Red states less red in 2016

Fivethirtyeight.com has an interesting piece this morning explaining how the 2016 electoral college map is shaping up to be largely a repeat of 2012, which would clearly be bad news for Donald Trump. But there's one key difference, at least if current polling is to be believed - many states thought to be solidly in the Republican column are looking less solid:

Trump Is Making More States Competitive. Red States.

Among the 44 states where general election polling has taken place, Hillary Clinton is ahead of Trump in every state that President Obama won in 2012, plus North Carolina....

That Clinton is winning where Obama won is obviously a major problem for Trump. Mitt Romney lost in 2012, after all. But the states are not lining up exactly as they did four years ago. In several states that Obama didn’t win in 2012 (including Arizona, Georgia and Utah). We made these before a Utah poll came out that widened Trump’s margin over Clinton in the polls-only adjusted polling average to about 7 percentage points. Still, Clinton’s deficit is far smaller than Obama’s was four years ago, so our conclusion doesn’t change.), Clinton is running closer to Trump than Obama did to Romney in 2012. Trump, meanwhile, is doing better than Romney did in some states that Obama won last time around, including Connecticut and Maine. In other words, the results are compressed: More states are competitive, and fewer would be blowouts...

It's clear that Trump's promise to change the electoral map has a better-than-average chance of coming true, if not quite in the way he presumably envisioned.