Republicans can give thanks for Donald Trump who redrew the political map

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 re-election — depended on an electoral map his party couldn’t recreate, as states like Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico moved into the Democrats’ column, where they’ve stayed since 2008.Republicans were in a dire predicament, but few dared admit it.Instead of recognizing the flaws in their own strategy, GOP campaign gurus resorted to exaggerating the other side’s strength: They accepted the progressive myth of Barack Obama as a once-in-a-generation political genius.Who could blame the GOP for losing to a phenom like Obama?Donald Trump could and did.Instead of fighting his elections on the map Republicans had been using, and mostly losing on, since 2000, Trump drew his own.Nothing Republicans had tried since Ronald Reagan left office had succeeded in piercing the “Blue Wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.Even if some Republican other than Trump could have won Ohio and Florida in 2016 — when both were still hotly contested swing states — no one else had a clue how to win the Rust Belt, and those blue-since-the-’90s states would have been enough, on top of what she did wind up winning, to make Hillary Clinton president.GOP nominees before Trum...