So imagine something weird happens and Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination. The Republicans, meanwhile, nominate that nice boy from Miami, Marky Rubio. Marky picks Governor Johnny Kasich of Ohio to be his running mate. They unleash their inner moderates and charm America. It’s a massacre. Rubio-Kasich pulls in a fully Reaganesque landslide. They win the popular vote by 18 points, just like Reagan-Bush in ‘84. It’s a 22-point swing from Obama-Biden’s 2012 margins.
In 1984, Reagan-Bush won every state but Minnesota and the District of Columbia. In 2016, with the same popular vote margin, assuming a 22-point uniform swing, Rubio-Kasich gets a map like this:
Bernie Sanders would win fully 119 electoral votes. After all, in 2012 the Democrats won eight states by more than a 22-point margin. Even with a Ronald Reagan like popular landslide, the Democrats will keep California and New York.
You basically can’t get an all-red map these days, the way you could back in 1984. The Republicans have lost too much ground in the northeast and west coast.
And note that this map is really a floor under a Sanders candidacy.
In reality, I do not think that he would lose with a 22-point uniform swing. I suspect that he would hold the Pacific Northwest and at least a couple of states from the old manufacturing belt: Illinois and Delaware certainly, Pennsylvania and Minnesota likely, Wisconsin possibly if there is a Walker backlash, with Iowa and Michigan and the rest of the Northeast within reach. It would be hard for Bernie Sanders to win the 2016 election. It would not be that hard for him to hold the Kerry-Edwards electoral map.
What about the other way? Something equally weird happens and Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination. Lindsey Graham refuses the veep nomination. So in an attempt to reach out to evangelicals and “teh blacks,” Trump picks Ben Carson.
It is a massacre, a fully Johnsonesque landslide for the Clinton-Castro ticket. The Democrats win by 23 points, a 19-point uniform swing over 2012.
Well, in this world the Democrats really do manage to turn a popular landslide into an electoral landslide, just like back in ‘64. Sure, the makeup of the states are different, since Republican margins in the South are not what they once were, but Trump-Carson gets only 73 votes scattered across a bunch of very-white mostly-rural states.
Only the map to the right, unlike the one above, doesn’t seem possible. I can’t imagine Trump losing Mississippi and South Carolina. And could the Democrats take Texas, even against the Donald and with Julián Castro on the ticket?
So I ask you, my readers, especially the usual suspects. Who would be the Donald’s best pick for Veep, if not Carson? And how many states would a Trump candidacy really win? Inquiring minds want to know!
No real disagreement with the Sanders map. It's a floor, and arguable that Sanders could do well to hold together the 2004 map.
OTOH, it's possible that if Sanders is struggling to win a Kerry + Ohio type map, he's giving up early in states like Florida and it allows the GOP to focus more and more resources on Pennsylvania, Minnesota, etc.
For the Trump map, yeah, the swing isn't uniform like that, you could have Hillary picking up significant white support across the country but the needle won't move much in Mississippi. I think Obama 2008 + the Dakotas and Montana + maybe Missouri may be the Clinton vs. Trump map.
Posted by: Logan | July 29, 2015 at 09:44 AM
Wouldn't Arizona, Arkansas and Georgia be winnable for the Democrats in a Clinton v. Trump election?
Posted by: Noel Maurer | July 29, 2015 at 09:51 AM
I think there's too much racial polarization. The whites in those states aren't really swing-voters to the same extent that your whites in the West and Northeast are. Maybe I'm being too skeptical. They'd probably be contested for at the very least.
Posted by: Logan | July 29, 2015 at 03:15 PM
Trump's loss counts as a moral victory, because he won all the Real America states.
Posted by: Johnny Pez | July 29, 2015 at 06:36 PM
Arizona and Georgia would reaches in the Trump scenario, but North Carolina is an easy swing.
Trump's optimum VP pick is probably Stan McChrystal.
Posted by: McDevite | July 29, 2015 at 10:37 PM
Has McChrystal shown any interest in running, let alone as a Republican aligned with Donald Trump's brand of conservative politics? He has always struck me as a rather liberal Democrat.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | July 29, 2015 at 10:40 PM
None that I'm aware of.
He's probably a fairly conservative Democrat, but there's really no way to know. But the McChrystal thing was more a parallel to Stockdale than anything all that specific.
Trump's historically been liberalish (pro-choice, etc), until the current attention-seeking incarnation. The problem is that helpful VP Candidates will see this as suicide pact that it is, and bail.
But leaving it to people in the Carson/etc continuum, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska is a more conventional pick. Rex Lee of Utah. But whoever does this would be cutting off their nose to spite their face, so it'd have to be a high fringe figure, a retiree, or someone in private business with functionally unsavory views who'd be able to fall in line behind Trump. The CEO of Papa John's is available.
Posted by: McDevite | July 30, 2015 at 01:08 PM
Your analysis makes me think that Carson is a good bet, much more than the guy from the last cycle. No?
Posted by: Noel Maurer | July 30, 2015 at 01:10 PM
It's sort of hard to answer the question, since people with conventional VP credentials won't get on the ticket in the weird event that Trump wins.
Neither Sasse nor Lee is exactly from the last cycle, more conventional credentials, while being fringey.
Sasse is dominionist with home schooling tendencies as well as being a former Bush Administration Official.
Lee is the son one of Reagan's Solicitors General, and Ted Cruz's sidekick.
The really good choice, though, is probably Tim Scott.
Posted by: McDevite | July 30, 2015 at 02:10 PM
People didn't hate Kerry and Gore because they were too liberal, people hated Kerry and Gore because they were John Kerry and Al Gore. They're inauthentic, Hillary Clinton has the same problem. Bernie Sanders base is way larger than this against Rubio-Kasich because it's the economy stupid, but unlike Bill he wants to reinstate Glass-Steagall, raise taxes on the ultra rich, and repair our infrastructure employing about 13 million people. Also, ha another Trump doubter, though it was more standard around this time, I hope you got the hint after he won the south
Posted by: Slattery | July 24, 2016 at 08:56 PM
Wow literally all of this was so wrong.
Posted by: Colby | May 07, 2019 at 08:02 PM
It was a thought experiment, showing that the country is now so geographically polarized that even Johnson/Reagan/Nixon margins wouldn't win 49 states.
In addition, while the 22-point uniform Republican swing depicted in the first map appeared marginally possible, the 19-point uniform Democratic swing depicted in the second map did not. Even in 2015 (let alone 2019), it did not seem possible for any Democrat running against any Republican to win 38 states.
I am sorry that you missed the point.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | May 07, 2019 at 08:12 PM
This aged worse than Michael Jackson's skin...
Posted by: Billy-Bob Mason | August 02, 2019 at 02:04 AM
See my above reply to Colby.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | August 02, 2019 at 08:16 AM