It's more than those three states, but I get your point. We need electoral college reform, and we need to uncap the house of representatives like the founders intended. Until then it's going to keep coming down to those purple states with razor thin margins, and safe red/blue states will just be used to run up the popular vote count.

Well yeah, there's North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois too. But they seem to be less likely to be the tipping point, plus AR/NV are too small to undo republican vote in MI/WI/PA which have provided 50 electors to the winner and zero to the loser for the last three elections.

How many elections do you remember and followed closely? These things shift all the time.

That's only true if the period of analysis is extremely, extremely short.

Well yeah I mentioned the last 8-9 years. But a lot of the shift already occurred with Bush: "Bush flipped 11 states that had voted Democratic in 1996: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia" (source Wikipedia); 8 of those have turned very much Republican since then.

So while the number of swing states has reduced a lot in 2016, the strength of republicans in the south hasn't changed a lot since 2000.