To win, the Democrats need to gain 38 additional Electoral College votes over their 2016 performance. Although the northern strategy of winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin may be the easiest path for the Democrats, there is a southern option as well. If the Democrats can flip Florida and North Carolina it will yield 44 electoral votes. This gain will result in a win if the rest of the map stays the same as it was in 2016. Both states went for Obama in 2008 and Florida repeated this support in 2012. However, these two states are more strongly Republican than the states in the Northern strategy. In fact, in both states in 2018, the Republican candidates for US House seats received more votes than the Democrat candidates as shown in figure below.
The strength of the Republican Party in North Carolina and Florida is demonstrated in several ways. Although North Carolina recently elected a Democrat for governor, the Republican hold the majority in the state legislature and have tried to strip the governor’s powers. The Democrats did not flip any House seats in North Carolina and Republicans received an estimated* 51.6 percent of the overall votes as compared to the Democrat’s 48.5 percent. Florida flipped two US House of Representative seats blue but overall voted an estimated* 51.2 percent for Republican House candidates as compared to 48.7 percent for Democrats.. They also elected a Trump Republican as Governor and the Republicans control the state legislature. Finally, because Republicans are in power in these states, controlling all the key positions, they may seek to make it more difficult to vote which could undermine the predictive power of the 2018 results.
The bottom line is that if the things continue as they have been, it will most likely be difficult to turn these 2 states blue. But, two years is a long time and it is unlikely that the economy will be as strong in 2020. It is also likely that the President’s scandals will continue to mount and become a crushing burden.
*I used previous year election totals in districts that were not contested in 2018 to estimate the total votes and party shares.