In an election that was a referendum on Trump, American Nation’s El Norte and Midlands regions swung particularly hard against his allies this week, but the “red wall” in the Deep South also collapsed, a electoral death knell for Trumpism on the national stage
By Colin Woodard
This week’s midterms were a massive repudiation of Donald Trump and his allies, and the worst electoral catastrophe for Republicans since 1974, maybe even ever. From eastern Maine to the western Aleutians, the party that refused to rein in the mad rule of their leader lost a mountain of state legislative seats, multiple state chambers, scores of House races, at least 20 gubernatorial contests, and control of the both houses of Congress. Democrats swept the board, winning tipping point senate seats by double digits and going on to capture additional ones in as unlikely places as South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa and, from the looks of it at this hour, Mississippi and Alaska. Even Maine’s Susan Collins was ejected, ending a thirty-year career in the upper chamber.
But you knew all that already, and you’ve come here for the regional analysis of what just happened, powered by the American Nations model. (For those of you who have no idea what that is, start here.) So let’s get straight to it.
The Red Wall Collapses
I’ve been arguing for months that voters in the two key “swing regions” of our federation, El Norte and the Midlands, had turned on Trump in a very big way, based on emerging data on everything from concerns about the collapse of democracy to shifts in authoritarian mindsets, to Trump’s local approval ratings. The data didn’t lie about that. But the most stunning development Tuesday was the collapse of the Deep Southern “Red Wall” protecting Republican power on the national stage. 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 regional vote!
That’s right. Because every state with a Deep Southern section had a Senate election this year, we were able to calculate the combined vote of the Democratic, Republican and third party candidates across the region, including the northern two-thirds of Florida, southmost North Carolina, the southeastern half of Arkansas, eastern Texas, and westernmost Tennessee. Democratic candidates won this regional vote (see the map above) by 5 points. Just think on that a second: the Deep South is now a battleground region.
I’ve been saying for years that this could happen one day. Unlike Greater Appalachia – the core of Donald Trump’s support – the Deep South had a formal, race-based caste system backed by law and death squads, all within living memory. A defining characteristic of such societies is that people whose families were assigned to the subordinate caste or castes are unlikely to support the ideological model and political structures that created such a system, which means you have a baked in opposition block that, in the Deep South’s case, can be a third or more of the population. Add enough demographic, generational, and urbanization-related change and you get Georgia in 2020. But I thought the tipping point was decades hence. Instead, Trump-led extremism managed to prompt it to happen this week.
The poltical consequences are already staggering. Democrats look 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 was 9.2 percent; of Texas, 6.5; and of Mississippi 4.3. The Senate races in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana were surprisingly close: the Republican nominee’ 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.
Of greater consequence for the region itself, Democrats swept the statewide contests in Georgia and Texas, which are now, for the time being at least, to be rightly called blue states, and they captured control of the lower houses of the Texas and North Carolina legislatures. In Texas, Talarico won Trump+20 Brazoria County in metro Houston by 6, Trump+9 Jefferson County (where Beaumont is located) by 13. Florida’s Angie Nixon flipped Jacksonville’s Duval County by ten and Tampa’s Hillsborough County by 9.
The Red Wall is breached, and U.S. electoral politics won’t be the same.
El Norte Says No
Slippage in the Deep South and metro Dallas (in Greater Appalachia) were important elements of the Democrats’ flipping Texas this week, but the single greatest driver was the repudiation of Trump across El Norte.
In 2022, Texas’s very Trumpy governor, Greg Abbott, only lost that 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. Impoverished Starr County was Trump+16, but went for the Democrat this week by 56. 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.
El Norte is an entrepreneurial, religiously observant, family-oriented culture, and if the U.S. had a “normal” conservative party like Germany’s Christian Democrats or the pre-Reagan GOP, the region would likely gravitate to it. By embracing blood and soil nationalism and xenophobic foreign and domestic policies, today’s Republican Party has succeeded in ensuring this rapidly growing region holds them in disrepute.
The Midlands Turn
Finally: 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. It’s also the region that invented the idea that we’re normatively a “nation of immigrants,” a culturally pluralistic polity where no ethno-religious group is in charge. And its always acted as our failsafe switch against extremism from the left or right. Unfortunately, the Midlands didn’t swing against Trumpism…until now.
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 ejected 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. And while white Yankees, for example, only disapproved of this by 9 points, white Midlanders did by 34, and white El Norte residents by 38.
This is part of the reason why Midlanders turned on Trump’s allies, and turn they did. Midland-dominated Iowa voted in a Democratic governor, US Senator, and three of four US 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 Gov. 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. Shapiro flipped suburban Lancaster, Berks, Cumberland and Northampton counties, turned Bucks County from Trump+0.1 to Shapiro +25, and boosted the Democratic margin in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County by 23 points over the 2024 presidential race. Democrats flipped the state senate, establishing a trifecta, as well as three US 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, Sen. Corey 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 Sen. Pete Ricketts survived the night in Nebraska, but 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 US House seat also flipped to the Democrats, as did Missouri’s 2nd district, also in the Midlands.
The only bright spot for Republicans, if you can call it that, was in the Ohio Midlands, the only section of that state that didn’t support the winning Senate candidate, Democrat Sherrod Brown. He lost the Midland strip of that state by 16, even as he won the Yankee Western Reserve by more than 20. The same pattern held in the governor’s race, as you can see in the maps here:
(If you’re wondering about that Midlands strip at the top of the northern Texas panhandle further up this post, that’s a well-established outlier to regional trends, in large part because it’s a really, really small sample size. The section of Texas settled via the Midlands colonization stream consists of just ten extremely rural counties bordering Oklahoma and comprises just 0.3 percent of the Lone Star State’s population. And if you’re curious about the relative population size of the regional cultures in each state, we have you covered here.)
Trump’s allies had a rough time in Yankeedom – witness Senate losses in Michigan, New Hampshire and Maine – and found no love in Tidewater, New Netherland, or the Left Coast to offset the damage. The Democrats even flipped Spanish Caribbean, which went for Senate hopeful Angie Nixon by 3.9 percent, likely fueled by similar concerns as in El Norte. On a regional level, this far right movement is now down to its final bastions in the Far West and Greater Appalachia. Their future is looking extremely bleak.
Thanks, as always, to our partners at the culturally-minded geospatial consultancy, Motivf, where Tova Perlman wrangled this data 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.