Democrats won the Deep South because Black people turned out, white Republicans stayed home in an election where ethnonationalist authoritarianism played a huge role
By Colin Woodard
Six years after a violent coup attempt in our nation’s capitol, this country’s political, business and media establishment are still having a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that the central issue in our political life really isn’t “moderates” vs “progressives” or “free markets” vs “socialism” or the abstract menace of “polarization.” As we’ve been demonstrating for years here at Nationhood Lab, it’s liberal democracy vs ethnonational authoritarianism and whether the American Experiment will make it to its 255th birthday, better yet its 300th.
For those needing more convincing, consider the truly historic results of last week’s midterms, in which the Republican’s Deep Southern “Red Wall” collapsed, giving Democrats control of Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas, plus US Senate seats in all three states and – in a total shocker — Mississippi. You can read about how Democratic Senate candidates collectively won the region – properly defined via the American Nations model – by more than a five-point margin in this post. But today, let’s dive a little deeper into how Democrats won this region.
First, Black people — who comprise 24 percent of the region’s population — showed up in a big way. The map at the top of this post depicts turnout in the region’s majority Black counties compared to the 2024 presidential election. In those counties, turnout in this midterm election was an impressive 84 percent of 2024’s. Meanwhile, as shown below, turnout in the rest of the region – the counties where Black people are a minority – was just 78 percent of last cycle, and noticeably weak in rural areas that are the heart of Trump’s support in many regions of the country.
The graph that follows graphs every Deep Southern county based on the percent of its population that identifies as Black (on the y-axis) with voter turnout on Nov. 3, expressed as a percentage of the turnout in that county in 2024 (on the x-axis.) The red line represents the mean trend, with turnout increasing in counties with larger shares of Black residents. Statistically, the share of Black people alone accounts for a quarter (.25) of the turnout variance across this vast region’s counties.
Black voters were key to Democratic performance in the region. CNN’s exit polls show they voted almost universally for Democratic Senators. Blacks broke, 85-12 for Democrat Annie Andrews in South Carolina, 88-11 for Angie Nixon in Florida, 93-6 for Ossoff in Georgia and a whopping 97-2 for Democrat Scott Colom in Mississippi.
This graphic correlates the percentage of each Deep Southern county’s population that’s Black with the percentage of votes cast in that county for Democratic US Senate candidates. (We can do this because, amazingly, every one of the ten states with a Deep Southern section had a Senate election Nov. 3.) The statistical correlation is .68, which is a fancy way of saying that 68 percent of the county-level variance in support for Democrats can be explained simply by the proportional size of the Black community.
Why did they turn out (and support Democrats) in enormous numbers? We don’t have a lot of hard data yet – though we’re hoping to remedy that with our own surveys if we can pull together the resources – but CNN’s exit polls for the core Deep Southern states suggest the trampling of Democracy was a major factor. In each, about two in three voters in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Mississippi said Congress wasn’t doing enough to check the president, and those who said so broke three to one for Democratic Senate nominees. In those same states, “democracy” was the second biggest concern of voters overall (after the economy), and those who said it was their top concern broke by two- or three-to-one for Democrats.
And why would Black Deep Southerners be especially concerned about democracy in 2026? Look no further than the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in Louisiana v. Callais, where they struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making racial gerrymanders legal so long as nobody called them such. Republican lawmakers jumped into action to try to curtail Black political representation in Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Louisiana, and their counterparts in Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina indicated they would consider doing so after the midterms. As Sarah Whittington of the ACLU’s Louisiana chapter told The Guardian: “The turnout and the exit polling that we’re hearing from partners and the boots on the ground that we had was that folks were not going to allow the court decision to undermine the power and the authority that they had with their votes.”
MAGA stays home
And who didn’t turn out to vote? A lot of Trump’s 2024 voters.
As we showed earlier this year, the Deep South has the highest proportion of self-identified MAGAs of any region in the country (18 percent) and the highest proportion of white voters who say they’re MAGA (25 percent of the total, more than double the proportion in the Midlands.) In terms of race and region, it’s the most conservative bloc of voters out there. The exit polls have whites breaking for the Republican candidate by about 60-40 in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina and by 71-27 in Mississippi.
Indeed, this graph shows the county-level relationship in the Deep South between the percent of people who were white and the percent of the vote the Republican Senate candidates got in that county. As you can see, it’s a pretty direct relationship, by itself explaining (statistically) 78 percent of the variation in county-level Republican support.
White Deep Southerners, as a group, remained loyal to Trumpism, if they made it to the ballot box. But a lot of them decided not to. but their enthusiasm to. This graph shows the relationship between the percentage of people who are white in each Deep Southern county and turnout compared to 2024. The more white a county was, the worse the relative turnout – the opposite dynamic as we saw with the Black electorate.
That’s quite an enthusiasm gap, and one that’s hard for a white ethonationalist movement to weather in a region that’s only 52% white.
Thanks, as always, to our partners at the culturally-minded geospatial consultancy, Motivf, where Tova Perlman wrangled this data and created the statistical graphics and John Liberty created the maps.
— Colin Woodard, author of Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America and American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, is director of Nationhood Lab.