Big Ticket Flips

Of the six states to flip from Democratic to Republican in the 2016 presidential election, five had more than 10 Electoral College votes – Florida (29), Michigan (16), Ohio (18), Pennsylvania (20), and Wisconsin (10). That is the largest number of states with 10+ votes to flip to the GOP since Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 when 11 such states did so: Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Moderate to high population states have flipped their partisan preference for president only 18 out of 124 times over the last six election cycles since 1996 (14.5 percent) compared to 48 of 122 doing so during the prior six cycles from 1972 to 1992 (39.3 percent). Since the dawn of the modern two-party era in 1828, a total of 258 states with 10+ Electoral College votes flipped from the previous cycle out of 872 possibilities, or 29.6 percent of the time.