"Lean" Democratic states

[Nichlemn]

Some states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or even Minnesota have long since been considered toss-ups or "lean Democratic" by the media / polling agencies before a presidential election. After election night, however, the rude awakening comes. Every time.
Why do some people not accept that those states are ineradicably Democratic?
And are there any counterparts on the Republican side?

Because they're only slightly more Democratic than the national average, and Democratic hacks think that winning or having close losses in the last few elections indicates a pro-Democratic national average, rather than just small sample sizes. It would be like someone saying before 1992 that Illinois was solidly Republican, because it hadn't gone Democratic since 1964. In reality, it had a Democratic lean overall for those elections, and predictably it went Democratic when a Democrat won in 1992.

[Nichlemn]

Some states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or even Minnesota have long since been considered toss-ups or "lean Democratic" by the media / polling agencies before a presidential election. After election night, however, the rude awakening comes. Every time.
Why do some people not accept that those states are ineradicably Democratic?
And are there any counterparts on the Republican side?

Because they're only slightly more Democratic than the national average, and Democratic hacks think that winning or having close losses in the last few elections indicates a pro-Democratic national average, rather than just small sample sizes. It would be like someone saying before 1992 that Illinois was solidly Republican, because it hadn't gone Democratic since 1964. In reality, it had a Democratic lean overall for those elections, and predictably it went Democratic when a Democrat won in 1992.

Right! Winning the U.S. Popular Vote only once in the last six election cycles means the Republicans have the advantage in presidential elections.

The type of answer Nichlemn just gave answers for excelsus why, if anyone from this thread is trying to be a hack, it's Nichlemn.

I posted a number of months ago the status of the two parties' states nowadays with the electoral map, and Nichlemn bitched up a storm that I had the nerve to say that, because Pennsylvania has had a Democratic tilt since after the 1940s and that Indiana did flip and carry Democratic in 2008, it was Indiana going Democratic before Pennsylvania would go Republican. Oh, no! We're supposed to be swayed that Pennsylvania will be going Republican because it was less than a full two points above the national margin with the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012 while that was also the case with the re-election of Bill Clinton in 1996.

Emotionally wound up Republican forum posters like Nichlemn would prefer to ignore numerous electoral histories, acknowledge whatever is figured to be a fine example here or there and which suits one's narrative, and then continue to double down on one's messaging that the Republicans are still kicking electoral ass in this period just as they had with the previous one and two generations ago.

We're in a new era, Nichelmn, where it's not the Republicans but the Democrats with overwhelming electoral-map advantage. You can either get with the current period … or get out of here.

lolololol. You've still yet to address my basic point from last time - if we're in a "new era" where Democrats have an "overwhelming electoral map advantage", you should be able to cite some kind of correlation that proves that past performance is indicative of future results. But a quick analysis shows no such correlation. A quick exercise in Excel shows there's been a negligible correlation between how many times a party has won in the last six (or five, or seven, or three, or any other number) and its likelihood of winning the next election. So for all intents and purposes, factoids like "Dems have won the popular vote in five of the past six elections!" may be interesting, but they don't tell us anything about what the Dem's future chances are. Anyone who made such crude extrapolations in the past would have been wrong as often as they were right.

This isn't about thinking the Republicans "still have" an advantage. They never had it to begin with, and neither do the Dems today. Democrats may still well be favoured to win the next elections, but it won't be because the past few elections "predicted" it.