It is true that there are states that the Democrats have pretty much no chance at winning. (Mainly rural states in the deep south and mid-west).
I disagree that Democrats have little or no chance of winning these states. The problem I see Democrats having is that they've largely written a lot of areas off and aren't even trying to win people in those areas over.
Tennessee, where I live, is a good example of that. West Virginia's an even better one. I've seen people on pro-Democratic sites such as Daily Kos arguing that West Virginia is pretty much hopeless and the best they can do if they want to win anything in W.Va. is run candidates who are conservative enough they could virtually pass for Republicans. (For example Jim Justice, the Democratic candidate who won last year's governorship and then changed his party affiliation to Republican soon after.)
Which overlooks the fact that for decades West Virginia consistently elected Democrats to the US senate, and consistently elected a majority-Democratic congressional delegation, and consistently had Democratic control of the state legislature. (The governorship switched parties on a regular basis, but that's another story.) It's only in the last decade that W. Va. has become so Republican. It's been quite a while since I lived in W. Va. but my assumption is that's not so much an acceptance of the current Republican party as a rejection of the current Democratic party.
A large proportion of the electorate no longer bothers to vote in elections. In some cases that may be due to obstacles to voting; but in many cases, I believe it's because they just don't see any compelling reason to put the time and effort into voting when they could be doing laundry or washing their hair instead. Democrats (and Republicans) may talk about making things better for the average person, but in practice the laws which get passed and policies which get enacted favor the people and corporations which are able to make large contributions.
Until Democrats can show lower-income and middle-income people that Democrats if elected really will work for and pass laws benefiting the nation as a whole rather than laws mainly benefiting the wealthy few, the Democrats are going to continue to lose a large number of people who should be their base -- as has already happened in West Virginia, in Kentucky, in Ohio, in Tennessee and many other places.
Bernie Sanders actually excited a lot of the people who had largely written the Democrats off in recent years (or who were young enough never to have felt the excitement); and instead of responding,
Yes! We'd love to welcome a you folks back into the tent the response of many in the Democratic circle was
If you're not already committed to blindly supporting us then we don't need your vote, so get lost.
Until Democrats realize that the way one wins people into one's tent is by making them feel welcome (rather than unwelcome) and making them feel you'll actually implement policies which will help them and their families if you're elected (rather than spouting nice-sounding rhetoric and then consistently doing little or nothing), Democrats are going to continue losing. A 7% increase in Republican unfavorability in the nation as a whole is not going to change that any time soon.
But there are many battleground states where either the state swings back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, or is Republican but with a relatively slim margin of victory. If its true that the Republicans are loosing support (and it actually is a long term trend, not some minor blip), then the swing states may turn solidly democrat, and the marginal Republican states may even become more competitive (even swinging towards the Democrats on occasion). In that situation, the Democrats would have a stranglehold on power even if they fail to win places like Utah and Alabama.
What would a 7% shift mean on a state-by-state basis in the last presidential election?
- Places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan would never have gone republican
- Texas and Arizona would now become battleground states
- Places like Colorado and Virginia (won by less than 10% in the last presidential election) would become completely out of reach of the republicans
Good luck winning an election under those circumstances.
A 7% shift in the states you list might indeed have a significant effect.
But the poll cited in the OP doesn't indicate such a shift occurred in any of those states. It's a
national poll of 1,000 people. It says that
nationwide 7% now view the GOP more unfavorably than they did. It says nothing about what the changes in each individual state were -- but I strongly suspect the GOP unfavorability has risen significantly in California, New York, Massachusetts, and other populous left-leaning areas, and that that's a considerable factor in the 7% figure.
If GOP unfavorability has gone up more than 7% in those areas, then it will have gone up less than 7% in other areas. How much it went up, we don't know. We need state polls, not a national poll, to tell us that; and the linked article does not provide state polls.
