Losing the Sun Belt

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 18, 2026

 

If you seek evidence that the GOP might still avert an electoral crisis in November, you’ve come to the wrong place.

 

While avoiding a forecast — prudently, as there are plenty of twists and turns still in store for us this cycle — Jeff Blehar expects “a bloody cull” of the GOP’s Senate candidates. Dan McLaughlin is no cheerier. If the president remains as unpopular as he is today by late October, it portends “grisly news” for the Republican Party, he wrote. If there are any signs of hope for the GOP’s senatorial class, almost all of them are in states to the north of the 35th Parallel.

 

Dan explains:

 

This cycle, if you take the polls at face value, Republicans right now stand to absorb a punishing net loss of five Senate seats — enough to flip the chamber — potentially with losses in heretofore deep-red precincts such as Texas, Alaska, and Ohio, the defeat of long-entrenched incumbent Susan Collins in Maine, blowout Democratic wins in the Sun Belt in North Carolina and Georgia, and — frustratingly — the three closest races in which they’re trailing all being potential pickups in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. That’s even with Ashley Hinson in Iowa clinging to barely more than a toss-up lead.

 

The GOP is seeing the same data that Dan analyzed, and they’re acting on it. “Some Republicans say the party needs to consider shifting strategy to have the best chance of keeping the Senate,” Politico’s Burgess Everett reported. Some advocate shifting “money from North Carolina and Georgia to more winnable races.” Even if the GOP pulled off upsets (and they would be upsets in a year with the kind of headwinds Republicans are facing) in the states where the polling for Democratic candidates is soft — New Hampshire, Michigan, and Minnesota — Democrats would still have more than one pathway to a majority in the upper chamber. Mitigating the party’s losses remains imperative.

 

But what a blow to lose the South — indeed, to preemptively cede the South. Incumbency is no small boon, as Georgia’s two Democratic senators would attest. Before 2021, the Peach State had not sent a Democrat to the Senate in over two decades — and that Democrat was Zell Miller, a liberal so conservative he endorsed George W. Bush at the Republican nominating convention in 2004. Today, dislodging Jon Ossoff or even Raphael Warnock from the seats they occupy is an all but impossible task.

 

Much the same could be said of Arizona. There, the state GOP went to war with its Republican senators. In a Pyrrhic victory for the Arizona Republican Party, they got rid of Jeff Flake and successfully besmirched the name McCain, replacing those figures with middling political talents that were swiftly replaced by Democrats Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego. Both senators are arguably to the left of their state’s electorate, but neither has proven vulnerable to challenges from the candidates that have emerged from the enervated ranks of the Arizona GOP.

 

Republicans are flirting with a similar outcome in Texas, where the party’s complacency has produced a variety of unacceptable nominees. Just as the GOP erroneously persuaded itself that the 2021 runoff elections that turned Georgia blue at the federal level would be easily reversible, Republicans are kidding themselves if they think Senator James Talarico would be a one-termer. We could say the same of North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, who is likely to succeed Republican Thom Tillis in the upper chamber.

 

For several cycles, Republicans have ceded the advantages that they spent decades acquiring in the Sun Belt. That’s a sharp reversal from the beginning of the past decade, when the GOP’s ascendancy rested on its appeal to this economically vibrant and growing part of the country.

 

In relative terms, the American South’s red hue is a recent historical development. The South’s evolution began in the middle of the past century, but its vestigial attachment to Democratic politics hung on well into the 21st century. It wasn’t until 2011, for example, that Republicans captured control of Mississippi’s state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction.

 

Yes, the GOP lost the jewel of the Sun Belt — California — long ago. But California had sacrificed its reputation for dynamism and economic vibrancy long before that. The American South and Southwest, by contrast, grew in influence and population precisely because they embraced the pro-growth policies and limited-government politics that Republicans of that era espoused. What’s more, the Democrats who told themselves that the region’s growing Latino population would rescue them saw their hopes dashed as America’s Hispanics have spent the past decade demonstrating that demography is not destiny.

 

Republicans sacrificed their appeal in the Sun Belt, and they compensated (consciously, in fact) for that by attempting to boost their appeal in the Rust Belt. That campaign has been fruitful, but at what cost?

 

The election of Democrats to the federal legislature in the South will not change the social contract in their respective states. Talarico won’t transform Texas into an overregulated, moribund, illegal-migrant sanctuary any more than the election of Mike Rogers in Michigan would signal the end of the Wolverine State’s commitment to organized labor. But Republicans should not gloss over the possibility that they might lose voters in the fastest-growing parts of the country.