As they carve their turkeys this year, Republicans can be grateful for Donald Trump, mapmaker.
He’s redrawn America’s political geography — not only winning back the White House for himself but pointing the way to victory for his party four years from now.
Before Trump, the major industrial states touching the Great Lakes were out of Republicans’ reach.
Only Ohio was winnable for the GOP, but it was a battleground, voting twice for George W. Bush and twice for Barack Obama.
Republicans dreamed of a “solid South,” yet that too eluded them: Florida was another battleground, one Bush came within a Supreme Court decision of losing in 2000.
The brief window when a Republican like Bush could compete for the White House had closed by 2008.
The problem was that even Bush’s one clear win — his 2004 reelection — depended on an electoral map his party…
