How Trump won: The south

In retrospect, what the article identified was, in fact, a serious contagion in the Democratic coalition. While President Obama performed very well among certain core Democratic groups, he amputated a portion of the historical Democratic base in the process – rural whites in Appalachia. He had, as the lead author of this piece suggested in his book, “The Lost Majority,” traded the traditional Democratic coalition for a narrower but deeper coalition.

We now view this contagion as spreading throughout the Democratic congressional and statehouse maps in the ’10s, as Democrats who had held on in down-ticket races for decades suddenly found it impossible to do so in 2016. Congressional losses in 2010 were the most pronounced in Appalachia and the Deep South, which lie in the heart of this region. Obama was able to piece together enough of his 2008 coalition to win in 2012, but in 2014 four of the nine Senate seats Democrats lost were in the South, while the party found itself with only two statewide officeholders in the Old Confederacy outside of Virginia and North Carolina, and was locked out of every legislative chamber in the census region (Republicans controlled two-thirds of the seats in over half of the chambers). In 2016, somehow, things got worse.

We look at the data in three ways (exit poll data are not available throughout the region for this election), all of which suggest deepening problems for Democrats: First, we look at the rural/urban divide. Second, we look at “swing counties.” Finally, we look at maps.