Story highlights
Trump's voters showed up on Tuesday
The states had given Democrats 242 electoral votes
Donald Trump on Tuesday eviscerated a piece of conventional wisdom that had become demographic and Democratic gospel in recent cycles: that blue states will always be blue states.
That bedrock belief, which Republicans and Democrats had shorthanded to “the Blue Wall,” was torn asunder as Trump romped through a series of Great Lakes states that had been Democratic cornerstones for decades. A trio of reliably Democratic states won by Trump, or with a Trump lead as of Wednesday morning – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – were never assumed to be a given, but every Clinton path to the White House took the Blue Wall as the starting point for any path by Hillary Clinton to 270 electoral votes. A fourth, Minnesota, showed just a slim lead for Clinton, and was too close to call by Wednesday morning.
The 18 states and the District of Columbia that have supported Democrats for president since 1992 gave Democrats 242 electoral votes – placing Clinton only 28 votes away from clinching the nomination. Analysts on both sides of the aisle spent most of the past months devising the path of least resistance for obtaining that margin.