Geoff Russ: Trump and his failures hand Texas, and much of the South, to the Democrats - National Post

Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa greets supporters during her a final public appearance before polls closed outside the Austin Recreation Center on Election Day, November 03, 2026 in Austin, Texas. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) By Geoff Russ November 3, 2026 at 11:45 p.m. The South rose again on Tuesday night.

President Donald Trump returned to the presidency at the start of 2025.

At the time, Republicans also controlled the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court. Less than two years into his second term, Trump’s unfocused administration has discarded the domestic priorities that propelled him back into office in favour of a poorly conducted war with Iran.

Trump has compounded this by launching a trade war against Canada and most of the United States’ traditional allies around the world. The result has been rising living costs for ordinary Americans, including the millions of swing voters who backed him in the 2024 presidential election.

For the first time since 1998, the Democratic Party won Senate races in South Carolina and Texas, and captured the governorship in Georgia. Democrats also picked up a Senate seat in North Carolina for the first time since 2008.

Most devastatingly, the Republicans lost the governorship of Texas, their jewel in the crown, as State Rep. Gina Hinojosa ousted Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Without Texas, the Republicans have no mathematical path to winning presidential elections. They may now find it very difficult to ever win Texas back. Pocketbook issues were a critical factor, and so was immigration and demographic change, but not in the ways people anticipated.

The South, which had been a Republican bastion for decades, cracked on Tuesday. It resembled what happened to the Democrats’ former Midwestern “Blue Wall.” When Trump broke through there in 2016, it realigned American politics. Now, the Democrats have found a realignment of their own.

The years to come will not be the first time that the South becomes one of the most politically contested parts of the United States.

In the half-century that followed The Second World War, the South became central to American politics. It was the old Democratic heartland, where the party controlled courthouses, patronage, and local politics, while its primaries were often the only elections that really mattered.

Republicans saw it as the great prize of postwar politics. It was a conservative, unabashedly reactionary swath of America, guided by Protestant morality and respect for traditional pillars of society, such as the military. People often speak as if the famous Republican “Southern Strategy” permanently flipped the South in 1968 under Richard Nixon, but the realignment took far longer.

For two generations, Democrats and Republicans fought a tug-of-war over Dixie that Republicans finally won decisively in 2000. Al Gore, the Tennessee-raised Democratic presidential nominee, lost every state of the old Confederacy, including Tennessee itself.

The struggle for the South went far beyond kitchen-table issues such as tax rates and farm bills. American politicians fought to win Southern hearts and votes. The memory of the Civil War, the question of states’ rights, Confederate war heroes, and the primacy of local power all had to be reckoned with.

Southern Democrats with Baptist roots, such as Jimmy Carter (now not the only president whose political career was sunk by conflict with Iran) and Bill Clinton, drew on their upbringings to speak to the most devoutly religious section of the country and to spread the gospel of welfare reform, law and order, and the value of work. Even John F. Kennedy paid tribute to John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator who championed states’ rights prior to the Civil War.

Carter and Clinton were among the last Democrats to seriously compete across the South, with Clinton carrying Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee in 1992. It took eight more years for Republicans to truly cement their hold. As late as 1980, Ronald Reagan won most of the Southern states by the skin of his teeth, with single-digit margins. It was no coincidence that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi with a speech praising local governance and states’ rights.

Carter would not have won the presidency in 1976 without its electoral votes, nor would Nixon have in 1968.

Herein lie the strange consequences of that eventual Republican victory at the turn of the century. As soon as Republicans secured the South, they no longer had to court its voters with the same vigour or attention. A party can bank votes from its safe regions and lavish attention on swing-states. The South became to the GOP what California and Massachusetts are to Democrats: a source of votes and donors whose loyalties can be taken for granted.

People have long argued that Hispanic immigration and resulting demographic changes would return the Democrats to power in places like Florida and Texas.

Mexicans, Cubans, and other Hispanic communities were supposed to be the cavalry riding to the Democrats’ rescue. Instead, many of these voters have become swing voters in the Trump era. In 2024, Trump nearly matched the Democrats among Hispanic voters nationwide, which was unprecedented in American politics.

In Texas in 2024, 55 per cent of Hispanic voters chose Trump over Kamala Harris, handing him 14 of 18 counties within 20 miles of the Mexican border. In Florida, Cuban voters in Miami-Dade turned the county from a Democratic fortress into Republican territory.

Now, those once-favourable voters swung away from Trump and the GOP on Tuesday, especially in Texas. Even Republican victories in Florida came by vastly smaller margins than in 2024.

However, there is another, more important immigration factor that has had an enormous impact on Southern politics. Across Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, Austin and Nashville, along with their sprawling suburbs that are filled with white-collar professionals, electorates are changing and becoming bluer. Skilled immigrants from East Asian and Indian communities, the reverse migration of Black Americans, corporate relocations, and blue-state transplants have all helped drive this shift.

Georgia is now a majority-minority state, while North Carolina is undergoing its own demographic transformation. The latter became the country’s top destination for domestic migration in 2024–25, receiving 84,000 newcomers.

Not every new resident of the South is a liberal. Many are tax refugees or retirees who have voted Republican all their lives. Nonetheless, enough are progressive, credentialed suburbanites eager to reshape the politics of their adopted states.

Immigration and Trump’s partial abandonment of his domestic agenda have accelerated the South’s political fragmentation, bringing pocketbook-minded swing voters into alignment with a growing bloc of Democratic partisans.

The great irony is that Trump shifted the Republican Party towards tariffs and economic nationalism in an effort to secure the Midwest. Instead, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race, while Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign in Ohio went down in flames.

Trump has taken the Solid South down with them, and the politics and culture wars of the South that were won by the Republicans in the 20th century have lost much of their salience.

The second presidency of Donald Trump was always going to be transformative, and it has turned out to be exactly that, but in ways few ever imagined.

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