Massachusetts isn’t such an outlier in presidential politics anymore: In 2004 it was one of only two states to give the Democratic candidate more than 60 percent of the vote. (Rhode Island was the other; John Kerry also topped 60 percent in the District of Columbia.) Barack Obama seems to have added seven states to that category: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Vermont. The Bay State may become just another piece in the Democratic base that stretches across the Northeast and takes in the nation’s most urbanized states.

Though Obama won 62 percent in Massachusetts, this was one of a handful of states where Barack Obama did not significantly improve on John Kerry’s 2004 showing. The same phenomenon occurred in 1932, when the Bay State was one of the few states where Franklin Delano Roosevelt barely nudged the Democratic share of the vote, despite making huge gains elsewhere in the US in his defeat of Herbert Hoover. But Massachusetts had already turned Democratic in 1928, swimming against the national tide by voting for Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party.

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