Well, there are fewer Southerners in top federal elected posts than at any point in my lifetime. (Or rather, there will be when Obama takes office.) Neither the president, vice president, speaker of the House, nor Senate majority leader will be Southerners. Even the Supreme Court has become a Yankee bastion. The last time the South as a cultural and political entity was so entirely shut out of top federal posts was 1861. And about damn time, says this proud son of the North who makes his home in the South.

But Clay is right: The Times story gets the phenomenon exactly backwards. It's not that the South has lost the nation. It's that the GOP has largely retreated into the South, and it is no longer possible to maintain a Republican coalition built around the cultural identity of traditionalist or "conservative" Southern whites. The GOP faces a stark choice: It can follow this regional rump into the grave, or it can walk away from the angry, aging white men of the South and build a new coalition on new ground. Democratic success in the last several cycles has been based on sinking new foundations into the South and West, where emerging cultural and political majorities identify against the cultural South's declining traditionalist white establishments.

Clay, I have to say that my own read is considerably less sunny.  Much of the South comes up blue on that map simply because of a marginal shift toward the Democrats in places [like my native Spartanburg County, SC] where the whites have long abandoned them.  And the "red crescent" consists heavily of counties that have long been hospitable to Democrats but who fled the party this year.  Your native [and my adopted] Tennessee is a case in point; Obama received 40 percent of his total vote from just two counties, Shelby [Memphis] and Davidson [Nashville], while the rural counties sided decisively with the heavily Republican suburbs.  It appears to me [although it may take several more elections to confirm this] that this election has consolidated the rural and small-town central South under the Republicans.  I find this really disturbing, especially when I see distressed counties in Central Appalachia [Harlan County!?!] going Republican.  That, said, you're right in noting that the region looks much less monolithic than it once appeared.  The urban South is developing a distinctive political personality, one that's starting to spread to the inner ring of suburbs [Cobb and especially Gwinnett in Georgia shifted Democratic, driven in part by expanding minority and immigrant populations], and the Atlantic South is diverging from the Central South.  It's going to take a while, but southern politics is inching beyond its old ethnocultural obsessions.

"It can follow this regional rump into the grave, or it can walk away from the angry, aging white men of the South and build a new coalition on new ground."

Here's to hoping for the former. Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me.

Not everybody is so optimistic.  Here's something depressing from one "mind of the South":

www.ajc.com/.../congressman_Marxist_obama.html

Looking at maps this way is fairly useless if they don't indicate population density in some way.  A huge empty county can be bright red or bright blue but it's irrelevant next to a tiny-but-densely-populated county.  But you can't tell that by a standard map.

I wonder what effect Katrina has had on this map---particularly in southern Louisiana. Many poor and minority voters have moved away from the region, which could account for part of the red tilt this cycle.

Here's where Newt Gingrich can prove his bona fides by getting Chambliss elected. They're both Georgians. Newt should come out from the behind the safety of those Talk Radio microphones and get to work.

Campaign using that hard right lingo he loves so much, and if he wins, he's earned the chairmanship of the RNC - great news for Democrats.

If he loses, he goes back to FOX and Talk Radio, more bitter than ever, and can continue to drive all moderates and minorities from the GOP - great news for Democrats.

He goes from a "Contract with America" to the contraction of the GOP. Get out there, Newt!

The South is definitely fissured and rapidly changing.  I think many Northerners are mystified by the white South's hangups about race and the Civil War, because up here (I live in NYC now) it seems as long ago and far away as the Napoleonic Wars.  But as a child of the deep South, I knew that my grandparents' grandparents fought, were wounded and taken prisoner in the Civil War.  In other words, people I knew well, knew veterans of that war well.  So really it didn't feel that distant.  In fact in 8th grade American history class, when the subject was the Civil War, I knew when my teacher said "we" she meant the Confederacy.  And she wasn't a racist, it was just the way she looked at the world.

What the map seems to be saying, is that enough people are moving in, and old timers are dying, to FINALLY begin to move chunks of the South away from that hateful legacy.  I am very interested to see whether the Repubs cling to that Southern rump or begin to make the move themselves.  On this I am conflicted...my head knows that we need two vital parties for the health of the republic.  On the other hand, my heart would like to see the bitter racists who called me un-American continue to stew in their toxic juices and fail spectacularly, at least for a couple more cycles.

Southerners, Black and White, are more conservative than people who live on the coasts. What party politics has to do with this remains to be seen.

When I was growing up in Louisiana, the most retrograde racists were Democrats. They got a big bump with Black voters after LBJ, and appear to have consolidated this advantage first with Clinton, and now with Obama.  Republicans had a chance to appeal to basically conservative Southern Blacks, but appear to have blown the opportunity.

"What is really surprising is not how stalwart the South is in its ways. It’s that broad swaths of the region look just like the rest of the country."

Nevertheless, Clay, the South as a whole (as defined in the exit polls) was further out of sync with the national vote this year than it was in either of the two previous election cycles. So that's a piece of evidence that points to the 'stalwart' side, rather than the 'just like the rest of the country' side.

Nationally, Gore led by half a per cent, Kerry trailed by 3 per cent and Obama led by 6 per cent.

In the South, Gore lost by 12 per cent, Kerry by 16 per cent and Obama by 9 per cent.

So the South was off from the national standard by 12.5% in 2000; 13% in 2004; and 15% in 2008.

Fairly nuanced numbers, true, but still ones that confirm the Times' point that the rest of the nation is drifting further off from the preferences of the South.

(I posted a series of charts on these numbers on the group blog I'm on, btw, see here: observationalism.com/.../more-exit-poll-comparisons-2000-2004-2008 )

Mr. Risen is correct that the South is not a static demographic-geographic bloc. This has long been true in varying ways. And "colablease" is right about the distinctive political personality of the urban South. I live in Atlanta, which I have sometimes described as a blue island in a red state - although that description unfairly leaves out Savannah and Athens, both home to substantial progressive elements.

That said, I urge my fellow Democrats to abandon any South-bashing rhetoric, however tempting it may be. There are plenty of voters whose loyalties are up for grabs in the next few years, some voted Obama, some voted McCain (& does it need to be said that plenty of non-racists voted for McCain?). And there are races to be run here, starting with the Jim Martin/Saxby Chambliss runoff Dec. 2nd. The last thing Georgia Democrats need to deal with is a lot of triumphalist, derogatory remarks about the South from national party officials (or journalists). The Chambliss people would love to have some South-bashing quotes from national Democrats to throw at Martin. Let's don't go there; this runoff is winnable.

Also, there are plenty of Southerners who could be valuable members of the Obama administration.

Some ot the counties that went blue in NC include smaller cities like Asheville or Greenville that have branches of UNC.  Also Guilford Co. (famed home of some of those pro-Americans).    And they can be pretty cosmopolitan places, in a down home kind of way, where there's a lot of diversity in people's daily interactions.  And in their medical centers, this mix includes lots of people coming from more rural areas for medical care.  Our college towns fielded armies of Obama volunteers that probably made the difference for NC.  (The 8 precincts organized by our local Change Crew had an average increased turnout of 20% over the May primary.) Anyone seeing this pattern in other parts of the South?  Someone mentioned Athens, GA.  I think that's another college town.    

What The Times article did not mention -- and where its premise is most strikingly borne out -- is that since the 2006 midterms returned congressional Democrats to power, Southern congressmen and senators have all but disappeared from committee chairs. At present, there are none in the Senate and just three in the House: John Spratt (SC) chairing Budget, Bennie Thompson (MS) chairing Homeland Security and Bart Gordon (TN) chairing Science & Technology. This power drought, the likes of which Southerners haven't experienced since the 1920s, is likely to continue for some time, as most Southern Democrats in both houses are low in seniority rankings.

<b>The Jim Crow Parties Are Different</b>

The changing culture, demography, and economy of the South are not refllected in the moribund and uncompetitive Democratic parties of the <i>ex</i>-Confederate states. These parties were nearly wiped-out in 1994. But, they are still searching for ways move virtually all policy matters into courts and cling to a collaborative ethos -- "conservative" Dems and "moderate" Reps -- in the legislative and executive branches of government, above all, in the "non-partisan" municipal governments.

Race is no longer decisive and a much less overt factor in political discourse. But, it is a huge factor in political patronage. Economics and <i>public finance</i> are paramount in state and local government, where they still reflect the original Jim Crow coalition: Today, that is mostly the slum-lord wing of the Democratic and land-speculator wing of the local Republican parties.

The small-donor and social-networking technologies introduced by the Obama campaign are the only real hope of political change in the Southern Democratic parties. Those still overwhelmingly still reflect a self-perpetuating and chain of professional and racial patronage - a "Grisham novel".  

This Texas native and Charlotte, NC resident was equally surprised reading this article. I mean Texas is not the south. Texas is Texas, but I think the biggest news was to my neighbors in Charlotte here who have just all learned from Adam Nossiter that we are no longer southerners.

What I take greater issue with, however, is the following:

"What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say."

Did this election not prove the opposite? I mean I definitely don't remember the Kerry campaign spending many resources in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia as Obama did.

@ strabka

The fact that Asheville has a branch of UNC may have made a slight difference in this election but this city is very liberal and cosmopolitan. When speaking of politics in NC Asheville is more in line with the Raleigh-Durham area than any other place in the state. Outside the city it's a sea of red but in Asheville we are blue.

I don't think the thrust of the NY Times article is that the Dems can now ignore the South...just that the deeply divisive Republican attempt to use Southern predjudice to control the votes there won't work anymore.

I do think the Dems should give even more attention to wresting the rest of the South from it's support of right-wing Republicans to more moderate politicians of both parties.

Cut it any way you like. I live it day in and day out. The deep South consists of an overwhelmingly racist voting population. Alabama and Mississippi are not Virginia and North Carolina. The NYT is spot on.

Presidential nominees have often underperformed in the home states of their primary opponents. (George Bush Sr. ran very weakly in Bob Dole's Kansas in 1988.) While there was no impact in New York, Obama was wiped out in Hillary Clinton's Arkansas.

I saw a definition of the South this week that included Oklahoma for purposes of counting Republican senators from the region. Why not throw in Kansas while the borders are expanding?

A few weeks ago I blogged about a county-by-county national map in the New York Time s showing that large