The South Was Once Solidly Blue-- And Significant Chunks Of It Are Headed In That Direction Again... And Fast

There are 10 congressional seats or parts of congressional seats in the Dallas-Ft Worth Metro, 5 in the San Antonio Metro, 6 in the Austin Metro and 9 in the Houston Metro, although some of these districts are shared between Metro areas. The Atlanta Metro has 6 congressional districts. Phoenix has 7 districts. And Orlando has 6. These are pretty much the fastest-growing metros in the country. Migration is changing the real PVIs of these Sun Belt districts-- and their partisan political orientations-- far more quickly than the glacial Cook Report can keep up with the changes. We'll come back to that in a moment. These are the districts, their current Representatives and the PVIs Cook currently assigns them (Blue colored districts are the most likely to flip in 2020):

Dallas-Ft Worth

• TX-03- Van Taylor (R)- R+11
• TX-05- Lance Gooden (R)- R+16
• TX-06- Ron Wright (R)- R+9
• TX-12- Kay Granger (R)- R+18
• TX-24- Kenny Marchant (R)- R+9
• TX-25 (shared with Austin)- Roger Williams (R)- R+11
• TX-26- Michael Burgess (R)- R+18
• TX-30- Eddie Bernice Johnson (D)- D+29
• TX-32- Colin Allred (D)- R+5
• TX-33- Marc Veasey (D)- D+23

San Antonio

• TX-20- Joaquin Castro (D)- D+10
• TX-21 (shared with Austin)- Chip Roy (R)- R+10
• TX-23- Will Hurd (R)- R+1
• TX-28- Henry Cuellar (D)- D+9
• TX-35 (shared with Austin)- Lloyd Doggett (D)- D+15

Austin

• TX-10- (shared with Houston)- Michael McCaul (R)- R+9
• TX-17- Bill Flores (R)- R+12
• TX-21- (shared with San Antonio)- Chip Roy (R)- R+10
• TX-25- (shared with Dallas-Ft Worth)- Roger Williams (R)- R+11
• TX-31- John Carter- R+10
• TX-35 (shared with San Antonio)- Lloyd Doggett (D)- D+15

Houston

• TX-02- Dan Crenshaw (R)- R+11
• TX-07- Lizzie Fletcher (D)- R+7
• TX-08- Kevin Brady (R)- R+28
• TX-09- Al Green (D)- D+29
• TX-10- (shared with Austin)- Michael McCaul (R)- R+9
• TX-18- Sheila Jackson Lee (D)- D+27
• TX-22- Pete Olson (R)- R+10
• TX-29- Sylvia Garcia (D)- D+19
• TX-36- Brian Babin (R)- R+26

Atlanta

• GA-04- Hank Johnson (D)- D+24
• GA-05- John Lewis (D)- D+34
• GA-06- Lucy McBath (D)- R+8
• GA-07- Rob Woodall (R)- R+9
• GA-11- Barry Loudermilk (R)- R+17
• GA-13- David Scott (D)- D+20

Phoenix

• AZ-01- Tom O'Halleran (D)- R+2
• AZ-03- Raul Grijalva (D)- D+13
• AZ-05- Andy Biggs (R)- R+15
• AZ-06- David Schweikert (R)- R+9
• AZ-07- Ruben Gallego (D)- D+23
• AZ-08- Debbie Lesko (R)- R+13
• AZ-09- Greg Stanton (D)- D+4

Orlando

• FL-06- Michael Waltz (R)- R+7
• FL-07- Stephanie Murphy (D)- even
• FL-09- Darren Soto (D)- D+5
• FL-10- Val Demings (D)- D+11
• FL-11- Daniel Webster (R)- R+15
• FL-15- Ross Spano (R)- R+6

Writing for The Atlantic yesterday, Derek Thompson noted that "Liberals in America have a density problem. Across the country, Democrats dominate in cities, racking up excessive margins in urban cores while narrowly losing in suburban districts and sparser states. Because of their uneven distribution of votes, the party consistently loses federal elections despite winning the popular vote... All over the world, liberal, college-educated voters pack into cities, where they dilute their own voting power through excessive concentration. So just imagine what would happen to the American political picture if more Democrats moved out of their excessively liberal enclaves to redistribute themselves more evenly across the vast expanse of Red America?"

And they are. "The New York City metro area," he continued, "is shrinking by 277 people every day. Other areas bleeding thousands of net movers each year include Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore-- all in states that routinely vote for Democrats by wide margins. These movers are U-Hauling to ruddier states in the South and West. The five fastest-growing metros of the past few years-- Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Orlando, Florida-- are in states won by Trump. The other metro areas with a population of at least 1 million that grew by at least 1.5 percent last year were Las Vegas; Austin, Texas; Orlando, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; San Antonio; Tampa, Florida; and Nashville, Tennessee. All of those metros are in red or purple states."

This drip-drip-drip of young residents trickling down into red-state suburbs is helping to turn southern metros into Democratic strongholds. (Of course, migration isn’t the only factor pushing these metros leftward, but more on that later.) In Texas, Democrats’ advantage in the five counties representing Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin (the “Texas Five” in the graph below) grew from 130,000 in the 2012 presidential election to nearly 800,000 in the 2018 Senate election.

In Arizona, from 2012 to 2016, Democrats narrowed their deficit in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, by 100,000 votes. Two years later, in the 2018 Senate election, the county swung Democratic, with Democrats gaining another 100,000 net votes.

In Georgia, from the 2012 presidential election to the 2018 gubernatorial elections, the four counties constituting most of Atlanta and its suburbs-- Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett-- increased their Democratic margin by more than 250,000.

What’s remarkable about these changes isn’t just their size, but their resemblance to Trump’s 2016 margins. Trump won Texas in 2016 by 800,000 votes. He won Arizona by 90,000 votes. He won Georgia by 170,000 votes. If these states’ biggest metros continue to move left at the same rate, there is every reason to believe that Texas, Arizona, and Georgia could be toss-ups quite soon.

As noted above, migration isn’t the only reason southern metros might be shifting to the Democratic Party: Young southerners are surely pulling their region left, while older residents could be switching parties in response to Trump. Republicans have likely hurt themselves by moving further to the right to galvanize their white exurban and rural base, even as their support has thinned in the suburbs and among working-class white women.

But domestic migration is key. Just look at Texas. CNN exit polls for the state’s 2018 Senate election showed that Beto O’Rourke was buoyed by recent movers, winning more than 60 percent of those who had moved to Texas within the past 10 years. At current migration rates, the “Texas Five” counties could easily add another 200,000 votes from 2016 to 2020, putting more pressure on Trump’s margin in the state. A September poll conducted by Univision and the University of Houston found the top-six Democratic presidential contenders all leading Trump in Texas.

Outside of national elections, the blue flood of the Sun Belt could have other political implications, such as more showdowns between blue cities and red states. As The Atlantic’s David Graham has argued, North Carolina’s GOP-led general assembly has waged war against liberal cities such as Charlotte-- for instance, by reversing a local ordinance that banned discrimination against LGBTQ people. This sort of state-city showdown could become a regular feature of southern politics. In the past six months, both the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Observer have run features bemoaning the Californication of northern Texas, with the former noting that “conservatives fear these domestic migrants will bring with them a liberal ideology that would disturb the Texas way of living.”

While such confrontations may be inevitable, over time the growth of liberal metros could force the Republican Party, which has lately been living off the fumes of retrograde xenophobia, to compete more aggressively for votes in the New South-- that is, to be a party for moderates, black voters, and immigrants. The political shift could swing the other way too: Democratic transplants to Dallas and Houston could edge right toward Republican territory, won over by their conservative neighbors’ arguments for lower levels of state and local taxation.

Overall, the southern suburbanization of Democratic votes could be a force for good, not only for Democrats but also, perhaps, for the future GOP-- and therefore for the country at large. Without changes to the Electoral College or to the distribution of Democratic votes, the U.S. may be doomed to replay the 2016 election for several more cycles. Coastal liberals will remain justifiably furious that their votes are systematically discounted, while rural conservatives will remain justifiably indignant that the heart of American business and media has flocked to cities that regard the countryside as a xenophobic backwater. The southern blue flood is not a cure-all for this schism. But if more white rural families join liberal transplants and nonwhite families in America’s diverse southern suburbs, Americans might discover, through the sheer fact of neighborly proximity, a less vitriolic and more optimistic political future.