What post-2016 trends do you see forming?

[Agonized-Statism]

Minority groups stop voting in monolithic blocks. Republicans generally win a majority of Asians and Democrats a majority of other minority groups.

A decade or two down the road, West Virginia crashes hard. Investors start moving in and push for it to be a tech hub. As the state transforms, it trends Democratic.

Vermont slowly trends toward the liberal GOP, but doesn't flip for a few decades.

Texas is fool's gold for the Democrats.

[Agonized-Statism]

I do think at least one of the big tech companies will eventually try to "take over" a small state economically and politically, like the railroads did in the late 19th century.  But I doubt it will be WV.  The existing population is too large and would be too strongly opposed to the tech workers moving in.  More plausible candidates would be one of MT/WY/ID/SD.  AK is also possible, but it might just be too remote to work as the secondary base of a Fortune 500 company.   

As we continue the transformation into an information economy, Alaska might become more plausible. When all your work is done digitally, you can live anywhere. Drone delivery might also help make living in remote places cheaper. The others are definitely possibilities as California bleeds its middle class, I agree...as a Californian expat, I know, we go everywhere. But I say West Virginia will surprise everyone purely because it might become the kind of wreck where entrepreneurs see the most opportunity. We're already seeing liberals "colonize" the southern states. Take a look at Buzzfeed sometime. They're dead set on overturning conservative social policy there in particular. Many western and northern liberals are also appropriating southernisms like "folks" and "y'all", because it's trendy to be a southern liberal. Funny enough, you might also notice the leading conservatives trying to shed the dreaded association with Bush by dropping the southern appeals and speaking more to disaffected northern workers. Not a single Republican nominee for President or Vice President has come from a southern state since 2004. If you ask me, in a few decades, we'll have an aggressively social justice-minded "New South" and a north more open to voting GOP.

[Agonized-Statism]

This is plausible, but the big question mark is what happens to the Religious Right bloc in that world?  They are an outright majority some Southern states and at least 30% everywhere.  For the South to become the Dem base, rather than a couple of urbanized outposts (VA, GA, eventually TX) they'd have to improve substantially with Millennial and younger Evangelicals. 

Social conservatism is dead. Sad to me, probably not to most people. The remnants of the religious right will likely disengage from the political world as the last bits of the Reagan Coalition slip away, becoming apolitical or maybe forming fringe parties. Like you said, a religious left is certainly a possibility, especially with how liberal the younger Evangelicals are. Seriously. All the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Methodists my age use scripture to justify their liberal beliefs, while most of the Trump supporters are irreligious or religious in name only. My social conservatism certainly doesn't come from the Bible. I'm apolitical, but I've heard similar talk coming out of young conservatives- most feel like the Bible is no longer a valid source for their views, so they claim things like Aristotelian logic as their basis. Ben Shapiro is popular not for citing the Ten Commandments, but for saying "facts don't care about your feelings". But in any case, religious people will no longer vote on religion.

As for how this plays out in the south, look at the culture. Southern culture is all about standing by your values and defending your honor. Also, from my personal experience, getting in people's business and being loud. As the country gets more and more irreligious and liberalism becomes the norm, social justice will become an easy, convenient pseudo-religion to pick up in lieu of Jeebus.

[Agonized-Statism]

Eventually, the weird alliance between rich urban Whites and racial minorities that is the Democratic Party will break under its own weight, and the GOP will gain substantially with rural minorities (Blacks in the South) and working-class Latinos.  The GOP can achieve this by becoming even "Trumpier" in the extent that it continues to make bogeymen out of neoliberal types.

In the long term, the current political alignment will reach its apogee when White voters in the Midwest are just as partisan as Whites in the South.  

This. It's a safe bet that the next realignment will be based on some socioeconomic problem, like automation. As for who's who, who knows. Maybe the GOP will end up being the rich liberal socialites' party instead.

[Agonized-Statism]

The thing is, the rich guys always win.  The poor/minorities will be the ones to move because they’re always more marginally attached to politics to begin with.  Their interests are always kind of orphaned, so they’re less wed to certain parties or ideologies. 

Too true. In America, we vote for corporate dominance, corporate dominance, or rebellious third party™ corporate dominance.

I think the next big shift we'll see over the next 20-30 years is Latinos becoming more republican

Yep! I predict that the assimilated latino vote will be split roughly down the middle, like whites.