Blue wall (politics)

"Blue wall" is a term that was used by some political analysts and pundits referring to the theory that in Presidential elections in the United States, the Democratic Party had, between the 1992 and 2012 presidential elections, established such an advantage in many, mostly contiguous (hence "wall"), states that the electoral map made a Republican victory an uphill battle from the start. George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election and the 2004 presidential election, but did not win any of the states in the blue wall. The 2016 election showed this wall was not impregnable, when Republican candidate Donald Trump won 3 previously solidly Democratic states in the area referred to as the Rust Belt, as well as one electoral vote from a previously Democratic fourth state.

The term "blue wall" and "red wall" refer to the colors associated with the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively.

Ronald Brownstein describes the blue wall as "the 18 states that form the blue wall, a term I coined in 2009" After the 2012 presidential election, Paul Steinhauser called "blue wall […] the cluster of eastern, Midwest and western states that have traditionally gone Democratic." The earliest description of the forces creating the Blue Wall comes from a Houston Chronicle blogger, Chris Ladd. A Republican, Ladd wrote in November 2014 that the seemingly impressive Republican win in the 2014 mid-term elections had overshadowed another trend apparent in the results – a demographic/geographic collapse. The Blue Wall was a Democratic demographic lock on the Electoral College resulting from the Republican Party's (GOP) narrowing focus on the interests of white, rural, and Southern voters. Ladd's analysis became popular when MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell featured it on a post-election episode of his show The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell.

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