In the 2020 elections, the Democratic Party saw some small but significant gains in the US South. Four years on, Christopher Cooper and Gibbs Knotts look at the 2024 election results in the US South, writing that Donald Trump increased his vote share by three percent in that region – the same as in the rest of the US. Looking at statewide and state elections, they write the Republican Party generally swept the South, and that we should expect the GOP to remain strong there in elections this year and in 2026.
- This article is part of ‘The 2024 Elections’ series curated by Peter Finn (Kingston University). The series has explored the 2024 US elections at the state and national level. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (p.finn@kingston.ac.uk).
In recent decades the United States South has emerged as the most rock-ribbed Republican region in the country, but the 2020 election brought signs that the Republican stranglehold might be loosening. In those elections, Joe Biden won two southern states: Georgia and Virginia. In addition, voters in Georgia sent Democrats to the US Senate, and Democrat Roy Cooper was re-elected as governor of North Carolina. With the 2024 elections now behind us, what do the results tell us about the Democratic Party’s appeal in the US South?
Changing population and the politics of the US South
A common explanation for the southern Democratic 2020 resurgence is the region’s continued population growth. Political scientists Charles Bullock and Mark Rozell jettisoned the oft used categories of ‘Deep South’ and ‘Peripheral South’ to subdivide the region—arguing that southern states are best understood as Growth States and Stagnant States. Growth States have the best prospects for Democrats; Republicans perform better in Stagnant States. Political scientist Irwin Morris provides a similar, but more detailed, analysis of the South’s increasing support for the Democratic Party in his book Movers and Stayers. Morris contends that the people who move to southern cities (the movers) are more likely to support Democrats, while the people who remain (the stayers) in the South develop increasing loyalty to the GOP.
In new research, we collaborated with Scott Huffmon of Winthrop University and Seth McKee of Oklahoma State University to analyze data from states, counties, and individuals to come to similar conclusions about the region’s changing political dynamics.
As a result of recent gains by Democrats and continued population growth in the region, there was a considerable amount of attention focused on the US South in 2024. Would Democrats continue to claw-back vote share and move the region closer to true two-party competition or would it remain a region dominated by the Republican Party? The answer, it turns out, leans towards the latter, though with a few caveats.
The top of the ticket in 2024
If you simply examine Electoral College votes, Republicans dominated the region in 2024. Donald Trump won 10 of the 11 states in the Old Confederacy (91 percent)—with only Virginia providing an exception to Trump’s dominance. In terms of Electoral College votes, the results were similar, Trump garnered 90 percent of electors in this critical region. Simply looking at states, however, can give a misleading view of the will of the people. After all, if a single candidate won every southern state by one percentage point, it would produce an electoral college landslide and a popular vote squeaker in the South.
Adding up the total number of votes for both candidates in the US South illustrates that Trump won 56 percent of the two-party vote share in the region, compared to 44 percent for Biden. Altogether, southern voters expressed about the same amount of support for Trump as did voters in Ohio—a state that is certainly not a liberal bastion, but also not among the most conservative in the county.
Comparing regional support from 2020 to 2024, we see that the difference between support for Trump in the South and the rest of the US remained fairly constant. In 2020, Trump garnered 53 percent of the southern vote and 45 percent of the vote outside of the South—a difference of eight percentage points. In 2024, Trump increased his vote share by three percentage points in the South and outside the South, amounting to an identical difference of eight percentage points between the regions.
The US South didn’t take on a bluer hue in terms of the Presidential vote choice in 2024, but it didn’t take on a deeper shade of red, compared to the rest of the country, either.

“Several campaign signs are displayed out…” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by VCU CNS
Other statewide offices
The 2024 election featured both the presidential contest and a host of other down ballot contests—including many that were decided at the state level. Other than the presidency, there were 38 partisan statewide elections across seven southern states: Republicans won 31 of them (82 percent).
Republicans won all 12 statewide partisan elections in Alabama, the Arkansas Treasurer, Mississippi and Tennessee’s US Senate seats, and the eight statewide partisan elections in Texas (including US Senator). The Democrats’ sole bright spots were in Virginia, where Tim Kaine held his US Senate seat, and in North Carolina, where Democrats won five seats on the Council of State and Democrat Allison Riggs won by fewer than 800 votes to hold onto her State Supreme Court seat.
When combined with the presidential election results, the Republicans swept statewide elections in 9 of 11 states in the US South. Virginia delivered a Democratic sweep in its two statewide elections and North Carolina was the only southern state that showed even a hint of partisan competition in the 2024 statewide contests.
Redistricting means little overall change in Congress
In addition to statewide offices, 142 southern US House seats were on the ballot in 2024. After the votes were counted, most southern states saw no change. The people of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, will be represented by the same partisan split in 2025 as they were in 2024.
Three states did see some change, however. Democrats gained one seat in Alabama and one seat in Louisiana, but Republicans gained three seats in North Carolina—a total region-wide shift of one seat in the Republican direction.
Why did those seats change whereas the others stayed the same? The short answer is redistricting. Court decisions in Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina led to a mid-cycle redrawing of district lines. New majority-minority districts were drawn in Alabama and Louisiana, and the Republican controlled North Carolina General Assembly drew lines with the expressed intention to increase their party’s representation in Congress.
State legislatures
For many years, southern states were known for delivering different outcomes at the state legislative level than they did at the federal level. All of that changed in the 2010 election cycle when the Republicans flipped both chambers in the Mississippi and North Carolina state legislatures, leaving Arkansas as the lone Democratically controlled legislature. Even that exception didn’t last long, as both chambers of the Arkansas legislature flipped to the Republican Party in 2012. Since then, the Virginia legislature has remained close to a 50/50 split, while all other southern state legislatures have been in Republican control.
The 2024 state legislative elections in the South saw more of the same. Seven southern states elected state legislators in 2024, and overall, there was a total shift of three seats in the Democratic direction in the lower chambers and five seats in the Republican direction in the upper chambers. Without question, Republicans control the South’s state legislative delegations—Virginia is the only exception.
Why we should expect more of the same in the US South
The US South’s political future seems to indicate more of the same. Virginia’s off-year elections have a good chance of providing a positive moment for Democrats in 2025, but 2026 looks like an unlikely year for large Democratic gains. Assuming there are no redistricting lawsuits that change the shape of the southern congressional delegation, we can expect that North Carolina’s 1st congressional district and Virginia’s 7th congressional district will remain the region’s only competitive congressional districts in 2026.
Every state in the South has one senate seat up for election in 2026. Of these, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas seem all but certain to remain in the hands of the GOP, leaving Florida (held by appointed senator Ashley Moody), Georgia (held by Democrat Jon Ossoff), North Carolina, (held by Republican Thom Tillis), and Virginia (held by Democrat Mark Warner) as the only states with competitive contests. The well-documented trend of the party of the incumbent President losing power in the midterms could help southern Democrats, but this is far from a certainty in this GOP stronghold.
Party politics in the US South will likely remain where it has been for a while—not quite one-party dominance, but something shy of robust two-party competition.
- This article is partly based on the paper, ‘Population change, racial settlement patterns, and the newest southern electorate’ in Politics, Groups, and Identities.
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- Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.
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