TENNESSEE
The home of Graceland, Vanderbilt, and the Grand Ole Opry, Tennessee is a state rich in culture and history. The Volunteer State is home to 7.1 million people (the 15th most in the nation) and has had its population more than double since 1960. In fact, Nashville, Tennessee’s capital and largest city, has had its metro population skyrocket in the last 30 years from 1.1 million in 1990 to over 2.1 million people in 2023. Nashville is now America’s 21st largest city, and Memphis, the state’s 2nd largest city, is not far behind at the 29th spot.
Certainly, this urban growth in a once agrarian state would cause a shift in its politics towards the left (like in Tennessee’s neighbor to the east, North Carolina), but it hasn’t turned out that way. GOP support in the state has remained consistently strong; Donald Trump won Tennessee in 2020 by a 23-point margin, securing 60.7% of the vote to Biden’s 37.5%. For comparison, in the same election Trump only won North Carolina by a 1.3 margin.
Interestingly, examining the results of Tennessee’s 2022 midterm elections, we see that out of the state’s nine congressional districts, eight went to the GOP. And although Republicans put up a very solid performance in the House Elections two years ago, winning 64.3% of the total votes and flipping the 5th district, it certainly doesn’t account for their eight out of nine seats… It all comes down to redistricting.
In early 2022, the Tennessee legislature created new congressional district boundaries. The bodies' GOP supermajorities drew and approved new boundaries that significantly favored Republicans, most notably splitting Nashville into three different districts. Separating the Democrat-leaning voters of Nashville into three different house races made certain that the Republicans would win all three. Now Tennessee’s 9th district, containing Memphis, is the only Democrat hold in this Republican-dominated state.
With all this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win Tennessee by a slightly greater margin than in 2020. Tennessee’s midterm elections demonstrate strong GOP support, the highest levels in state history, and Trump will certainly ride this momentum to cement even greater gains in the Volunteer State.
VIRGINIA
The Commonwealth of Virginia certainly has a rich history. The birthplace of a whopping eight Presidents, including founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, Old Dominion was the most populated and influential state at our nation’s founding. During the Civil War, Richmond, Virginia, served as the capital of the Confederate States of America, with the state seeing action in the battles of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, among others.
After the Union was victorious and Virginia was readmitted, the state spent the next 72 years voting for Democratic Presidential candidates, besides taking a break in the election of 1928 by voting for Republican Herbert Hoover. However, in 1952, it turned red for Republican Dwight Eisenhower and remained that way (minus Democrat LBJ’s landslide 1964 victory) up until 2004, although it was a swing state in those final years.
In 2008, the state at long last returned to the Democratic Party, voting for Democrat Barack Obama over Republican John McCain 52.6% to 46.3%. Since then, the Republican Party has struggled to win back the once solid red state, with Republican Donald Trump most recently finishing 10.1 points behind Democrat Joe Biden.
But could things be different this November? With a popular Republican governor and an almost evenly split House delegation, Virginia may just become a battleground state once more. The rise of Glenn Youngkin as Governor of Virginia was certainly an unlikely one. In 2021, the relatively unknown businessman ran as a Republican, beating out the state’s former Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe 50.6% to 48.6% in what was considered a minor upset; McAuliffe had led Youngkin in the polls up until the week of the election. This also marked the first time since 2009 that a Republican had won a statewide election in Virginia.
In his first three years on the job, Youngkin has become extremely popular, earning an approval rating of 57% in a recent poll, including a 62% rating with Independents. Since Virginia has been relatively blue for going on 20 years, polls in the state have been taken few and far between. However, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, which unfortunately only includes 10 of them, Democrat Kamala Harris is up 7.6 points on Donald Trump, 50.4% to 42.8%. And despite the unreliability of this metric, we believe that this margin is relatively accurate.
With growing Republican support in the state led by the popular Glenn Youngkin, we predict that although Kamala Harris will carry Virginia, it will be a narrower margin than Joe Biden did in 2020. So, expect a Harris victory of between 7 and 9 points.
ARKANSAS
Arkansas may be the most forgettable state in the South, but its political history is actually one of the most interesting in the region. For one thing, Arkansans chose the Democratic Presidential candidate in 100% of elections from 1876 (the end of Reconstruction) through 1964 (the passage of the Civil Rights Act), no other state has that distinction. But since 1964, Arkansas has only voted blue thrice, once for Jimmy Carter (in 1976), and twice for former Governor Bill Clinton (in 1992 and 1996).
So, can Arkansas, once the solidest state in the Solid South, turn out this time for Kamala Harris? In 2020, Donald Trump won 62.4% of the vote in the Natural State, the highest percentage in any southern state (except Oklahoma). While Joe Biden finished with 34.8% of the vote, it was still an improvement over how Hillary Clinton, the former Arkansas first lady, performed four years prior (she got just 33.7%). Arkansas also was one of only seven states where Trump grew his margin of victory from 2016 to 2020, albeit very slightly (from 26.9 to 27.6%).
This coming election, Trump will have a key ally in Arkansas’s governorship, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Sanders was Trump’s former press secretary and is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, who also served as Arkansas’s governor from 1996-2007. Sanders handily won election in 2022 with 63% of the vote, and in those same elections, Republicans won 70% of all House votes in the state (although this number is partially inflated due to them running unopposed in the state’s 1st district).
A good indicator of Trump’s potential performance this November is Arkansas’s 2nd congressional district, which includes most of Little Rock (the capital and largest city) and its suburbs, and is also the least Republican district in the state. In 2022, incumbent Republican French Hill won 60% of the vote, up from when he won 55% in 2020. These gains in the suburbs for Republicans indicate that Trump has room to build on his 27.6% margin victory.
Unfortunately for Harris, Arkansas doesn’t have the Black population of other deep South states (which is why it’s the most Republican). Only 12.4% of the population is Black, which is even under the national average. So, while Harris may perform stronger with Blacks in Arkansas (but even that remains to be seen), this will likely be offset by Trump’s stronger performance with the state’s suburban voters. Thus, we predict Donald Trump will build on his margin of victory in 2020 and win Arkansas with upwards of 63% of the vote.
OKLAHOMA
Existing for 73 years as Indian Territory before finally entering the Union in 1907 as the 46th state, Oklahoma certainly has a unique history. Throughout the 1830s, American Indians living in the Southeastern United States were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and forced to migrate to the newly created Indian Territory in what was later called The Trail of Tears. And while this territory remained closed to outside settlers for over half a century, in 1889 its unassigned lands were opened to the public, allowing individuals to claim up to 160 acres if they lived on the land and improved it.
This history gives Oklahoma its demographics today, where 8.4% of the population is Native, the highest percentage in the nation besides Alaska, and 63.5% of the population is White. Oklahoma is also one of the reddest states in the nation. The Sooner State has voted for a Democrat Presidential candidate only once in the last 72 years, LBJ in the election of 1964. In fact, in the 2020 Presidential election, only two states had all of their counties go for Trump: West Virginia and, of course, Oklahoma.
Trump won the state with 65.4% of the vote to Biden’s 32.3%, a margin of 33.1 points. But this victory shouldn’t be at all surprising; every Republican Presidential candidate since 2004 has won Oklahoma with over 65% of the vote; the all-time high for a Republican being Richard Nixon’s 71.8% in the blowout election of 1972. Despite this, in recent years, Republicans have failed to grow their support in the state. In the 2014 midterms, the GOP won a remarkable 70% of the votes in the state’s five House elections, but in three of the four elections since then, their share of the vote has decreased, most recently coming in at 66.36% in 2022.
Additionally, in Oklahoma’s 2022 Senate race, Republican incumbent James Lankford defeated Democrat challenger Madison Horn with 64.3% of the vote, over three points less than his previous run in 2016. And while these performances are still significant victories for Republicans, they do show that the party has stagnated in the state. Finally, while Donald Trump increased his share of the vote by 0.05% from 2016 to 2020, his margin of victory in the state shrunk considerably; Trump won the state by 36.4 points in 2016, but by just 33.1 points four years later.
With this in mind, we predict that Donald Trump will win Oklahoma by a similar margin to his 2020 run. You can expect Trump’s margin of victory to fall within the 33 to 36-point range, making it unlikely that he’ll net any massive gains in the state, but making it equally unlikely that Democrat Kamala Harris will make any improvements over her predecessor.
TEXAS
If there was ever a single state which might determine the future of electoral politics and our two-party system as we know it, that state would likely be Texas. With 40 electoral votes and a steady Democratic trendline through the 21st century, the one-time Republican stronghold has situated itself in the competitive arena – albeit, at the outer rim of it.
Texas has consistently supported Republican candidates since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. But over the last 25 years, a transformation has taken form. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush won the state by a 21.4% margin over Democrat Al Gore. But by 2020, Donald Trump only won the state by 5.6% over Joe Biden. Over 20 years, Texas experienced a 15-point shift to the left – one of the largest shifts across the nation, and similar to those experienced in states like Arizona and Georgia, which voted for Democrats for the first time in 2020.
One of the most significant demographic changes fueling this shift is the growth of Texas' Hispanic population, which now makes up nearly 40% of the state's residents. While Hispanic voters are not monolithic, they have leaned more Democratic in recent elections, especially in urban areas. This growing demographic, along with significant Black and Asian American communities, has helped bolster Democratic support in Texas’ cities.
Suburban areas, once strongholds for the GOP, have also shown signs of shifting left, particularly in the counties surrounding Dallas and Houston. This trend is driven by demographic changes and disaffection among suburban women and college-educated voters, many of whom have grown weary of the more populist and divisive rhetoric coming from the national GOP.
Texas is geographically and politically divided between its rural, conservative regions and its urban, more liberal cities. The state's rural areas, particularly in West Texas and the Panhandle, remain strong Republican bastions, where issues such as gun rights, energy policy, and immigration resonate deeply with voters. Meanwhile, urban areas like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin have grown increasingly Democratic, with diverse populations, younger voters, and college-educated professionals driving this trend.
Looking at the topline, one might ask: if Georgia and Arizona have become tossups, what’s stopping Texas from doing so?
For every demographic and region fueling Democratic hopes, there is one favoring Republicans. Starting off: while the state’s cities and suburbs had undergone a massive leftward shift from 2000 to 2016, there is some evidence that these movements have slowed. For instance, Harris county – which contains Houston and its surrounding suburbs – shifted less than 2 points leftward between 2016 and 2020, while it had undergone a 12-point shift between 2016 and 2020. This doesn’t mean Democrats are in danger of losing ground; rather, they have hit (or are close to hitting) a ceiling with these groups of voters. Additionally, while Hispanic voters (mainly in densely-populated metros) have indeed bolstered the Democratic coalition, the ethnic group is not monolithic: many Hispanic voters in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley have bolted rightward during the Trump era, likely resulting from a combination of social conservatism and support for Trump’s advocacy for border control – an issue they (literally) hold near and dear.
Looking ahead to 2024, Texas will likely remain a focal point for both parties. Democrats will aim to build on their recent gains in urban and suburban areas, focusing on mobilizing younger, more diverse voters. Republicans, on the other hand, will seek to maintain their dominance in rural areas while solidifying their appeal to suburban voters who may be concerned about the state of the economy and public safety. But ultimately, Republicans will likely emerge victorious: Trump has built a durable 6-point lead in the polls, a number which is comparable to the 2020 results and would be logical in a national environment similar to that year (which seems to be where we’re heading).
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