What The Hell America!

When Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin arrived in Florida’s 6th Congressional District over the weekend to campaign for Tuesday’s special House election, his expectations were in check.

Sure, Josh Weil—the Democratic candidate running for the seat that opened up when Rep. Mike Waltz left Congress to be President Trump’s national security advisor—has raised a truly impressive amount of money. And yes, Democratic voters appear to be looking for an outlet for their angst. But the Northeast Florida district hasn’t sent a Democratic representative to Congress in over forty years, and it supported Donald Trump by more than 30 points in November.

Party officials said that Martin’s visit wasn’t just about the special election. Rather, it was a recognition that as more Americans move to the South, the party has to step up its game in the region.

“It’s not by accident that I’m here in Florida right now actually canvassing in the Florida 6 election, or that I’ve been in Houston and Georgia already,” Martin said in an interview with The Bulwark before heading out to knock on doors. “There’s going to be a complete seismic shift as it relates to congressional power. . . . We cannot be caught flat-footed as a party. We have to be prepared to meet that moment.”

Thanks to a decades-long flood of cross-country migration from states like California and New York to states like Texas and Florida, the South has emerged as an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse. Tech companies are relocating to Austin; movies are increasingly being produced in Atlanta; and more students from the Northeast are attending SEC schools—and then staying in the South after graduating—than ever before. The region accounted for more than two-thirds of all job growth across the United States since early 2020, and it now contributes more to the national GDP than the Northeast does.

All of that means that the South is on track to make historic gains in the 2030 census. Florida and Texas are projected to gain four or more congressional seats, while North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee could each gain a seat. Meanwhile, reliably blue states like California could lose as many as five; New York might lose three. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin could also see declines.

All told, nearly four in ten Americans could hail from the South by the next census, according to a recent Brennan Center analysis. That not only means the path to a House majority runs through the South—it also means the party’s reliance on the “Blue Wall” will no longer be viable in future presidential elections. (The number of Electoral College votes a state gets is determined by how many congressional districts it has.)

Martin is fairly clear-eyed about the challenge ahead of him. He said the party has suffered from tunnel vision in the past and been unable to plan beyond the upcoming election. As the former head of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, he recognized that state parties in the South have been vastly underresourced for years. He described the Brennan Center report as “eye opening.” He recounted a conversation he had with Brandon Presley ahead of his 2023 race for Mississippi governor about how Southern states had been neglected for years by the national party—a conversation Martin said “sent shivers down my spine.” (Presley lost by 3.2 percent.)

Yet Martin remains optimistic.

“Wayne Gretzky said once that you have to skate to where the puck will be, not where the puck is,” Martin said. “These are ripe opportunities for the Democratic party if we do our job over these coming months and years.”

Share

AS DNC CHAIR, MARTIN HAS a professional obligation to keep a positive attitude. But less-constrained Democratic officials have been sounding the alarm. They warn that the party has ignored demographic changes for too long, and it still isn’t acting with enough urgency to avoid potentially devastating electoral outcomes for years to come.

“I’ve been trying to tell the party that they need to start looking South, because the trends have been there for a while,” former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones told The Bulwark. “I don’t have a lot of confidence right now that they are looking at the same demographics and the possibilities that so many of us in the South see.”

Jones warned: “If they don’t start doing it now, once that census is in, it’s going to be too late.”

At a DNC donor retreat in Fort Lauderdale on Friday, the changing electoral map was a major point of discussion. Democratic strategist Paul Rivera walked donors through the Brennan Center analysis in a slideshow presentation and Martin also emphasized to the group the importance of investing in state parties in the South. “We were faced with the fact that this could be a census catastrophe, depending upon what people do when 40 percent of the country is in the South,” said Chip Forrester, a member of the DNC finance committee and a former chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party.

Some state officials are skeptical that the resources will flow. Local leaders in the South have complained for years that the donor class and the DNC have not invested enough in state parties. They’ve watched national leaders talk a big game about flipping Texas or making Georgia reliably blue without putting in the work to reach those goals, such as by building out a robust on-the-ground staff that knows the region’s political landscape.

“What makes me sad is that it does not matter how many times we scream it, we aren’t being heard by the people who control our party,” said Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project and mayor of Enfield, a rural town in eastern North Carolina. “Building a new Blue Wall and pathway to 270 that includes Southern states—that’s going to require work in counties that we’ve never seen Democratic candidates go to.”

Jones said he worried the party was too “entrenched in the old ways of lurking from one election to the next looking for that shiny penny that’s going to win the election” and lacked the discipline needed to invest in long-term and bigger-picture strategies. “We have not played the long game in the South in a long, long time—and that is a huge problem,” he said.

Democrats in the South argue that despite the region’s conservative tilt, the challenge confronting their party isn’t insurmountable. The population boom, they note, is largely the result of black, Latino, and Asian people moving to the region—demographics that the party has historically done well with, although they lost some ground to Donald Trump in the last election.

But whether the party leadership will see that as an opportunity and decide to act before it’s too late remains to be answered.

“I think the party is starting to understand, but still hasn’t grasped the impact that Latino voters in particular are going to have with the realignment of the 2030 census,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and Bernie Sanders adviser from Texas.

“The way you figure out how to best reach Sunbelt Latinos—or black folks, or working class folks—is to start including them in the process to develop that strategy. And right now, there’s none of those people apparent in our own party.”

Share The Bulwark

— DNC donors who attended the finance meeting told me that folks arrived in Florida on Thursday evening for the two-day retreat feeling dejected. Many of them had made their largest donations ever during the 2024 cycle and were reluctant to open up their checkbooks again for a party they thought had mishandled that election. But two attendees, including Forrester, told me the mood had shifted by the end. Martin gave a compelling pitch about investing in the future of the party and his outside-the-Beltway perspective was a refreshing change. Still, there was an acknowledgement among the group that getting some of the party’s big donors to contribute could be a bit tougher this year, and there remained some anxiety about how the party will end the first quarter of the year.

— It’s not just Florida that’s voting this week! There’s also a high-profile Supreme Court election in Wisconsin on Tuesday that will determine the balance of the state’s highest court. The race has gained national attention in part due to Elon Musk, who has poured money into it, posted about it nonstop on social media, and even campaigned for the conservative candidate (Musk is expected to travel to the state on Sunday evening). As Bill Lueders argued in The Bulwark last week, the Wisconsin election will be a clear test of Musk’s influence and whether his playbook of dumping money into elections can be attempted elsewhere this midterms cycle.

— The first edition of Jonathan Cohn’s newsletter, The Breakdown, is out today, and I can’t recommend it enough.

— Sen. Michael Bennet wants to go back home to Colorado.

— Another excerpt from an upcoming campaign book paints an unflattering portrait of the Biden brain trust.

Leave a comment

Share