(How) did commentators designate "swing" and "safe" states 1960s-1990s?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

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.

[Cassandra]

I recall in Perlstein's Barry Goldwater book a discussion of a "big six" (I think that was the number) of populous states with larger urban centers that the post-WW2 political commentariat thought of as the states that would decide the election. The swing votes within those states (all in the north) were black voters, hence lukewarm attempts by both parties (again, in the north) to appeal to them. This would be one way that Goldwater's nomination and the subsequent turn of the Republican party under Nixon and Reagan completely blew up the conventional logic about how political campaigns should be run.

[Samof94]

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.