The question is: Have white voters abandoned the party because of polarization — bad news for Clinton — or because of Obama, which is better news.
Red and blue America are no more constant than our use of “blue” and “red” to describe the major political parties. Different parts of the country shift slowly over time — particularly in the longer scale of presidential politics.
To illustrate that point, you need only look back to the 2000 election, the year the “red-blue” divide was born. There have been four presidential elections since then — 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 — and while many counties have voted for one party consistently, many have also flipped back-and-forth.
What stands out here is the mottled upper Midwest, but also lower West Virginia, which has gone from being awfully blue to awfully uncertain.
We would have zoomed in on metro areas, but those tend to be pretty solid — solid blue. While there were 2,126 counties that voted Republican all four elections and only 461 that consistently voted Democratic, significantly more people live in those fewer — and more populous — Democratic counties. So there is a base of 132 million people (using 2014 population estimates for counties) that have backed Democrats four elections in a row. 117.2 million have backed the GOP.
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