A Southern Tectonic Shift

This article appears in the December 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

As impressive, and perhaps more important, than the overall Democratic sweep in last month’s midterm election was the location of its epicenter: the South. After the 2030 census reapportions the number of congressional districts and electoral votes that each state will be given, Democratic strongholds will see their representation and electoral clout shrink to the point that even a Democratic sweep of the blue-wall states of the postindustrial Midwest won’t be able to guarantee the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president.

This year’s midterms, however, provided the Democrats with a very surprising Plan B. By sweeping the table in three of the four largest Southern states—Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas—Democrats realized they’d stumbled upon another route to national political power.

To be sure, these victories were products of the conditions peculiar to the year: a wildly unpopular president whose unjustifiable war and arbitrarily applied tariffs stretched millions of Americans’ finances to the breaking point, whose deportation raids and financial corruption offended his compatriots’ moral sensibilities, and whose fiddling with D.C. monuments while the economy burned saddled him with disapproval ratings that rivaled Richard Nixon’s lowest points. That the Republican Congress consistently failed to rein in Donald Trump’s malignant idiocies saddled them with approval ratings even lower than his. Asked in the networks’ exit poll if Congress had provided an acceptable level of checks and balances to Trump and his administration, a whopping 71 percent said they’d not done enough, against a paltry 9 percent who judged they’d done too much.

The abdication of Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue from attending to the country’s business has cost the party its edge over the Democrats on topics that Republicans usually dominate. Not only did the exit polls show that voters preferred to have the Democrats handle the economy, but they even gave Democrats higher marks on handling taxes (40 percent preferred the Democrats, while 38 percent went with the Republicans), a perennial GOP strong point. Moreover, the kinds of issues that Republicans generally put before the public to highlight the Democrats’ shortcomings simply didn’t register this year. Asked what they considered the most important issue, voters led with the economy (39 percent) and the state of American democracy (33 percent), with a bare 3 percent citing crime (see: Democrats soft on).

Then there were the Trump policies that specifically afflicted the regions that turned against him. States with heavy concentrations of Latinos, like Texas, saw massive flight from the Republican column, powered not just by the cost of living but also by the costs of the deportation sweeps that had devastated their families and communities. Agricultural states, like Kansas and Iowa, which rely on tractors and trucks to shape and move their goods, found the price of diesel prohibitive, even as Trump’s trade wars curtailed their markets for exports. Southern states with high percentages of Black voters, like Georgia and Mississippi, saw high Black turnout in response to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and its unleashing of partisan Republican gerrymandering intended to diminish Black political power and interests.

Finally, from Ken Paxton to Vivek Ramaswamy to Darline Graham, the Republicans asked voters to support a bevy of certifiable lulus, while the Democrats ran a crop of compelling, or at least normal, candidates.

So yes, there were reasons very particular to year six of the Trump presidency that set the table for the Democrats’ wave. And yes, some of those shifts may be short-lived phenomena connected directly to tariff wars and the high price of gas. But beneath these particularities, there were also tectonic shifts in the demographics and political economy of the three key Southern states that Trump brought to the surface. There are deeper reasons why Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina have become politically purple, and understanding them can help the Democrats create what might become a new political majority.

TO BEGIN WITH, ALL THREE ARE STATES increasingly dominated by metropolitan areas, populated by racially diverse professionals, even more racially diverse service-sector workers, young newcomers from neighboring states and distant lands, and the steadily more cosmopolitan cultures coming along with them. Houston, Dallas, and Austin meet all those criteria in Texas, as Atlanta does in Georgia, while Charlotte and the Research Triangle play a version of that role in North Carolina. Young people move there for career reasons and to find housing more affordable than it is in the Northeast and the Pacific Coast. While the border communities in Texas are among the most venerable, settled, and traditional of any American regions, most Latino immigrants live in the state’s considerably more heterogeneous big cities.

Diverse by their very nature, and easier terrains to organize in than suburban or rural areas, cities invariably tend toward social liberalism and the formation of movements (planned or spontaneous, daylong or permanent). This year’s exit polls tell us that city dwellers voted for Democrats over Republicans 72-27, while 59 percent of suburbanites voted for Democrats, and only 41 percent of small-town and rural residents did. Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas are now sufficiently urban, with all that entails, to require the Democrats to target their efforts there.

Texas, with its 40 Electoral College votes, has long been the anchor state of the modern Republican Party and American conservatism more generally. But it is not only increasingly urban and racially diverse; it’s also increasingly young. The median age of Texans is 36, the lowest of any state except Utah.

One reason why Texas had a Democratic sweep, while the second-largest Southern state of Florida remained largely Republican, is the anti-Castro, anti-socialist, anti-Democratic politics of its own Latinos, chiefly of Cuban and South American extraction. But in addition, the median age of Floridians (42.6) is the fifth-oldest in the country behind Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and West Virginia, states that young people leave in search of work. Florida doesn’t have an equivalent out-migration of the young; it has long been defined, though, by an in-migration of the old.

In last month’s election, the share of voters in the Senate race under the age of 45 in Texas was 36 percent. In Florida, it was 25 percent. (Nationally, it was 31 percent.) That 11-percentage-point difference was also true for voters 65 and older: In Texas, they constituted 30 percent of the Senate-race voters; in Florida, 41 percent. These are numbers that can define a state’s politics, because the young generally vote more liberally than the old, and even more so when the early-career and family formation costs of college, child care, and housing become prohibitive.

At certain times, generations can be distinct political cohorts, and this is one of those times. In Texas, 79 percent of voters under 30 voted for the Democratic Senate candidate this November; between 30 and 45, the percentage drops to 66 percent, and among seniors 65 and older, only 44 percent. In Florida, the Democratic percentages for the two under-45 age groups were about 5 points lower than in Texas—74 percent and 61 percent, respectively—but they still were well left of Florida’s seniors, who gave just 41 percent of their votes to the Democrat.

While many anchor Democratic states—California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Oregon—are poised to lose electoral votes and members of Congress after the 2030 census, Texas is projected to gain four new seats, while the purple states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona are projected to each gain one. Right now, the combined electoral votes of Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina come to 72, while those of the three most Democratic blue-wall states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) come to 44 (likely 42 after 2030). As the South’s major cities grow with in-migration of young people from other states and immigrants from other lands, Democrats would do well to specifically address the economic concerns of these young, majority-making voters: higher wages, legally mandated wage and benefit standards for gig workers, affordable colleges and trade schools, job creation in construction (which could serve multiple needs if those jobs built housing), and the extension of Medicare coverage to children and young adults. None of these policies can be accused of “wokeness,” nor is their appeal at all limited to self-designated liberals.

WHILE NOVEMBER’S ELECTION MARKED a clear swing leftward by the electorate, the ideological self-definitions of American voters did not swing left. The exit polls found that 26 percent of voters called themselves liberal, 41 percent called themselves moderate, and 33 percent called themselves conservative. What Americans mean by these terms has never been all that clear; for many years, they’ve seemed to reflect people’s stances on cultural issues more than on economic ones. Sixty-one percent of these same respondents also said that they wanted the federal government to take a bigger role in helping Americans get health care, which is a liberal and social democratic position if ever there was one.

The point for Democrats is that the level of support for progressive populist economics extends well beyond the ranks of liberals, much less socialists. Asked whether the American economy favored the wealthy, or was generally fair to all, 70 percent of midterm election voters said it favored the wealthy. The exit poll didn’t pursue the implications of that assessment, but other polls have made clear both the widespread support for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and for legislation that would curtail the domination they exert over politics and policies.

I’m pleased to report that Montana voters passed by a wide margin (65-to-35) an initiative that requires the state to amend its corporate charters so that corporations would be forbidden to participate in or contribute to political campaigns, elected officials, candidates, and ballot measures—which would apply to all corporations doing business in the state and to their activities in every other state as well. (The status of this backdoor repeal of Citizens United will eventually wend its way to the Supreme Court, of course.) And it was enacted by the same electorate that was casting 52 percent of its vote for Republican House candidates.

Populism cuts across nearly all ideologies; ensuring that populism focuses on progressive economic targets and goals is the task of the left and, when it can be roused, the center-left. In his election night victory speech, Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico made clear that the real opponent whom he’d defeated wasn’t poor Ken Paxton but rich Elon Musk, who’d sunk more than $200 million into beating him. Talarico added that the problem wasn’t just Musk; it was the billionaires investing huge sums into AI with no regard for what it means to the future of human employment and human life, and into the purchase of politics and government. Talarico is not necessarily a man of the left, but he is a sentient liberal aware that our reigning plutocracy is a threat to both democracy and our livelihoods, and he has connected with a public that shares his belief.

Beneath the backlash against Trump and all his works, beneath even the growing rage at our new-age oligarchs, the tectonic plates of American politics are shifting in the increasingly urban South. The Republicans’ anchor state is now a fuzzy purple, joining Georgia and North Carolina in what may prove to be a fundamental change in the American political landscape. Democrats, take heed.

This article appears in Dec 2026 issue.