Bottoms becomes first Black woman governor as Hinojosa makes Texas history
Democrats swept through the states of the old Confederacy on Tuesday, winning U.S. Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia while capturing both the Senate races and the governor’s offices in Georgia and Texas, according to The Wall Street Journal. Throughout the region, down-ballot state offices and legislatures long held by Republicans flipped to Democrats in a single night.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, told a cheering election-night crowd gathered in a downtown Atlanta hotel ballroom: “You shocked the world.” “It’s no exaggeration to say you are making history tonight,” he said.
In Georgia, the sweep ran deep down the ballot. Democrats won the races for lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state, along with lower posts from agricultural commissioner to school superintendent, and took control of the state House for the first time in 22 years while nearly winning the state Senate. In the state’s Senate race, Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff soundly defeated Mike Collins, the Journal reported.
Even Mississippi, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1982, remained in play: Democrat Scott Colom is locked in a tight race with Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith that few saw coming. President Trump, who carried Mississippi by more than 20 points two years ago, returned to the state last month to shore up support.
Even in races Republicans won, the margins narrowed sharply. In Alabama, Republican Tommy Tuberville won the governor’s office by 4 percentage points, after departing Gov. Kay Ivey won her 2022 race by nearly 38. In South Carolina, Republican Alan Wilson was elected governor after a close contest with Democrat Jermaine Johnson. And in Florida, Trump’s adopted home state, Republican Byron Donalds narrowly edged his Democratic opponent in a governor’s race that came in tighter than expected.
The outcome immediately reset the American political map, prompting speculation that states Republicans have long counted on might now be competitive battlegrounds in the 2028 presidential election, and it set off finger-pointing among GOP strategists and activists over who was to blame. “It is a complete ass-kicking that is completely deserved,” said Ryan Mahoney, a veteran Georgia Republican strategist. “The Republican Party’s platform has been rewritten from the principles of Ronald Reagan to those of Trump, to things that are not conservative and things voters are not looking for,” he said.
Some forces behind the results were years in the making. The population across the 11 states of the former Confederacy has grown much more diverse in recent decades. Non-Hispanic white and Black residents — historically the region’s two largest groups — accounted for 68% of the Southern population last year, down from 83% in 2000, according to census estimates, while the region’s share of Hispanics rose to 22% from 13% over the same period.
High turnout among Black and Hispanic voters lifted Democratic candidates across the South and made history. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms will become the first Black woman governor in the United States and the first Democrat to win a governor’s race there since 1998. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa will become the state’s first Hispanic governor, and James Talarico, who made courting Texas’ Hispanic voters a major part of his campaign, easily won his Senate seat, overturning three decades of GOP supremacy in Texas statewide elections.
Backlash against Republican redistricting efforts — viewed by many as an attempt to disenfranchise Black voters — fueled mobilization across the region. In South Carolina, historic Black turnout helped Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews post a major upset over Republican Darline Graham, Trump’s handpicked candidate and the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally.
The Black vote shaped North Carolina’s Senate race as well, where Democrat Roy Cooper won 59% to 39% over Republican Michael Whatley. Cooper ran even stronger in the 41 counties where the Black population tops the state average of 20% — counties that accounted for almost 40% of the votes — and in each of them his vote share topped Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential mark by more than 5 percentage points.
Newcomers from other parts of the country are changing the South’s identity as well. Since the pandemic began, the region — which the Census Bureau defines as 16 states plus the District of Columbia — has netted more than 1.2 million movers from the Northeast, 900,000 from the West and half a million from the Midwest, according to bureau estimates. Many of those residents settled in urban and suburban areas, driving population gains from metro Charlotte, N.C., to Greenville, S.C., to Nashville, Tenn., and boosting the share of Black and Hispanic voters, whom exit polls show lean Democratic.
For years, Southern cities such as Atlanta, Nashville and Austin, Texas, were seen as Democratic islands in a sea of red, their bumper stickers showing a blue dot on a red background. On Tuesday, the Journal reported, those blue dots ballooned. The South was once heavily Democratic, but the fight for civil rights — which Southern Democrats of the era strongly opposed — ruptured the party. Republicans pursued a “Southern strategy” for years to woo white Southerners, and cultural issues such as prayer in schools, gun rights and abortion, along with Ronald Reagan’s appeal, gradually moved conservative Southern voters to the GOP.
Political scientists said the results don’t necessarily mean a new dominant party has emerged — rather, both parties will have to work harder. “The solid South is breaking up,” said Chris Grant, a political-science professor at Mercer University. “After last night, we are moving back to a two-party South,” said Christopher Cooper, a political-science professor at Western Carolina University. “It was a stunner,” he said.
Cooper cautioned that while Tuesday’s Democratic win was tectonic, that doesn’t mean it is permanent. “In ‘08, everyone said, ‘Oh, my God, North Carolina flipped for Obama. It’s blue now,’” he said. “No, it wasn’t. It flipped right back in the following cycle because it was right on the precipice.”
Mahoney said rural, working-class Southerners who welcomed Trump’s populist message and backed him for years have been hit by inflation and soaring gas prices. “Those same voters now are thinking, ‘Man, we got duped,’” he said. Such voters, once the backbone of MAGA victories across the South, likely will stop voting in large numbers for the GOP and simply stay home, he added. “If we’re just left with country-club Republicans and big business, we are never going to win again,” he said.
The diverging fortunes played out at rival Atlanta election-night parties. At Mike Collins’ party in a suburban hotel — Fox News on two large televisions, young men in blazers, women in bright red dresses, some older men in caps reading “Freedom” — just 40 supporters showed, the Journal reported, their eyes avoiding the screens. In past years, such rooms were packed, with cheers erupting as Republican victories were announced across Georgia and beyond. When television announcers declared that Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, had soundly defeated Collins, no one reacted, and an hour into the event people began leaving. Across town, security lines snaked through the hallways at a downtown hotel event for Ossoff and other Democrats, where a ballroom was standing room only and revelers outside shouted “Keisha!” as cars honked in support.