The Purple Wave: A Dive Into America's New Swing States

Campaign season has traditionally offered few surprises for those evaluating the political map every year. California will generally vote Democrat. Places like Alabama usually will vote Republican. And the races that matter will likely occur in a handful of "purple" swing states scattered throughout the country with diverse populations, a clear urban/rural divide, and a deep legacy of investment by national candidates.

At least, that was tradition.

Today, several state and federal elections in traditionally blue states like New York and Oregon are virtually toss-ups, with Republicans threatening to upend years—if not decades—of Democratic control. States once ignored in the national conversation, like Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina, have emerged as some of the nation's most contentious political battlegrounds over the last 15 years, often returning single-digit margins in presidential races and highly competitive contests for state and national office.

Even Colorado, which shifted solidly Democratic in the last several decades, has become competitive, with Republicans making headway in House and Senate races that once would have been considered pipe dreams.

The real question is whether the shift is built to last.

In Oregon, wedge issues like crime helped exacerbate nationalized concerns over the state of the economy, helping put Republicans in a position for success that would have been unthinkable just a half-decade earlier.

Colorado, which went for Democratic President Joe Biden by double digits in 2020, could realistically see one of its Senate seats flip to Republicans this year on the strength of moderate Joe O'Dea, who has publicly broken ranks with divisive GOP figures like former President Donald Trump.

And in blue strongholds around the country, the hardest walls of the Democratic coalition are beginning to show cracks under the weight of a relatively unpopular president, a challenging economy and mishaps by Democratic leadership at the state and local level.

The biggest change, GOP leaders say, is the rise of unaffiliated voters, who appear increasingly willing to alternate between parties based largely on local or even regional issues.

In Colorado, more than half of the votes in the Republican primaries were cast by unaffiliated voters, the Colorado Sun reported over the summer, in a year when national Democrats injected hundreds of thousands of dollars into the state's primaries to elevate a more extreme brand of GOP candidate that would face a disadvantage against a Democrat. That effort ultimately failed, and moderate Republicans—party leaders say—now have all the momentum.

"Republicans are a few points down in terms of voter registration," Joe Jackson, executive director of the Colorado Republican Party, told Newsweek. "But if we get a majority of that big, big block of the unaffiliated vote, we win."

And from state to state, the message is consistent. In blue states where abortion is likely to remain legal following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, crime and the economy are by and large the dominant issues, not only in their own messaging, but among the voters.

"When we're doing surveys and talking with voters, they are focused on inflation, they're focused on cost of living, they're focused on crime," Jackson said. "And, you know, there's no doubt who's been in charge here the last few years in Colorado, so it's been an easier pitch. Everyone knows that Democrats have been in charge."

It's a similar challenge in more competitive states like North Carolina, where Republicans and Democrats have regularly traded momentum over the past decade. Justin King, an activist with the Democratic advocacy group Forward Carolina, said the state did not see a similar surge in voter registrations as others following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe but did see a growing number of unaffiliated voters joining the mix in a sign that the electorate could come to mirror the partisan divide nationally.

And though Democrats hold the governorship—as well as a formidable U.S. Senate candidate in Cheri Beasely—the party's momentum has faltered in recent months in a state whose politics traditionally mirror the national political sentiment.

"If it's a good night for Republicans at the federal level, they're going to have a good night here," King said. "Which means they're probably going to get a supermajority again in the state legislature, and [Republican U.S. Senate candidate] Ted Budd should win by two points, something like that. Maybe even more than that. It seems to be here at the very end, the wave is kind of breaking their way."

A similar trend is apparent in Democratic strongholds in the Northeast, where Republicans blame states' high tax burdens and liberal policy shifts as the source of voter discontent.

Though Republicans saw little recent momentum in New York—a handful of flipped seats in small, traditionally blue cities like Cortland and Utica—a Democratic governor's scandals and the visceral failures of the state legislature's bail reforms offered Republicans an opportunity to rail against the state's long-standing system of single-party rule, opening the field for what is arguably the GOP's strongest crop of candidates in years.

Marc Molinaro, a former gubernatorial candidate who narrowly lost a special election to represent part of New York's Hudson Valley in Congress, is within striking distance of Democratic favorite Josh Riley in the race to represent New York's 19th Congressional District. In the 17th District, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Sean Maloney is facing a credible threat from Republican strategist Mike Lawler in a suburban area north of New York City.

And in the Democratic-dominated city of Rochester, strategists say the city's former police chief, La'Ron Singletary—who made headlines for his high-profile clashes with disgraced Mayor Lovely Warren in the wake of the police-involved killing of local man Daniel Prude—could be a potential spoiler candidate in his bid to replace Democratic Representative Joe Morelle.

"I wanted to go and have candidates who gave a damn," Mike Sigler, a Republican Party activist and Tompkins County legislator, told Newsweek. "And I think I got that this year."

At the top of the list is Republican Lee Zeldin, a Long Island-based congressman who—backed by massive amounts of outside spending and a campaign message built around fighting crime and inflation—has surged in the campaign's final weeks to a stalemate in the polls with Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, who replaced disgraced Democrat Andrew Cuomo last year after a decade in office.

Sigler, who chairs the Republican Party in New York's bluest county and recently wrapped his vintage Volkswagen van in Zeldin campaign imagery, said the energy around Zeldin statewide has not been seen for any Republican candidate since Governor George Pataki—who was in office from January 1, 1995, to December 31, 2006—with his momentum fueled by a simple and consistent message, blasted almost non-stop on television screens throughout the state that things are expensive, and that crime feels out of control.

That message, he said, could give Republicans the "in" they need to claw back in New York, and potentially introduce some balance he says voters have begun to yearn for in the state.

"I think Lee Zeldin is gonna win. Like, I feel it," he said. "But then we as a party need to perform in a week. We can't just win and say 'great, we're done here.' No, we've got to win and enact new policies that are gonna make New York state better. That's the key. I mean, we're gonna have to deliver."