first exhibition of the party’s demographic death spiral”:
The problem for Republicans is that Mr. Obama was a terrible fit for the state’s eclectic mix of white voters. The Florida Panhandle is full of the culturally Southern white voters who rejected Mr. Obama, as they did across Dixie. Mr. Obama also struggled with older whites over age 65, who represent 30 percent of the state’s white voters, and among Jewish voters, who represent about 15 percent of self-identified white Democrats in Florida. Mr. Obama’s strengths — like his appeal to young, socially progressive voters in well-educated metropolitan areas — lack pull in Florida.
All of this will be reversed if the Democrats nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is a good fit for the state’s odd combination of Southerners, New York expats and older white voters. Mrs. Clinton doesn’t even need to outperform Mr. Obama among Florida’s white voters anyway, as she’ll benefit from four more years of demographic change.
Ben Highton clarifies the GOP’s 2016 disadvantage:
While swing state trends look good for the Democrats, the same is not apparent in the rest of country. In the remaining states, there is more movement toward the Republicans than the Democrats. In the 23 safely Republican states, continued movement toward the Republicans is occurring at a rate about 25 percent faster than the average movement toward the Democrats in the 14 safely Democratic seats. In fact in 10 of the 12 states that are changing fastest, the movement is toward the Republicans, not the Democrats. However, these trends have virtually no influence on the chances of victory in a presidential election because with a winner-take-all system like the Electoral College, additional votes in a state that is already safe for one party are “wasted.”
His model finds that “that to have a 50 percent chance of winning the Electoral College the Republicans would have to win the popular vote by a margin of between one and two percentage points.” Jonathan Bernstein ponders the Democrats’ apparent advantage in the Electoral College:
I’m increasingly convinced this is something real, and it’s a pretty big deal. As Ben says, that large a bias would almost certainly have flipped the 2000 election to the Democrats; other elections close enough to have been affected by a bias this large would include 1976, 1968, and 1960 (if the losing party had been helped by an Electoral College bias of this size).
If these results hold up through 2016, expect the parties to begin flipping their positions on the Electoral College, perhaps very rapidly.
The Dish 