So as we all know, for much of the second half of the twentieth century, the election map was very much in flux from one election to the next. So I have to ask, did commentators (and internal elections operators) have conceptions of swing and safe states, and, if so, (a) were these commonly agreed upon; (b) were these correct; (c) were people at the time aware of how much in flux the map was? In many ways, the electoral map since 2000 seems to have been historically stable compared to 1960-1996.
One obvious choice would be the Mountain West and Great Plains which, 1964 exempted, seem to have been consistently GOP up until the recent shifts in the SW and Colorado.
Montana went for Clinton in 1992.
