Hypothetical 2032 Election Prediction

In the midst of all my recent 2026 and 2028 election predictions and news, I’ve recently realized that it’s been a very long time since I’ve looked beyond this decade electorally or politically (with my most recent 2030s article regarding my predictions at the time for how the next redistricting cycle would play out having recently reached its second anniversary). Some of you will look at this headline and think me crazy, and to a degree, those who do would be right to do so. After all, we are just getting into the midst of the 2026 election cycle, and while 2028 projections may seem reasonable due to them being of the closest upcoming presidential election, 2032 is nearly a decade away, and making accurate predictions would therefore be nearly impossible; and I agree. Therefore, this article will not concern specific candidates nor any sort of national environment effects. Rather, it will focus on the political trends of states and where I expect their partisan leanings to be in 7 years, as well as redistricting that occurs at the turn of every decade. As such, state ratings and electoral vote counts will be slightly shifted from their respective 2028 consensus (I will reiterate one more time, this article has nothing to do with the 2028 election cycle). Now with that being said, let’s take a look at what I currently think a 2032 electoral matchup between generic Democratic and Republican candidates would look like.

States are classified as safe (10% or greater margin of victory), likely (5-10%), lean (1-5%), and tilt (less than 1%). Made using the YAPms political mapping tool.

Before I begin my analysis, there’s one key assumption I wanted to note. As can be seen in the map above, I have an incumbent Democratic president running for re-election against a Republican challenger in 2032, due to the fact that I currently believe Democrats are more likely to win the presidency in 2028 than Republicans. This could obviously change, and if Republicans win the presidency in 2028, incumbency advantage would obviously switch to their favor in 2032. However, it should be noted that the classifications above were made with the thought of Democratic incumbency in mind, and that if Republicans end up holding the presidency in 2032, they would be favored electorally.

With that assumption accounted for, I currently have the generic incumbent Democratic candidate defeating the generic Republican challenging candidate by the slimmest of margins. More interestingly, though, the Democrat’s pathway to victory would be vastly different than the one they would likely have charted during the 2028 election cycle, with the amount of flipped states on both the Democratic and Republican sides between 2028 and 2032 almost certainly being at least one (more on that in my generic 2028 prediction article). Many of the key states changing hands will also have differing numbers of electoral votes in the 2030s than they did in the 2020s, reflecting nationwide population trends and making them all the more interesting on the presidential level. Before gauging at the political trends, let’s take a look at how redistricting could affect the 2032 election cycle.

Redistricting Favors the Southern United States

It’s no secret that Americans have been moving southward for some time now. For decades, Southern states such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia have been rapidly growing at the expense of Northern states such as Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania. I expect 2030 apportionment to merely continue this process, as outlined in the map below.

Numerical value of each highlighted state clarifies how many electoral votes the state will gain or lose. Made using the YAPms political mapping tool.

As can be seen in the map, with the sole exceptions of New Mexico (losing an electoral vote) and Washington (gaining an electoral vote), all states gaining electoral votes are located in the southern part of the country, while those losing electoral votes are located in the northern half. In particular, Midwestern “rust belt” states such as Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are seeing their populations decline, while large Southern “sun belt” states such as Texas and Florida, the two fastest-growing states by population percentage in 2023, as well as Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina (all key swing states) are seeing their populations rapidly grow. This not-so-coincidentally coincides with the political trends in each of these states, as the sun belt states in question are formerly Republican states actively trending Democratic, while the rust belt states are formerly Democratic states trending Republican. As these shifts will ultimately define the 2032 election cycle, irrespective of each party’s nominee, let’s take a more detailed look at them.

Rust Belt Trending Republican, Sun Belt Trending Democratic

Throughout the 21st century, a dominating political trend that has defined the nature of swing states has been the correlation between population gain and increase of vote share for the Democratic Party (with the notable exception of Florida), primarily affecting southern sun belt states. Likewise, northern rust belt states that have been losing people have become more Republican. These simultaneous trends have created an interesting paradox in which (rust belt) states formerly solid for the Democrats and Republicans (sun belt) respectively have all become highly competitive, with the “core seven” swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada having been the most crucial in deciding every presidential election since 2016 (and five of which non-coincidentally showed up on my redistricting predictions for the 2030s). For the Democratic Party in particular, the two fundamental pathways to electoral victory have been through the rust belt with the former three states mentioned (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania), or the sun belt with the latter four (North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada), and throughout the 2010s and 2020s, the rust belt was always seen as the safer path. However, as can be seen in my predictions, I believe that with a further redistricting cycle favoring the South and another near-decade of routine political trends, 2032 will be the year where that changes.

In 2032, I have the generally Democratic candidate winning electorally without carrying the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for the first time since 1916, signalling a profound shift in the party’s strategy going forward. Fundamentally, as the sun belt continues to grow and diversify at the rust belt’s expense, the Democratic pathway to victory will eventually lie in the South, and I believe that 2032, while likely to be a close election as always, will be the election cycle that cements this as the case.