Half the Confederacy Flips

There were 11 Southern states that left the Union in 1861 to fight to retain slavery. Save for the period of Reconstruction, when Black people, who then comprised the majority in a number of those states, could vote and win elections, and a brief wave of biracial populism in the 1890s, those states anchored American conservatism when it came to racial politics (though they supported the New Deal after ensuring it would only apply to whites), and since 1980 have anchored American conservatism on virtually every political question.

But the South was whistling anything but Dixie in yesterday’s elections. Three of the four most populous Southern states—Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia—voted blue up and down their tickets. My colleague David Dayen has already broken down the results in the first two. It was not only Senate candidate James Talarico and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa who won in Texas; the Democrats carried every down-ticket statewide office, from the powerful lieutenant governor’s post through the attorney general’s office, whose outgoing tenant is Ken Paxton, all the way down to railroad commissioner, where voters defeated the appalling Bo French. Democrats already held the statewide offices in North Carolina, save only those of senator—a problem that Democrat Roy Cooper rectified yesterday by his overwhelming Senate victory. Still as of this morning, no House seats have been called for a Republican in North Carolina, despite the legislature drawing new maps this year to gerrymander the state even deeper.

In Georgia, the victories of Sen. Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms, who will become the nation’s first Black female governor, were matched by Democratic victories in the other key statewide offices. Annie Andrews’s victory over Darline Graham in South Carolina’s Senate race, by contrast, had no discernible statewide coattails, but Democrats did win one of the six House seats held by Republicans and may yet pick up one more. And in the evening’s most gobsmacking contest, Black Democrat Scott Colom may win the Mississippi Senate seat held by Cindy Hyde-Smith (as I write, he’s leading by 43 votes) despite getting only late assistance from the Senate’s Democratic campaign committee.

Even the Southern Republican victories were nail-biters. Jamie Davis, the Louisiana Democratic Senate candidate whom we profiled in the Prospect on Monday, came only 25,000 votes short last night out of 1.5 million cast. Angie Nixon ran a close race in Florida. Marsha Blackburn, now governor of Tennessee, got a scare while winning her race, as did Tommy Tuberville, now governor of Alabama.

These weren’t only about superior individual candidates. This was a repudiation of the Trump presidency and the Republican Party that has become a Trump cult. More than that, though, these victories marked the changing demographics of the South. Like Virginia, North Carolina has become home to so many Northerners, who have come to its Charlotte business center or the Research Triangle, that the partisan shift has been visible there for years. The growth of metro Atlanta into a major metropolis has had similar consequences for Georgia’s demographics.

The Texas story is more complicated, and more important, as it is the largest state, the anchor state, in the Republicans’ Electoral College coalition. The state’s burgeoning cities—Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso—have been home to growing Democratic majorities for many years, while the other major city, Fort Worth, oscillates between Democratic and Republican control. Houston, Dallas, and Austin in particular have seen major in-migration of young workers and young families from other states, while all the major cities have seen substantial growth in immigrant populations, both Latino and Asian. These new Texans tend to be younger than the new residents of the South’s second-largest state, Florida, where a disproportionate share of the newcomers are retirees seeking warmth and low taxes. The young professionals moving to the South go to Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia; they don’t go to Florida, which is one reason why Florida stayed red yesterday.

The other reason is that Florida’s Cuban and South American Latinos don’t vote like Latinos in the other Southern states. Last night, CNN displayed a map that highlighted every U.S. congressional district where a majority of the voters were Latino. Most were in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and every one of those was carried by a Democrat yesterday. The Republican exceptions were the two majority-Latino districts in Florida, though those were close.

It’s clear from yesterday’s Southern state results that the sometimes violent deportation sweeps by ICE had the effect of sweeping a sizable number of Latino citizens into the Democratic column; that was surely a factor in Texas’s blue wave, which was so overwhelming that it skewed the national vote total: The swing was 13 points to the Democrats last night, but in Texas it was around twice that, and it’s a big enough state for that to deepen the national result.

Similarly, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Republican justices on the Supreme Court, abetted by their rulings that unleashed gerrymandering in Southern states intended to destroy Black political power, also brought record numbers of Black voters to the polls. This was surely a factor in Andrews’s Senate victory in South Carolina, and Colom’s amazing run in Mississippi, as well as the good showings for Black statewide candidates Davis and Nixon in Louisiana and Florida.

The South was not the only region that saw a flip to Democrats yesterday, of course. The senatorial victories of Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan showed the strength of economic populism in the industrial Midwest, while those of Josh Turek in Iowa and Adam Hamilton in Kansas made clear the devastating effects of Trumponomics on agricultural states. None of those states, however, have significantly growing populations; they may lose seats in the next decennial redistricting even as the Southern states (though not Mississippi) will add some. To be sure, yesterday’s election marked a national repudiation of Trump and MAGA, but the Democratic victories in the South also reflected long-standing demographic trends that work in the Democrats’ favor.

Victories in states like Texas and Georgia, much less South Carolina, mean that the new crop of senators and representatives aren’t likely to be on the left fringe of the Democratic Party. Then again, Talarico’s victory speech last night went beyond the now standard evisceration of “elites” to a scathing attack on the billionaires—and the trillionaire—who have sought to buy elections and politicians, the better to keep their profits up and their workers down. Perhaps the move to return populism to its original economic focus could also return it to the political descendants of the original populists, who were centered in the South and the Plains states. James Talarico, meet Bernie Sanders. How the fledgling post-Republican South evolves politically will shape America’s future.