Is a New Sunbelt Populism Rising?

Despite a tough political climate, Trump’s overreach has emboldened the region’s next generation of liberals.

At a February 7th campaign event dubbed “Rally for Our Republic,” Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia assailed the Trump administration as the “most corrupt of all time,” asking rhetorically, “If you’re Steve Bannon, how do you sell any of this?” to the left-behind Americans who helped power Trump’s election victories. The widely circulated, pugilistic speech depicting Trump’s cabinet as part of the “Epstein class” was exactly the kind that base Democrats hungry for stronger leadership in Washington have been demanding since Trump’s return to office. Yet Ossoff’s speech was also notable for recasting the MAGA GOP as the party of intrusive and oppressive big government. “What happened to ‘don’t tread on me’?” jeered Ossoff after recounting Republican attempts to justify ICE’s lethal force and trail of violence. In the face of Trump’s escalating attempts to centralize power, Ossoff previewed how federalism and negative liberty might be reclaimed as progressive causes.

The speech was also a potent reminder that today’s swing state Democrats, incumbents and insurgents alike, have not been cowed into taking a bloodless stance on Trump’s record for fear of losing the suburban moderates and independents whom Democrats need to be competitive in conservative-leaning areas. As illustrated further by the increasingly combative style of Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego and James Talarico, the Texas State Representative vying with Representative Jasmine Crockett to flip a Senate seat held by the GOP since 1961, Sun Belt Democrats east of the Colorado River have become less guarded about the stakes facing their constituents and the country. But their rhetoric also takes firmer aim at the forces and interests that have tightened the financial vise on working families. Though they have yet to consistently match Bernie Sanders’s fusillades against America’s richest elites, their change in register reflects a bet that tenacity and conviction, not caution, is the key to reviving Democratic prospects in regions the GOP has dominated since the end of the New Democrat era.

These glimmers of a new Sun Belt populism challenge the conventional wisdom regarding Democrats’ strategy in the Southeast and Southwest. In the aftermath of the 2024 election, public attention turned toward the party’s new class of putative moderates—those who had won very close elections in recent years and had overperformed Kamala Harris—and the sobering advice they had for a party establishment that many ordinary voters saw as dysfunctional and disingenuous. Democrats, advised Gallego, Arizona’s newly minted junior Senator, had to get serious, fast, about the border and public safety, admit they underestimated inflation’s toll, and accept that working-class minorities aspiring to the American dream have little patience for progressive politics when it doesn’t manifestly advance their hopes. The heavy implication was that Democrats had to exit their echo chamber and reconnect with voters who want a simple, clear agenda focused on security and opportunity.

It wasn’t just rhetoric, either. Twelve senators, including Gallego and Ossoff, voted for the Laken Riley Act the day of Trump’s inauguration, to the dismay of progressives who warned it would undermine due process and violate other civil liberties. The dilemma over how to win the confidence of moderates who swung to Trump over the border crisis and simultaneously hold rogue agencies accountable hasn’t relented since. As a majority of Americans conclude ICE makes them “less safe,” Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada, have counseled other party moderates to take a tougher stance on crime while pressing for targeted DHS reforms.

Sensitive to charges Democrats still have no appetite to regulate immigration, pragmatists such as Gallego have similarly straddled the line. Although he has attacked the “goon squads” deployed in Minneapolis and said ICE is “rotten” at its core, Gallego continues to stress the importance of border security, reforming the asylum process, and strengthening operations that deter drug and human trafficking. Many activists have thus wondered if, in the stand-offs to come, the party’s most vulnerable incumbents might make unsavory compromises in order to look tough and stay viable back home.

And yet, a year into Trump’s second term, such fears have largely diminished. Instead, there has been a pronounced shift in emphasis among the Sun Belt’s rising stars toward fighting corruption and abuses of power. Along with former North Carolina governor and Senate candidate Roy Cooper, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and a handful of Southern insurgents hoping to fuel a blue wave in the House, these Democrats have taken the fight to the GOP’s hard right but also become more vocal about confronting monopolistic practices that drive up household expenses and undercut local economies.

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This surge in left-populist rhetoric beyond liberal strongholds is proof that Democrats’ ideological factions don’t necessarily correspond to fixed regional blocs. But it also marks a change from the pattern that had emerged in recent decades. Before economist Thomas Piketty coined the “Brahmin left” typology, terms like “San Francisco liberal” or “Massachusetts liberal,” while wielded as pejoratives by Republicans, had captured the realignment that was underway in the Democratic Party by the mid-Aughts.

The party’s ascendant bloc comprised college-educated, urban-dwelling whites and minorities who were economic progressives to varying degrees but were closely associated with a positive outlook on globalization, feminism and LGBT rights, and environmentalism. Rust Belt and red state Democrats, by contrast, either reflected the party’s embattled protectionist faction, and thus did not always align with other liberals on immigration or climate policy, or the more socially conservative remnants of the party’s New Democrat phase. Mostly Southern, these latter Democrats by and large symbolized the kind of moderation that other party members had grown frustrated with but which, for obvious electoral reasons, couldn’t be spurned outright.

The Tea Party moment then brutally accomplished what urban liberal activists couldn’t achieve on their own: purge their party of dozens of “centrists” who, it must be said, often seemed more interested in incremental bipartisanship and old-fashioned logrolling than overdue reform. In both the 2010 and 2014 midterms, Democrats suffered staggering losses in conservative-leaning states that had previously supported several down-ballot Democrats even as they shifted steadily to the Republican column in presidential elections. Those outcomes underscored for many observers that the dynamic that had emerged in the post-civil rights era had reached its apogee: the Northeast and West Coast were the bastions of contemporary progressivism, while the former states of the Confederacy, sans Virginia but with the addition of Arizona, home to Barry Goldwater, John McCain, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, formed the indisputable base of “movement” conservatism.

Democratic strategists and activists were divided, however, over how to put together a coalition that would make up for the losses that had accumulated under Barack Obama. Despite the demoralizing pattern in the Southeast and Southwest, there was a sense, prior to Trump’s 2016 victory, that the worst had come to pass and that a new generation of more energetic, social media-savvy leaders, buoyed by the multiracial “rising American electorate,” would keep Florida firmly in the presidential column and at last tilt Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina in Democrats’ favor. While Ohio and the fabled “blue wall,” it was generally agreed, had to be defended, many strategists ventured the party would be better off cutting its losses in Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana and concentrating on the Sun Belt states that were rapidly gaining in population.

These debates became fiercer as Bernie Sanders mounted a credible challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary. Clinton memorably played up Sanders’s undeniable lack of support from older Southern black voters, while strongly signaling she would mobilize the younger minorities who would determine Florida and North Carolina and even put Texas in play. Clinton, moreover, tied race to Sanders’s economic pitch to depict his movement, like Trump’s base, as essentially backward-looking and pessimistic. Sanders, Clinton insinuated, was capturing an intergenerational bloc of globalization’s losers: the old, anti-free-trade white left of industrial labor and its sympathizers, as well as millennials “living in their parents’ basement” since the Great Recession—frustrated “baristas,” in Clinton’s words, who were unhappy with their education and career prospects and looking for “free” stuff. (Besides its condescension, Clinton’s outlook ignored that black manufacturing workers, from Detroit and Gary, Indiana, to the Southern piedmont, had also suffered heavily from offshoring and import competition.)

Remarks like these, matched by Clinton’s glaring lack of campaign stops in Wisconsin and Michigan, came to haunt the Democratic establishment following Trump’s 2016 upset. Clinton had made it sound as if Sanders’s movement was unsuited to understanding the preferences and aspirations of the diversifying New South. But she failed to rally the minority voters her campaign assumed would propel her to victory—black turnout noticeably dipped from the surge obtained by Obama in 2008 and 2012, particularly in those very regions Clinton implied were stuck in Fordist nostalgia—and Florida, then the most prized toss-up state, began its sharp swing to the right.

Since then, the party has wrestled with how to fix its image problems in the Midwest while maximizing opportunities across the Sun Belt. In the latter case, the ability to project “star power” that might overwhelm local Republican machines has had enormous purchase among Democratic operatives and progressive media. Yet the results have been a muddle. Insurgent candidates such as Beto O’Rourke, whose bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz generated national excitement, and Stacey Abrams, who ran two unsuccessful campaigns for governor of Georgia, were feted like celebrities. But their 2018 defeats, although fairly narrow, underscored the limits of relying on resistance liberalism and viral media clips in fast-diversifying states.

A few breakthroughs in 2020 and early 2021 amid a less than stellar down-ballot performance for congressional Democrats nationally seemed to reaffirm the case for moderation. Heartened by Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 victories in Arizona and Georgia, as well as the election of Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, and Ossoff to the Senate, national Democrats tentatively concluded that the rising American electorate would indeed be the linchpin of Democratic victories, but that it was essential to also mobilize suburban independents and “Romney Republicans” alienated by MAGA extremists. In effect, Democrats outside deep blue states had to strike a balance between harnessing appeals to identity while praising the shared advances and aspirations of regions eager to move on from the terrible legacies of Jim Crow.

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It was thus taken for granted that left-populism would not emanate from the South and Southwest—that it would stay isolated to a few coastal cities and Northern Rust Belt districts. The new slate of purple-state Democrats, reflecting the party’s center of gravity, were more culturally liberal than their New Democrat predecessors. But they were otherwise expected to play their counterparts in the Trump era, especially as the forecast worsened in 2024; to win and be reelected, they would have to visibly break with their leadership and the progressive base on select issues and be measured in their criticism of economic inequities and concentrations of market power. The Sun Belt, after all, was attracting hundreds of thousands of Northerners and Californians—many of them minorities—purportedly in search of the “pro-growth” policies and lower costs that Republican incumbents repeatedly boasted of.

The Trump administration’s chief priorities, its brazen corruption, and persistent economic headwinds have upended that calculus. Indiscriminate tariffs, the yearlong uptick in grocery prices, the sluggish job market, the rollback of basic consumer protections, the collapse of antitrust enforcement, and the surge in utility rates due to the energy demands of AI data centers are hurting ordinary Sun Belt residents no less than blue state ones. Trump’s expansive detention and deportation regime has also repulsed countless Latinos whose support in 2024 likely contributed to his victories in Arizona and Georgia and his even stronger performance in Texas. Finally, as the housing crisis has become national in scope, the Sun Belt’s advantages have dwindled—a sign, perhaps, the region has become a victim of its own success. The discontent all this has generated suggests Sun Belt Democrats can afford to be more like the populist Texan Jim Hightower or Florida’s legendary New Dealer Claude Pepper and less reminiscent of the overcautious Al Gore as they push to expand their coalition’s geographic reach.

Indeed, Democrats following Ossoff’s and Gallego’s lead have strong reasons to channel an older strain of populism, one which guided the best of the South’s liberal reformers. While the national party treats its regional obstacles as a fait accompli dictated by the preferences of red state electorates who have rewarded Republicans decrying the ills of the “woke” left, there is nothing inevitable about the current red state “growth model” or its popularity. In fact, its support may prove weaker than meets the eye. Despite the Sun Belt’s allure, tepid wage growth, minimal workplace protections, and regressive taxes continue to weigh down working families hoping for greater mobility. But whether one regards the “Texas Miracle,” “Florida’s Blueprint,” and their equivalents as enhancing opportunity or enabling exploitation, these are far from the only development traditions known to the Sun Belt. For all the assumptions that the South and Southwest have historically stood for rugged individualism, these regions have a storied reputation of contesting monopoly power and employing antitrust laws to diversify their economies. They also benefitted enormously from New Deal programs that spread electrification and public power and corresponding regional planning boards that seeded industries beyond textiles, furniture, and mining.

Laissez-faire governance, in short, has rarely if ever defined the section’s laudable progress. Insurgents who can get this history right, while proudly invoking their states’ many triumphs over stereotype, will be best positioned to magnify the shortcomings—as well as the mounting philosophical incoherence—of Republican rule at the local and federal levels.

That’s not to say it’ll be easy to change the minds of Sun Belt voters conditioned to view liberalism warily. Gallego and Ossoff have amassed a national following, and the telegenic Talarico may have a shot at joining them in the Senate if he overtakes Crockett, his Democratic rival. But their party has yet to cultivate down-ballot insurgents who can replicate, in district after district, the kind of upset recently pulled off by machinist Taylor Rehmet in North Texas. Furthermore, their shared strategy of leaning into anticorruption populism while largely ignoring the liabilities of progressive identity politics has yet to be really put to the test. Even if Trump’s support continues to crater, Ossoff faces a tough reelection environment, and his fate in November will have an outsized impact on whether Democrats triangulate at all on the issues that contributed to their harrowing 2024 losses.

Still, as the heavy hand of Trump’s politicized agencies, deportation efforts, and unscientific tariffs sap the economic vitality of local communities at the same time that the well-connected are handsomely rewarded and shielded from oversight, Democrats have a rare opportunity to turn the tables in the regions at the center of their dreams and disappointments. By this time next year, observers across the political spectrum may be talking about a very different—and wholly unexpected—Southern renaissance.