Is this the year the New South turns blue?

The Republican fortress is cracking

Joe Biden.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

For more than a decade, Democrats have eagerly anticipated the transformation of the once solidly-Republican South into a series of electoral battlegrounds. Ever since Barack Obama's 2008 win in North Carolina, the party has been hoping for favorable demographic trends, including an influx of highly educated transplants from cold weather states and the growth of Latinos and younger-than-average populations overall, to make Georgia and Texas into perennial battlegrounds, and perhaps even to transform Florida into a reliably blue state.

Yet so far none of it has come to pass. Throughout the decade, North Carolina remained a stubbornly Republican-leaning battleground state, while Georgia and Texas have stayed reliably red. Democrats have not won a statewide race in Georgia since 2000 or in Texas since the early 1990s. Both of North Carolina's Senate seats are in Republican hands, and the Florida GOP, powered by the never-ending in-migration of white retirees, has triumphed in every statewide race since 2014. Looking at the region objectively, it has mostly been a huge disappointment for Democrats looking to open up alternate pathways to 270 Electoral Votes and 50 seats in the Senate.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.