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.
