inroads in former GOP strongholds such as the South and the Rocky Mountain West, thanks to the growth of Hispanics, as well as the increasing numbers of educated professionals in suburbs of such states as Colorado and Virginia.

Democrats also have become dominant in the Northeast and along the Pacific Coast.

"The first and most important place to start is California," says Ayres, the GOP consultant.

Republicans used to carry California — back in the days when the party nominated Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both Californians. But Republicans haven't prevailed there since 1988.

Four years ago, the nation's largest state gave Obama 61 percent of its popular vote in 2008 — and its 55 electoral votes.

"Throw in New York and Illinois, where Republicans did well for a very long time, andmy answer.
– Edwin FineApr 20 '16 at 18:54

The 99.9999999% availability figure is an often-quoted but fundamentally misleading statistic. Mats Cronqvist, one of the AXD-301 team members, gave a presentation(video) (which I attended) at the 2010 Erlang Factory conference in San Francisco, discussing this precise availability statistic. According to him, it was claimed by British Telecom for a trial period (I believe from January to September 2002) of "5 node-years" using the AXD-301. There were 14 nodes carrying live traffic by the end of the trial.

Cronqvist specifically stated that this is not representative of the entire AXD-301 history, or Erlang in general, and that he was not happy that Joe Armstrong kept quoting this, leading to overblown expectations of Erlang's reliability. Others have written that five nines is a