cities like Charlotte, Atlanta, and others, pushed the historically conservative South to align itself with what was becoming the clearly more conservative party, the Republicans.7
But, for the first half of this period, the South voted Democratic almost all the time, and given that the Republicans won the White House in seven of nine elections from 1896 to 1928, many of the southern states racked up a lot of presidential campaign losses by voting for Democrats. By the 2010s, Republicans dominated eight of the 11 states of the old Confederacy—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—and thus they all comfortably supported Republicans John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 while the nation was voting for Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, the remaining three ex-Confederate states—Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia—all eventually became swing states, with Virginia moving from rock-solid Republicanism in presidential elections (it was the only southern state to vote against evangelical Christian Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976) to the nation’s political center, closely mirroring the national vote in both 2008 and 2012.
Florida and North Carolina retain slight GOP leans but are battleground states (the Sunshine State) or are trending in that direction (the Tar Heel State). In any event, bloc voting first for Democrats and then for Republicans in the South makes it hard to argue that any of these states are historic bellwethers, even though demographic changes might make those latter three states along the Atlantic Coast among the most reliable bellwethers going forward, perhaps surpassing even a state like Ohio.
In the Northeast, the poor records of Maine and Vermont stand out, primarily because they are the only two states to never vote for FDR, fighting off the eventual four-term president’s advances even in his landslide reelection triumph of 1936.
New England Republicanism, like the South’s Democratic tradition, was a feature of a political system where presidential elections were effectively reruns of the Civil War held every four years, with the North Republican, the South Democratic, and the battlegrounds of the Midwest and Border States oscillating in competitive years. Modern party labels tell us little about the ideology of the time. Just because Maine and Vermont never voted for Roosevelt, while Alabama and Mississippi provided him with such towering totals that the results seem to resemble sham elections held in dictatorships, didn’t necessarily make the former pair “conservative” and the latter pair “liberal” by the 21st-century definitions of the terms.
There’s a saying that “As goes Maine, so goes the nation.” That wasn’t because it was a bellwether; as shown above, Maine was a reliably Republican state in presidential elections for much of its history. The saying comes from the fact that until 1958 the state voted in September as opposed to November for nonpresidential offices, which most states adopted as a national election date following the Civil War. RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende noted in 2010 that “this enabled prognosticators to get a good sense of which way the winds were blowing. If Republicans did well, they could expect a decent year nationally. If the races were close, it was probably not going to be a good year. And if Democrats actually won a few races, Republicans knew to run for cover nationwide.”8 In 1936, Maine’s early vote backed the GOP in multiple statewide offices and the Pine Tree State’s three US House districts, suggesting a Republican turn nationally. Instead, FDR won a smashing reelection, losing only two states (Maine and Vermont, noted above). That led to a revision: “As goes Maine, so goes Vermont.”9
Massachusetts and Rhode Island have better records in part because they turned reliably Democratic much earlier than some of their New England neighbors. Both states voted for Catholic Democrat Al Smith, the governor of New York, in 1928. While Smith was soundly defeated by Republican Herbert Hoover—losing even some states in the South, thanks in part to his religion and his urban politics—his nomination excited his coreligionists and immigrants in big cities, stirring a new base that Roosevelt would bring solidly into the Democratic Party during his presidency.
OHIO’S MIDWESTERN COMPETITION
The Midwest features three states that election watchers have cited at various times as bellwethers: Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio. But while the bellwether label has fit at certain points, developments in Illinois and Missouri, and also nationally, made both these states less reliable presidential predictors in the 21st century.
A growing political separation between urban and rural America—cities becoming ever more Democratic while rural areas have become increasingly Republican—has tilted Illinois strongly to the Democrats thanks to the increasingly Democratic lean of Cook County, home of Chicago, the Midwest’s biggest city.
Illinois gave up its bellwether status by voting comfortably for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and no one expected it to go Republican in 2016 unless the GOP ran up a national margin of Ronald Reaganesque proportions. It just isn’t really winnable for Republicans anymore in a close national election.
In the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, the Economist declared, not inaccurately at the time, that “Missouri has an almost mythical reputation in American presidential politics.”10 The state had voted for the presidential victor in every election but one since 1904, and it was poised once again to play an outsized role in another close race. Indeed, Missouri ended up voting with the winner—Republican George W. Bush—but Bush did about two and a half points better in the Show-Me State than he did nationally, while Democrat John Kerry did about two points worse. It was the third election in a row that Missouri had voted slightly more Republican than the nation, a tiny lean that would become more pronounced.
Missouri has of late tilted away from the Midwest and toward the South, and there are not enough Democratic votes in the state’s two major cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, to make up for the rest of the state becoming reliably Republican.11 After fulfilling its bellwether role for the 25th time in 26 elections in 2004, Missouri resisted the country’s clear Democratic swing to Obama in 2008, voting narrowly for John McCain. By 2012, Missouri voted seven points more Republican than the nation as a whole—the GOP’s best performance in the state relative to the national results since the Civil War. Missouri often leaned toward its southern neighbors throughout its history, including in 1956, when it was the only non-Confederate state to back Democrat Adlai Stevenson against Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.
Only 10 states voted for both parties at least once in the four elections from 2000 to 2012. Illinois and Missouri were not among them; one uniformly backed the Democrats (the Land of Lincoln), the other, Republicans (the Show-Me State). Ohio, meanwhile, voted with the winner in all four elections and mirrored the national vote in each election.
THE WESTERN BELLWETHERS
Out west, California, Nevada, and New Mexico have strong histories of voting for presidential winners, although there is increasing evidence that two of the three—the Golden State and the Land of Enchantment—are, like Illinois, moving more reliably into the Democratic column.
Shocking as it may seem to those familiar with only 21st-century results, California went Republican in all but one election—the Lyndon Johnson 1964 landslide—from 1952 through 1988. However, a Californian was on the Republican ticket in all but three of those 10 elections: Richard Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952 and 1956, and the GOP nominee in his own right in 1960, 1968, and 1972, while former California Governor Ronald Reagan was the Republican nominee in 1980 and 1984. Throughout this period, California was not noticeably more Republican than the nation as a whole, and its failure to vote for Carter in the very close 1976 election was part of a broader problem for the Democrat that year: he proved to have very little appeal west of the Mississippi River (the farthest west state he carried was Texas, which has voted more often with the South than the West throughout its history). No one would have called California a bellwether in the 2010s, given how reliably Democratic it became, thanks to the dominance of its big, urban centers along the coast and growing population of Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters.
If one just went back over the last hundred years of elections (it didn’t become a state until 1912), New Mexico would match Ohio as having the best record in voting with the winning presidential candidate. But the Land of Enchantment—where about two in five voters