He’s trying to gain more blue-state votes. In English, noun modifiers (here "blue-state") are normally singular even when logically they appear to refer to more than one thing. The hyphen shows that we mean votes from blue states, not state votes than are blue, but in cases like this people increasingly omit the hyphen, either because they do not even consider that a hyphen might be necessary or because they think it looks fussy.
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He’s trying to gain more blue-state votes.
In English, noun modifiers (here "blue-state") are normally singular even when logically they appear to refer to more than one thing. The hyphen shows that we mean votes from blue states, not state votes than are blue, but in cases like this people increasingly omit the hyphen, either because they do not even consider that a hyphen might