Democratic Sweep Shakes Up 2028 Map

BY AARON ZITNER AND JOHN MCCORMICK

The wave election that gave Democrats control of Congress and a majority of governor’s offices is creating another big benefit for the party: New pathways for assembling the states needed to win the presidency in 2028.

The election outcomes in Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas have scrambled the early thinking among both parties about how to garner the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, and they signal that the 2028 battleground is sure to expand beyond the six states that have been the main arena since President Trump first ran in 2016.

Democrats carried Iowa and Ohio as recently as 2012 before voters in those states swung behind Trump, but they haven’t taken Texas since Jimmy Carter ran in 1976. On Tuesday, Democrats won the governor’s office in all three states, giving them organizational and fundraising power that can boost a presidential campaign. They also won Senate races in all three.

In addition, Democrats won the races for governor in all six of the familiar presidential swing states, those that have shifted between the parties at least once since 2016. Those

include the three northern industrial states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the three Sunbelt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

“The election was a gamechanger,” said Jeff Rusnak, an Ohio Democrat and veteran of presidential and statewide campaigns dating to 1988. “It opens up a variety of paths for Democrats.” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, called it the “best map for Democrats in decades.”

Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who led communications for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said North Carolina and Georgia now look like lean-blue states, and that his party can’t take Texas and South Carolina for granted. “There are going to be more swing states in 2028 than we have seen in a really, really long time,” he said.

Republicans are particularly worried about their prospects in Texas, which carries 40 electoral votes, the largest cache after California. Republicans there lost every statewide race. “If the Republican Party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor, then we are not going to be viable nationally going forward,” warned Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in a postelection news conference.

A party’s midterm setbacks don’t always point to losses in the next presidential election. Big Democratic losses in 1994 and 2010 didn’t prevent former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama from winning re-election two years later. The biggest factors for 2028 will be the profile of the nominee that each party chooses, along with how much money and organizational skill that person has.

Some Democrats warn the ground gained could be lost if the party moves too far to the left—even though a slate of progressive victories suggests that is a source of energy for the party. “If Democrats fail to nominate a moderate, they will put all these seats, particularly in stretch-red places, at risk for 2028 and beyond,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of a policy group called Third Way that is pushing the party to moderate.

Still, the 2026 midterm results suggest strongly that the election will be fought on an expanded battleground that includes states that haven’t voted Democratic since Obama was in office or for decades, in the case of Texas.

Jim Messina, who managed Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and was national chief of staff in 2008, said having a governor of your own party in place is a big help in presidential races, calling it “one of the most predictive factors of who wins a battleground state.

“You have infrastructure. You know who the good people are—especially new governors, because they just won contested races. You can’t overestimate their importance,” Messina said.

Messina said the party’s future nominee would have new considerations to sort through, such as whether to compete in Texas and how strong the Democratic shift has been in North Carolina, which has eluded Democrats since the 2008 presidential election but now has a Democratic governor and, as of January, a senator.

And then the campaign would have to decide whether the financial investment is worth the payoff in electoral votes, especially in big states with multiple, expensive media markets. “When we decided to go into Florida, I said to the president, ‘This is a $100 million decision,’” Messina said, referring to Obama’s 2012 re-election bid. “Texas is probably a half-billion dollar decision.”

For Democrats, opening new pathways in the Electoral College has been an existential matter. Due to population shifts, as many as 11 congressional seats, and therefore 11 electoral votes, are projected to shift out of Democratic--leaning states after the 2030 census, creating new problems for the party in the 2032 presidential election.

Most of the seats are likely to shift into states that, at least until recently, have leaned Republican. Texas, for example, would gain as many as four Electoral College votes under some projections, and Florida could gain two to four new votes.

Democrats have strengthened their foothold in North Carolina, where they retained the governor’s office in 2024 and on Tuesday elected Democrat Roy Cooper to the Senate.

In Georgia, another state Trump won in 2024, voters chose a Democrat, Keisha Lance Bottoms, to succeed the state’s Republican governor, and they re-elected Sen. Jon Ossoff by an 18-point margin.

While Florida stayed red, governor-elect Byron Donalds won by little more than a point.

Ohio, a longtime battleground before the Trump era, has a good chance of being one again, especially after electing a Democratic governor, said Aaron Pickrell, director of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign there.

Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa Democratic governor and U.S. agriculture secretary, said his state could be in play in 2028 if Democratic Gov.-Elect Rob Sand governs in a bipartisan way and the party shows discipline in Washington.

Only the smallest of the recent presidential battlegrounds, New Hampshire, retained a Republican governor on Tuesday.

DeSantis noted: “Of the 10 largest states in this union, only one state will have Republican control of their state: the state of Florida.”

A voter checked in at Sunbury United Methodist Church in Ohio.

BRIAN KAISER FOR WSJ