Talk Elections

Should be obvious what I mean- Colorado would be a staunch Republican state today if not for the rapid growth of Denver.

Are there any other currently Republican low-population states that are likely to be Denverized?

Nevada will probably fall out of easy reach for Republicans after 2020 (it's still one of Trump's first possible flips). People sometimes say Idaho, but by the time that happens the trends will have reversed and party coalitions will have changed. Another fracking boom could do this fast in the Dakotas. Any migration to Wyoming will have an impact because there's only half a million people there.

Kansas is currently the best candidate for this as Johnson County may be going the way of Fairfax, VA.

SLC would carry Utah for Dems if the Mormon vote moderates or goes permanently 3rd party.  Even Romney almost lost SLC in 2018.

Some of this could be happening in Montana with Tester's increased margins in the "urbanized" parts of western MT but I doubt it will carry over to presidential elections enough to matter.

Idaho, perhaps? Boise and Idaho Falls are fast growing cities, though I don’t think they’re growing at a pace to which their populations would eventually surpass the rest of state. Nor are they super liberal, for that matter.

Utah is the next best example and Salt Lake City and it's few liberal suburbs simply cannot overtake Utah, Davis, Weber, and Morgan counties. If Utah becomes blue, it'll be because the Mormon suburbs changed, not because Salt Lake City grew to a huge size.

How has no one mentioned the only one that really seems to fit: Arizona?

I read somewhere that if only non-Mormons voted in UT, it would have given Clinton her biggest margin which makes sense. SLC is probably the only really good job market for young professionals in a really red state. Nashville is probably the only other good one.

Ya Arizona is the best answer here.

CO's blue lean isn't entirely due to Denver - it also has two pretty large (>100K) college towns and lots of the mountains have blue leans due to destination towns/retirement/recreation towns. Idaho lacks those outside of Sun Valley (Moscow is... not Boulder) and Utah's Native American and Mexican constituencies aren't supplementing any D tilt of SLC area at all. Arizona on the other hand has a pretty sizeable D base outside of Phoenix if you look to Tucson and Nogales and of course the Diné lands.

Fun Fact Jeff flake actually lost Arizona outside Maricopa in 2012. In 2018 the opposite was true.

What about Western MT with the rapid growth in the cities of Missoula, Helena, Kalispell and Bozeman?

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=2016&fips=30&f=1&off=0&elect=0&def=swg&datatype=county

Note that the one county which swung D from 2012 to 2016 is also the fastest growing county in the state, as well as the county which contains the state's largest higher education institution. This is something to keep an eye on for future elections here.

Yes. Aside from 3rd parties splitting the vote (and we all know it's just specifically because of Trump himself, not because they've grown disenchanted from the GOP), unless the Mormons shift their voting patterns, I don't see UT becoming a blue or even swing state for now.

Of course a lot of these changes can be blunted for a while by the local Republican party being very good at using micro targeting to peel away D votes throughout the D base while keeping the R base solid. Mostly through focusing on retail politics and local issues at the first sign of demographic decline. This has worked really well in Florida but the Democrats in the Northeast may have overused it but now might need it as more people leave the smaller states though I imagine Vermont will always be D because its a boutique area.

The only reason I didn't mention it is because the OP said low population states.

I don't think it will impact statewide voting anytime soon, but Boise, Idaho is a real up and coming city for young professionals, especially in fields like tech.

Missoula County got 11.22% third party vote with Johnson, Stein, Write-ins and Fuente receiving 5.46%, 2.77%, 2.72% and 0.27% respectively. It's obviouslys a democratic county with a large college present. Any Democratic nominee should easily improve those margins from 2016 and Biden less so.

The fracking boom resulted in North Dakota having the largest swing to Trump of any state in the nation. Energy booms (or, in general, reliance on the energy industry) are basically the most sure way to turn a state towards the GOP; Trump seems to be hoping that this will happen in New Mexico to, uh, reverse Denverize the state.

Arizona is the answer to this question, since it is if anything more dominated by its central metropolitan area than Colorado and that metropolitan area is growing, trending left, and dragging the state along with it. Georgia isn't a Mountain West state, but something similar is happening there with Atlanta. In general, anywhere that's trending Democratic is doing so because of the growth of some metropolitan area or areas -- what separates these states from Texas is just that there's multiple such cities there. Idaho is an answer here with Boise, but the trend there is too slow, and the state too Republican, to matter before a realignment comes anyway.

I'm tempted to cite the Twin Cities and Minnesota, but the Upper Midwest is a place where Republicans could still make fairly substantial gains with rural voters in a way that's not really an option throughout the Mountain West, so I'm hesitant to say that.

If the Bakken were closer to Fargo, I could see this as a possibility many, many years down the line. Not because extraction workers are left-leaning (quite the opposite), but as a second-order consequence of ND's dominant metro becoming denser and more populous. However, the Bakken sits at the opposite end of the state, so the primary effect of a second boom would be to boost the populations of towns like Williston and Dickinson into the ~30K range. Which I can't imagine being much of a boon to the D-NPL.

That's what I'm saying, it would be the suburban growth that would come with oil that could fuel a Democratic shift (pun intended).

And I'm pointing out that there are no significant urban concentrations of any size in western ND, so the pattern of growth would be low-density and not particularly favorable to the left.

A combination of in-migration and shift in party stance is needed to rapidly turn a region to/from a political party.  And of course, the smaller the state, the more likely the shift.  Vermont is a good example of this--a small state that was always Republican but in the New England/Northeast/moderate stance.  A small migration of people into Vermont and the rightward movement of the Republican Party took about a generation for the entire state to switch parties.

I could see hip places like Boise and Salt Lake City continue to trend leftward and could move their corresponding states move in that direction.  Not to change the state (because they are simply too conservative) but at least to win more congressional and state legislature seats (and potentially become competitive at the statewide level for gubernatorial and Senate races).

Of course this is all hoping that there is ticket splitting in the future. There should be but it hasn’t looked too good for it lately. In Utah and Idaho, I definitely see each state having a swing district while the rest of those districts are unanimously Republican save for the usual suspects.

 Basically people "trying to get away from it all"(my parents) or who don't have anywhere else to go (me my first year out of college) that are the only people who are voting Democrat in districts like that.