In the Deep South, the “Red Wall” and History Collapses

Hours after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told White House aide Bill Moyers: “I think we may have lost the South for your lifetime—and mine.” He was right. Moyers died last year at 91. This week, Democrats retook the Deep South, this time as the party fighting ethnonationalist authoritarianism, rather than the one that had upheld it in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The victory was narrow and, yes, it could prove fleeting, but it was a victory. Democrats didn’t just see marginal gains in this region—the heart, soul, and birthplace of the Confederacy, the KKK, and the American ethnonationalist tradition—their Senate candidates actually won the region-wide vote. Democrats will now lead state governments in South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. They’ll have senators representing those three states and probably Mississippi to boot. They showed themselves competitive in Florida and even Alabama and Louisiana. The “other” slaveocracy region, the Tidewater in Chesapeake Country, went Democratic a decade ago, which leaves Republicans, Trump, and Trumpism forced back to their final redoubt in the southern Uplands of Greater Appalachia.

This is an event of historic and seismic proportions. The “Red Wall” has collapsed, and the Trumpian version of the Republican Party faces the possibility of extinction at the national level. Someone will have to radically retool the GOP, or see it replaced by a new not-far-right conservative party.

I have hard and revealing data to share on what happened Tuesday. But for those unfamiliar with my work, let me share a few words on what happened long before that.

As I laid out in my 2011 book  American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America and a sequel, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, our true regional differences and their boundaries can be traced to the rival colonizing projects on the eastern and southwestern rims of what is now the U.S. in the 17th and 18th centuries. These rival projects settled mutually exclusive strips of much of the continent, laying down cultural norms and attitudes toward authority, honor, diversity, government, individual liberty, communitarianism, identity, and belonging. These have shaped our history, constitutional structure, and, of course, electoral politics—past and present. (I have frequently written about its political implications in the Monthly over the past 16 years, but there’s a detailed summary here.) The regions do not respect state or even international boundaries, as the map at the top of this post shows what they look like today. They profoundly affect our politics, as I’ve shown in the 2024, 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests; the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms; and even key off-year contests discussed in the Monthly in 2013 and 2011.  Here’s a map of the regions:

At Nationhood Lab—the project I founded at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy—we study how these regional cultures shape all manner of phenomena in American life. Because every state with a Deep Southern section had a Senate election on November 3, we were able to calculate the combined vote of the Democratic, Republican, and third-party candidates across this region, including the northern two-thirds of Florida, southmost North Carolina, the southeastern half of Arkansas, eastern Texas, and westernmost Tennessee.

The bottom line: Democratic candidates won the Deep South Senate vote by 5 points. Just think on that a second: Democrats won the Deep South.

The political consequences are already staggering. Democrats appear to have won Senate seats in two Deep Southern-controlled states—South Carolina and probably Mississippi—and won two more with net assists from the Deep Southern sections of Texas and North Carolina. The Democratic candidate’s margins of victory in the Deep Southern section of South Carolina were 9.2 percent; in Texas, 6.5; and in Mississippi, 4.3. The Senate races in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana were surprisingly close: the Republican nominee’s respective regional margins were just 6.6 points in Florida (the Spanish Caribbean section actually went blue) and only 2 points in Alabama, where the Democrat actually won Mobile and Tuscaloosa counties, which had supported Trump by double digits two years ago.

Democratic Senate candidates also flipped a dozen rural and suburban counties in South Carolina’s low country, roughly doubled their margins in black-majority counties in that region, and more than quadrupled it in Charleston County. They flipped at least eight rural and small-town counties across central and southern Georgia while bettering their 2024 margins in the core counties of metropolitan Atlanta by about 15 points. Black turnout flipped a chain of Mississippi majority-black counties that went for Trump in 2024, and discontent with Trump added some white-majority rural and suburban counties.

And that’s only the beginning of the Trumpists’ humiliation.

El Norte revolts

Slippage in the Deep South was an important element in the Democrats’ flipping Texas this week. Still, the single greatest driver was the repudiation of Trump across El Norte, which imperial Spain colonized from south to north from the early 17th to the early 19th centuries and has been Latino ever since, culturally and demographically. In 2022, Texas’s very Trumpy governor, Greg Abbott, only lost the El Norte section of his state by 9 points. This week, he lost by 27, while Ken Paxton lost the Senate race there by 32. Look at the carnage in this region, which, in the past two presidential cycles, had swung hard for Donald Trump. Cameron County, home to Brownsville, where I resided many years ago, voted for Trump by a six-point margin in 2024; this week it picked Talarico by 38. Just up the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Hidalgo County (McAllen is there), they voted for Trump by three, and now Talarico by 46. Bexar County, home of San Antonio, saw a 26-point boost in the Democratic margin of victory. Tejanos are apparently unimpressed with the tariff war and being shaken down by ICE every time they leave the house.

And it wasn’t just Texas. Democratic gubernatorial candidates flipped Trump counties across the El Norte sections of New Mexico, Arizona, and California as well, including Phoenix’s Maricopa (Trump +3 to Katie Hobbs +16), New Mexico’s once-Trump-loving, Hispanic-majority rural border counties, and Imperial and Riverside counties in Southern California. With the Democratic flip of Arizona’s Sixth district, every person living in a county touching the 1,933-mile US-Mexico border will be represented by a Democratic congressperson.

Midlands also revolt

Finally, there’s the Midlands. This, as American Nations and Nations Apart readers know, is the great swing region of our politics, community-oriented but skeptical of top-down government solutions. This Quaker-founded region invented the idea that we’re normatively a “nation of immigrants,” a culturally pluralistic polity where no ethno-religious group is in charge. This week, it belatedly fulfilled its historic role as a failsafe switch against extremism from the left or right.

At the Pell Center, our May polls showed Midlanders and Norteños were especially concerned about the erosion of the republic under Trump. Outright majorities in both regions said the U.S. was no longer a democracy, including white Midlanders by a five-point margin. Given eighteen potential threats to democracy, voters in both regions chose “Donald Trump,” and were the only region where that was the case (though he was second or third for most). They also strongly rejected ICE’s aggressive deployments in schools, hospitals, and other sensitive locations, with Midlanders disapproving by a 39-point margin and residents of El Norte by 41. On Tuesday, they expressed their disapproval at the ballot box.

Midland-dominated Iowa voted in a Democratic governor, U.S. Senator, and three of four U.S. Representatives. In the Senate race, the counties containing Davenport and Dubuque flipped, along with half a dozen rural, solid Trump 2024 counties and one big, rich, suburban one (Dallas County, outside Des Moines, which went from Trump +6 to Josh Turek by 10). In Kansas, the Midland section went for the Senate Democrat by 10.5 points, clinching victory, even as the state’s Greater Appalachian and Far Western sections voted Republican by 23- and 38-point margins.

Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro easily won reelection, boosted by a 27-point margin in the Midlands (up from 22 in his 2022 race), even as Greater Appalachians rejected him by 12. Democrats flipped the state senate, establishing a trifecta, as well as three U.S. House seats in the Midlands, and another just over the river in Midlander New Jersey-02. And don’t overlook the Garden State either. In Midlander South Jersey, Senator Cory Booker flipped Atlantic City’s Atlantic County (Trump+3 to Booker+14) and wealthy suburban Gloucester County (Trump+3 to Booker +16) while boosting the Democratic margin in populous suburban Camden County by 24 points (to Booker +46).

Republican Senator Pete Ricketts survived the night in Nebraska. Still, he only won the state’s populous Midland section by 1.9 percent over an independent challenger, Dan Osborn, who won Omaha’s Douglas County by 20 and Lincoln’s Lancaster County by 19. The Omaha area’s U.S. House seat also flipped to the Democrats, as did Missouri’s 2nd district, also in the Midlands.

There are a lot more details in our article on the midterms over at Nationhood Lab. But the bottom line is the same: The people have delivered their verdict on Trumpism. Now it’s up to the Democrats to bring accountability to those who tried to bring down the republic and all it’s supposed to stand for.

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