The South is the fastest-growing region in the U.S., with states like Georgia and Texas seeing a surge of younger and more diverse people. Experts say that could mean generational political shifts in the Sun Belt.

Guests

Michael Li, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law.

Charles Bullock, Richard B. Russell professor of political science at the University of Georgia

Amanda Nelson, co-founder of Y’all Vote, an organization working to flip statehouses in the South from Republican to Democrat. Political content creator behind the account “Amanda’s Mild Takes.”

Matt Mackowiak, GOP strategist. President of Potomac Strategy Group. Former chair of the Travis County Republican Party.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I        

ANTHONY BROOKS: The South is the fastest-growing region in the United States with expanding populations of young people, immigrants, and people of color. That means big shifts in political power. Consider the midterm elections less than three weeks away.

People are already voting in many states. There are close races in several southern states, once considered reliably Republican. In Texas, the Democratic dream of flipping the state blue is being carried by James Talarico, running for the U.S. Senate against Republican State Attorney General Ken Paxton.

JAMES TALARICO: We need a new American dream for today’s families. I am running for LBJ’s Senate seat, the Hill Country’s own Lyndon Johnson.

BROOKS: In North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper is running well ahead of Michael Whatley in a race that could help Democrats take control of the U.S. Senate. And in Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms is in a close race for governor against Republican Rick Jackson.

RICK JACKSON: If you’re ready for a real-life conservative who knows how to fight the tough fights and win big for Georgia, I’m Rick Jackson, and I’m asking for your vote.

KEISHA LANCE BOTTOMS: He has missed this debate. He’d rather hide behind his billions than explain to you his record of making billions off the taxpayers of Georgia.

BROOKS: Even in South Carolina, the reddest of red states, there’s a tight race between Republican Senator Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister, and her Democratic challenger, Dr. Annie Andrews. Now, of course, rising prices, an unpopular war, and a very unpopular president have a lot to do with these races, but so does the way the South is growing and changing.

Young people, immigrants, and African Americans are moving in big numbers to states like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, fueling a population boom that means more political power for the South, as many as nine new seats in Congress. So that’s what we’re looking at today. And let’s begin with Michael Li.

He’s senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Michael, good to have you. Welcome to On Point.

MICHAEL LI: Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

BROKS: Yeah, we’re glad to have you and I want to talk about the political implications of this soon, but let’s start with a primer of how the South is changing.

What’s happening in terms of these demographic shifts?

LI: So step back six decades and since the 1960s, the South has been the fastest growing region of the country decade after decade. In that period of time, it has gained 30-something congressional seats. If you go back to 1960, the South, the Midwest, and the Northeast were all about the same size.

The South is now by far the largest region in the country. About 40% of all Americans live in the South and that’s a long-going story. But what’s changed a bit in recent years is that increasingly it’s people of color who are driving the population growth of the South. And in fact, in states like Georgia and Texas, you’re actually starting to see the white population decline, not just as a share of the population, but in absolute numbers.

As the older white population leaves the scene, the states are becoming much more diverse at a very fast clip. The South has also been a big recipient of immigration, in part because it has a booming economy. And so lots of immigrants have come there, and they’ve also made these states much more diverse, and that’s been a big change in the recent years.

BROOKS: You told my producer, Claire, as an example, Texas could add close to 800,000 Black people this decade. That’s about as many Black people as live in Mississippi, or to put it another way, it’s about a congressional district worth of Black people coming to Texas. So talk a little bit about that. Is that consistent across the South or what strikes you about that? That’s a pretty extraordinary fact.

LI: It is an extraordinary fact that Texas, like I should have said, is the fastest growing state in the country by far, and along with a quartet of other states, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and South Carolina really those are the states that are driving the South’s population growth.

And really there’s sort of two Souths. There’s the fast-growing boom states of the South that I just mentioned, and then there’s sort of the rest of the South. And these are very attractive states for a variety of reasons. And not only for people coming from outside the United States, but also people relocating from within the United States, including a lot of people of color.

There’s been really a sort of reverse great migration that’s been taking place this decade and the last as people leave cities like Chicago and New York that are expensive and that aren’t as perceived as having as much opportunity and moving back to the South. And they’re choosing places like Texas and Georgia and North Carolina and really powering the growth and then making these states the fastest growing states in the country.

BROOKS: And what’s behind this? What explains this move? Is it job opportunities? Is it climate? Is it all of the above?

LI: That’s a great question. I think it’s a little bit of all of it. I think a lot of people, the cost of living has gotten much higher and there’s a lot of stories of people who are leaving places in New York, where they live in a two-bedroom apartment and they move to Atlanta and they get a four-bedroom house with a yard in a suburban area with good schools.

And really, I think, that’s driving it. And the southern states have been some of the fastest-growing as well. Texas is booming. And really I think a lot of the Black population growth actually is not in cities like Dallas or Houston, but is in the suburbs of places like Dallas and Houston and it’s really sort of middle-class Black Americans looking for opportunity and finding it in Texas and other states like that.

BROOKS: And let me ask you as well about more and more younger voters. I was seeing, reading that according to the latest census data, the South was the only region in the nation which recorded an increase in the number of residents under 18 over the past five years. Compare that to the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West, which saw their share of young people plunge.

So that’s changing the demographics as well across the South, right?

LI: Yeah, absolutely. Texas in particular has the second-youngest population in the country, and it’s adding a lot of new babies every year. Whereas in many states, in other parts of the country, you’re actually now seeing more deaths than births, and that’s a new thing.

But states like Texas continue to add, to have a net number of births over deaths.

BROOKS: So when we look at the effect of this politically, we can look at states like Texas, like North Carolina, like Georgia. There’s been a lot of coverage of close Senate races there, where Democrats are pinning their hopes on victories to help them retake the Senate.

And there’s a lot of reasons that you can point to about why Democrats are competitive in these states. It might have to do with candidate quality, it might have to do with the economy, with an unpopular president. But to what extent does it also have to do with what you’re talking about here?

LI: There certainly are a lot of new people in the South who weren’t there even in 2020, but certainly weren’t there a decade or more ago. And these states have really just gotten much more demographically diverse. The electorates have gotten much more demographically diverse. White voters in Texas are now only 46% of the electorate and that is, whereas Latinos are 32% of the electorate and rising.

And if you go back to the early 2000s, Latinos were a quarter of the electorate, and now they’re a third of the electorate. And they are the deciders, right? And I should also mention Asians. Texas has the fastest growing Asian population in the country. It will have a larger Asian population by the end of the decade than New York.

And really these new groups whose votes are up for grabs are really the deciders. In 2024, a lot of Latinos went toward Republicans. This cycle, there’s a lot of evidence, at least if you believe the polls, that Latinos might be reverting toward Democrats, and that’s changing the politics of these states, and it’s making it much more interesting than it was. Because we’ve gotten very used to telling a static story of the politics of the South, almost Faulknerian version where nothing ever changes, and now the South is the place where everything is changing.

BROOKS: So long term and I know this is a difficult question to answer, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Does this demographic shift help Republicans more or Democrats more, or is it a little too complicated to answer?

LI: The way I would put it is that the future of the South is going to be increasingly multiracial.

And the winners of this will be the party or parties that compete for that multiracial future. Increasingly, you’re not going to be able to succeed in places like Texas by just appealing to white voters. You’re going to have to build a multiracial coalition that includes Latinos, includes Asians, includes Black voters, and the party that sort of figures out how to do that will win the future.

BROOKS: And another thing, when we think of presidential politics, the Electoral College more and more of the country, more and more of the focus of this is going to be focused on the South, right? With a larger population comes a bigger share in the Electoral College.

LI: That’s right. The South is not gonna only gain congressional representation with the nine new seats, it’s going to gain nine new electoral votes, and that totally changes the dynamics for how you get to 270 electoral votes. It will no longer be sufficient for the Democrats to win the blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

That will not get them to 270, even if they do that, because the South will be that much more powerful. Even winning the blue wall states plus Arizona and Nevada barely gets Democrats to 270. So really, the future of the country’s politics is increasingly going to be the South, and the South really, in a lot of ways, will be the ballgame and that’s something that’s new for the South.

They’re not used to doing that. I think it’s also a very scary situation for Republicans potentially, because if Republicans can’t consistently win states like Texas or Georgia, then their path has to change, and particularly Texas, because Texas by next decade will have 44 electoral votes potentially, and that’s a huge number of votes that Republicans want to be able to count on and they may not be able to count on unless they do better at winning Texas.

Part II

BROOKS: Michael, you were explaining a lot about this demographic shift across the South before the break. I want to ask you, is it largely … where is it happening? Is it happening in rural locations, urban locations, throughout the South? Where is it centered?

LI: It really is happening in urban and especially suburban locations.

The suburbs of places like Dallas and Atlanta really are booming. In fact, far more people live in the suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth than live in the two major cities themselves. And they’re booming across the board. They’re adding white people.

They’re adding Black people. They’re adding Latinos. They’re adding Asians. In one of the suburban counties north of Dallas which is the third fastest growing county in the country, Collin County, 43% of the growth this decade has been from Asians. And so it really is an extraordinary moment that those counties are also adding large numbers of Black voters, large numbers of Latino voters and it’s really and in fact, they’re becoming majority non-white, and that really is a big shift.

BROOKS: Michael Li, stand by. I wanna welcome into the conversation Charles Bullock. He’s Richard B. Russell Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia, and he joins us from Athens, Georgia. Charles Bullock, welcome to On Point. It’s great to have you.

CHARLES BULLOCK: Great to be with you and Michael, and join the conversation.

BROOKS: Good. Pick it up anywhere you want. What political shifts are you noticing in this current midterm cycle? Let’s start there. How is this playing out in the current batch of races that a lot of us are paying a lot of attention to across the South?

BULLOCK: If we were doing this 10 years ago, I think it would be a very short conversation, and we would say, virtually all of these Senate seats which are of interest, governorships, U.S. House seats, that Republicans are going to win them unless they are very urban. And what we see now, and you’ve touched on this already, is it looks like the North Carolina seat is going to go from Republican to Democrat.

A year ago, it was thought that Georgia’s Jon Ossoff was the most endangered Democrat in the Senate, and now he’s leading by 8 to 10 points. And the question then becomes will he have enough coattails to elect a governor, Democratic governor in Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms?

BROOKS: Yeah, so you’ve been observing politics in Georgia for a long time.

How does this moment feel new or different to you right, right now? You just explained that, but this is a pretty dramatic change, right?

BULLOCK: Absolutely, yeah. I lived through one realignment as Georgia and the South went from Democrat to Republican, and I may get to see another realignment, at least with regard to what you referred to as the growth states.

And yeah, it is two Souths, what is happening here in Georgia with the resurgent Democratic Party is not at all like what is happening if you cross our border to the west and get to Alabama, where it’s not even clear that the Republican Party is maxed out there. The Republican Party, in terms of its vote shares in Georgia, maxed out about 20 years ago.

The Republican Party has lost 20 seats in the State House over the last eight elections. There is change underway here in this state, and Virginia has already changed. North Carolina is posed for change. And the most interesting one, of course, is Texas.

BROOKS: So tell me what you’re most interested about when you when you look at Texas.

And where I’m leading with this question, I asked Michael this before the break. To what extent are Democrats competitive in these states? Which feels like news, which feels like a new thing, and might be explained in a big way by these demographic shifts. But it might also be explained by candidate quality, by a bad economy, by an unpopular war, an unpopular president.

How do you balance the thinking about what explains this?

BULLOCK: Just to underscore how dramatic things are, there’s not been a non-incumbent Democrat elected to a statewide constitutional office in Georgia or Texas in this century. This is generational, potentially. It helps Democrats across the board that this is midterm of a Republican presidential election.

Now, if we look at the U.S. House, there’s only been three times since the Civil War where the president’s party came out of a midterm election better off than they went going into it, in terms of Congress. But adding onto that, inflation, the unpopular war the unpopularity increasingly of what is being done with regard to deportations.

So there are lots of things which are working to Democrats’ advantage, and it looks like they have pretty good candidates that they’ve recruited this year. So everything lines up in Democrats’ favor, although they are still climbing a hill because Republicans have been in charge. They’ve got to draw the congressional districts.

So yeah, Democrats have the wind to their back, but they do have to go uphill to succeed.

BROOKS: Michael, I want to come back to you. When it comes to this population shift, I’m wondering what we know about early registration data and precinct level shifts. Are these new residents reinforcing existing political majorities, or are we actually seeing in this registration data a sort of shift in the balance of power?

LI: I think that’s a little hard to tell in the South because in Southern states you generally don’t register by party. And that’s different in states like New York where you register as a Democrat or a Republican. And so what we know about these voters is when they vote.

And we will get a very interesting set of data. This is like a goldmine for political scientists and those who study politics, because you’re talking about a very new and emerging electorate. And we’ll find out whether these people are showing that they’re going to be reliable Democrats or reliable Republicans over the course of the next few elections.

And we’ll also know whether they’re going to stick it out or whether they’re just particularly mad this election cycle, and then they decide that they’re going to be non-voters going forward. But, I think, there’s a lot of … if you’re a Democrat in a place like Texas, there’s a lot of encouraging signs that maybe you can put together a coalition with this new electorate that might hold the state and might win, not only a U.S. Senate seat, but polling shows that every statewide office Lieutenant Governor, Agriculture Commissioner, everything is up for grabs this cycle, and that could be really exciting because it could be a whole sweep for Democrats in Texas.

BROOKS: Really interesting.

BULLOCK: Anthony, one of the things to look at —

BROOKS: Yeah, go ahead, Charles.

BULLOCK: Yeah, is Michael’s right, most Southern states don’t register by party, but you can look at what happened in the primaries. Now, here in Georgia 150,000 more people asked for the Democratic than the Republican ballot back in our May primary.

Over the last 16 years, the only other time when there were more Democratic than Republican ballots cast in a primary was 2020, and of course, that’s when Georgia voted for Joe Biden and elected two Democratic senators.

BROOKS: That’s really interesting. So there’s a short-term effect that we’ve been … we’ve been talking about a long-term effect, but we’ve also been talking about a short-term effect on the midterms.

But what about this longer game in the run-up to the 2030 census? With more population there are more chances to redraw these political maps. What does that look like to you? Charles, let me start with you.

BULLOCK: Yeah. What Democrats are going to have to do in order to protect themselves is to win either governorships or control with a legislative body.

Now, what we’ve seen recently has been Republicans with a trifecta. They control all the powers of redistricting. If that’s the situation in a state come 2031, once the new data come out, sure, you’re going to continue to see Republicans press their advantage. Nothing new here. Democrats did the same thing for decades when they were in the majority. But if Democrats say in this state, suppose Keisha Lance Bottoms wins the governorship and then gets reelected in 2030, then you’re going to end up with a map which is going to be much more balanced in terms of fairness to Democrats and Republicans.

Same thing could happen in most other southern states. Not in North Carolina, though, because the governor can’t veto a redistricting plan.

BROOKS: Michael, what’s your view on the chances of this redistricting come the 2030 census?

LI: I think you’re already starting to see a lot of signs that there could be a freak-out about a changing America.

And that in things like the new rules that the Trump administration is proposing, which would, for example, eliminate the collection of race and ethnicity data on the census. We’ve asked a form of race question from every census dating back to 1790. This could be the first census in 2030 that doesn’t ask that.

You’re also seeing efforts to exclude people, because a lot of the growth in the country are immigrants. And some share of those are undocumented immigrants, some share of those are students, some share of those are people on H-1B visas. And all of those people under the new rules that are being proposed by the Trump administration would no longer be counted.

Now, that’s a process that’s still in its early stages, that an effort to do that would almost certainly be challenged in court. But they are moving forward as of right now on things like adding a citizenship question to the census, asking questions about your legal status and the like in order to be able to try to implement this.

And I think if states like Texas flip or Georgia continues becoming a blue state, I think there will be a lot of efforts potentially to undermine that and not to make it hard to fully realize those gains.

BROOKS: Interesting, yeah. Charles, I’m wondering as we see this population growth across the South, heavily concentrated in major metro areas and suburban rings, Michael mentioned this before the break, how are you seeing the parties adjusting their strategies to either maximize turnout in these expanding suburbs or countering them by turning out rural voters?

BULLOCK: Yeah. As the South becomes more urban, you simply can’t win by just simply going with rural voters. Now, here in Georgia in 2018, Governor Kemp concentrated on rural Georgia and won. But even his own advisors told him, “This is the last election you can do that with. You’re going to have to spend much more time working the suburbs.”

Now, there are suburbs and then there are outer suburbs. The inner suburbs increasingly are the ones that are becoming Democratic. But if you go out to the second ring, that’s where Republicans are very heavy. But even there, you’re beginning to see some inroads. For example, in one of the most Republican counties just north of Atlanta, the two southernmost precincts are becoming Democratic.

Why? Because there’s a huge influx of Indians. Whole subdivisions, I’m told, are essentially populated by Indians. So this diverse population is moving further and further out from the cities, and the game’s going to be played in those because that’s where you find the swing voters. Who are the swing voters?

They’re white, college-educated voters. Those are people who generally identify as Republican, but who are not Trump Republicans, and they’re going to be critical this year’s elections.

BROOKS: All right, that’s really interesting. And let me ask you about the extent to which minority voting power is going to be protected or diluted.

And here I’ll come back to you, Mike. How do you anticipate the expiration or preservation of the Voting Rights Act provisions which influence how the next set of congressional maps are drawn?

LI: That’s a great question because I do think there will be efforts to dismantle a lot of opportunity districts that exist.

Now, that can be a dangerous game because people did try to do some of that this decade, and it looks like that may backfire on Republicans because they may have spread their voters out too thin and may lose some of the seats that they thought, but they were going to have for sure and not take that one —

BROOKS: You’re talking there about last year’s redistricting effort.

Was it last year? The most recent redistricting efforts, which you’re saying might backfire on Republicans, right?

LI: That’s right. Yeah. In states like Texas and Alabama where they eliminated a Black district, Louisiana where they eliminated a Black district, and some of that may backfire on them.

But I think that there will be an effort to undermine minority power because there still is a lot of racially polarized voting in the South. And a large share of Democrats in the South will be people of color, and if you can eliminate those seats, you can try to hang on to your power for a bit longer.

Now, that’s in some ways stupid game because it’s not as though states like Texas and Georgia are going to stop getting more diverse, and the electorate of the future is going to be even more people of color, right? Because the older Americans tend to be disproportionately white as the large Baby Boomer generation, which is very disproportionately white, begins to leave the scene.

You’re going to have a much more diverse electorate, and if you don’t begin competing for that electorate, if you just try to undermine the power of Black voters and Latino voters and Asian voters, you will not be well placed for when those voters are not only a significant voice, but the majority in these states.

I want to talk about Republican and Democratic strategy in the South, and I’ll come back to you for this, Charles. For years, Southern GOP power has relied on low taxes, on talking about economic growth. How is the party, or is the party adapting its messaging to retain these new residents who move for economic reasons, but may not align with the local party’s social platform?

Can you talk a little bit about that?

BULLOCK: Yeah, and those two things I didn’t mention, low taxes is still very forefront of Republican messaging. It’s expanded now so that it talks about not only lower income taxes in states that have it, but even going down to the local level and Republicans promising to cut property taxes, which almost exclusively are local governments.

But they’re also, Republicans, are becoming sensitive in the states, and there’s still 10 of them, which are concentrated in the South, which haven’t fully embraced the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it’s known. So some Republicans are now beginning to acknowledge that maybe that’s something that needs to be done because they’re getting such an outcry from their citizenry who are suffering because of the absence of the efforts that were put in place by the Biden administration to make purchasing health care more affordable.

This is going to continue to become significant with each year as it becomes harder and harder to find any kind of health insurance. So there is an aware —

BROOKS: I think we lost Charles there. We’ll work to get him back. Michael, let me come back to you and talk about sort of the Southern Democratic playbook.

Southern Democrats have seen varying levels of success. We talked about breakthroughs, potential breakthroughs in states like Georgia. What’s the focus there in persuading these moderate swing voters or how to drive up turnout among these newly arrived residents of the states?

LI: I think, yeah, I think in places like Texas and the suburbs of Atlanta, people are still trying to figure that out, and Republicans still try to, a lot of times, play by the old playbook which is to punch a bunch of culture war buttons and the like. In Texas, people talk about Sharia law in some of these counties that are adding a large number of Indian Americans and things like that.

As though that’s a threat. Elected officials talk about problems with diversity in schools and the like. But Democrats, I think, are still trying to figure this out because it’s a very different electorate.

Part III

BROOKS: Amanda Nelson is co-founder of the organization Y’all Vote, which is working to flip state houses in the South from Republican to Democrat. She’s also the political content creator behind the account Amanda’s Mild Takes.

She joins us from Richmond, Virginia. Amanda, welcome to On Point. Great to have you.

AMANDA NELSON: Hi. Thank you for having me.

BROOKS: And Matt Mackowiak also joins us from On Point station KUT in Austin. Matt is a GOP strategist in Texas and the president of Potomac Strategy Group. He’s also a former chair of the Travis County Republican Party.

Matt, great to have you. Thank you for joining us.

MATT MACKOWIAK: Hi, my pleasure. Thank you.

BROOKS: Amanda, let me start with you. First of all, talk a little bit about the work that Y’all Voting is doing. Just describe what you’re up to.

NELSON: Sure. We are a coalition of content creators in all of the 13 southern states.

We coordinate messaging and work on voter education and getting out the vote specifically targeting state House races, so state senate, state general assemblies, also governor’s races and Supreme Court races where they have the ability to affect gerrymandered maps. So that’s what we’re working on.

BROOKS: Gotcha. And you’ve been listening I assume. We’ve been talking about big demographic changes across the South. I’m wondering which ones you’re paying attention to and how this is driving your strategy.

NELSON: All of them. So we fundraise for competitive state House seats in all of the 13 states, but we focus a lot of our efforts on the states where these demographic changes are happening.

So we’re focused a lot on Texas, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina specifically.

BROOKS: Gotcha. All right. So Matt, let me bring you in and the same question. What are you seeing in terms of these demographic changes across the South and how it’s driving Republican strategy to hold on to majorities, to regain majorities to do whatever it is you need to do?

MACKOWIAK: Yeah, you’ve got a handful of consequential U.S. Senate races across the South, and as they say in boxing, styles make fights. Every race is different. Are there some similar qualities and aspects to them? Sure. I agree with the earlier analysis. My friend Michael Whatley will not be elected to the U.S. Senate here in 19 days.

He’s running against a buzzsaw in the sitting governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, bit of an institution in that state, and it ended up being a very bad political year for the former RNC chair and the former state party chair in North Carolina to run. Look, the fact that the map has expanded, if you just step back for a second expanded for Democrats and shrunk for Republicans, tells you about the political environment.

And so if you just look at those four Southern states, right? That we’re talking about for U.S. Senate, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, all of which border at least one other, and in some cases, two others. North Carolina’s gonna go blue, so that’s a flip. I do believe South Carolina will stay red.

Yeah. Darline Graham is obviously the sister of the legendary senator Lindsey Graham but the fundamentals there are still pretty strong. Georgia obviously is going blue. Republicans nominated —

BROOKS: Or staying blue.

MACKOWIAK: Yeah, yeah, sorry, staying blue.

Sorry. Staying blue, not Republicans nominated their weakest possible candidate in Congressman Collins, Mike Collins, who the president unwisely endorsed. And I think Florida is interesting but I don’t think anyone really thinks Florida’s gonna flip from red to blue. The Democrats actually nominated a fairly weak candidate there, I believe.

And Republican, the new Republican senator, Ashley Moody’s in good shape. So those four, you’re gonna have a D plus one net effect at a time when Democrats need to net four seats to gain, to regain the Senate majority in the U.S. Senate here in 19 days.

BROOKS: Matt, it’s interesting to me that you didn’t mention the state where you are, Texas, which has a big Senate race that a lot of people are paying attention to, James Talarico against Ken Paxton. Arguably, Ken Paxton not the strongest candidate because of the scandals that he’s been involved in, but how are you viewing that race? You’ve handicapped the others.

I’d really be curious to hear your review of that race.

MACKOWIAK: I will, and I left Texas out mostly because about half the state considers us Southwestern, and half of us, half the state considers itself South. So it’s a little bit of a unique deal. Look, I worked for Senator Cornyn on his re-election in this race for 16 months from March of last year through May … ’26, excuse me.

And we did everything we could to try to re-nominate a statesman who served the state and the country well. We got beat pretty decisively in the runoff when President Trump endorsed Ken Paxton, a decision I know he regrets now. Ken Paxton right now is losing. That’s an astounding statement.

Republicans haven’t lost a statewide race in Texas since 1994 and I know the outside groups spent $100 million in September alone. Looks like they’re going to spend $150 to $200 million in October to try to get Paxton over the line barely. Talarico, look I’m not for him, but he’s running a great campaign.

You saw that on the CNN town hall last night. He just raised more money than any Senate candidate in the country this quarter, $64 million. He’s created a permission structure for some Republicans to do something other than vote for Ken Paxton, which is why he’s ahead. Ken Paxton has created no permission structure for Democrats to do anything other than vote for James Talarico.

So we are where we are. It’s a bad environment. Paxton’s the weakest top of the ticket candidate Texas Republicans have had since at least 1990 when Clady Williams sought re-election as governor. And I think we are headed towards one of the most negative statewide and local election results in Texas in modern history.

We will lose, I think, at least two statewide races. I’ll predict it’s both Talarico and Jon Rosenthal, who’s running against the white nationalist Bo French, for Railroad Commission. I think both of those races will go blue. And I can tell you right now, there is palpable fear at the highest levels of the Republican Party in Texas that our governor could lose, who won by 20 points four years ago, that our lieutenant governor could lose, that some of our down ballot races, whether they be attorney general, ag commissioner, even state Supreme Court seats could go blue. We’re in borderline unprecedented territory here.

BROOKS: Wow. Charles Bullock, I want to bring you back into the conversation. There’s Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist giving not a very sanguine report if you’re a Republican. What do you hear in that, in his assessment of what’s happening in Texas?

BULLOCK: I’m stunned, yes. To have that whole laundry list of things which are endangered. And yeah, if something like that happens, there would also be some of those congressional seats that were drawn to be Republican, which would also end up either not shifting Republican and maybe Democrats even picking up some of those which had been safely Republican, but got redrawn, to make them de facto more competitive.

Now, if something like this happens in Texas, that is clearly going to be the lead story on November the 4th. And again, with a Republican governor, then when redistricting comes in 2031, it’s going to be a map which is going to be more balanced in terms of Democrats and Republicans.

BROOKS: You mean with a Democratic governor, right?

BULLOCK: You’re right, you have a Democratic governor, you’re right, yeah. If Ossoff wins there, yeah, it’s going to be a much favorable map for Democrats. So then maybe you end up with something approaching 60/40, even 50/50 in terms of the share of the seats which are between Democrats and Republicans, which would have then a huge implication for what’s going to be happening in Congress come 2032.

BROOKS: Amanda, I wanna ask you, we talked about a lot of the population growth across the South including younger voters, more voters of color, what are you working on in terms of messages to try to capture those capture those voters?

NELSON: I’m sure as most folks in those demographics are getting their news from content creators across social media as opposed to more traditional media companies now.

So we are talking directly to them, and we are talking to them in two lanes. The things that they care about, first of all, things like, if you live in Texas, Texas has the highest uninsured rate of any state in the country. If you live in Florida, because of the decisions the State House has made there and their governor, your property insurance is probably going to be several multipliers higher than your mortgage.

Cost of living, issues like that. If you’re a woman, you are much more likely to die if you need health care in any of these Southern states. So we speak directly to the issues that young voters care about and that people of color care about, the dehumanization that a lot of Black voters, especially in the South, feel after Callais, as their states move to immediately disqualify their votes and eliminate their majority minority districts.

So you know, those demographics are, they’re angry. They’re tired of being priced out of places that they want to live. And the kind of great thing about being a content creator in any of these states is that you can just say that. I don’t work for the Democratic Party. I’m not paid by the Democratic Party.

I don’t have to couch my language in any sort of consultant or strategist messaging. I am that voter, right? I’m a person of color. I live in the South. So I just speak to them and I encourage my creator corps, which is about 700 people across all of the Southern states, to speak in the same way.

BROOKS: Gotcha And Matt, when it comes to the Southern Republican strategy, for years, I guess it’s fair to say Southern GOP power has relied on low taxes, on economic growth. How is the party adapting its messaging to retain new residents who move for economic reasons, but may not align with the local party’s social platform?

MACKOWIAK: Yeah. It’s a great question because I think the playbook that worked in the South, you know for much of the last few decades will probably not work in the New South. And so the New South is gonna be decided in the suburbs. That’s certainly true in Texas. You mentioned in the earlier report Collin County is I think one of the three fastest growing counties in the country.

Collin County’s going to go Democratic this election in Texas. I’d wager a very large amount of money that’ll happen. There’s a bunch of reasons for it. But look, they’re adapting. Smart Republicans are adapting it by talking about kitchen table issues, by talking about security and safety in communities, by trying to address issues that people feel in their daily lives and you’re getting less value, less marginal value out of social issues.

Doesn’t mean there’s none. I think the Second Amendment is a pretty strong issue in the South for Republicans. It’s a pretty weak issue for most Democrats in the South. So that’s one example of a cultural issue that I don’t think has lost its resonance, but if you just want to do it on abortion and on gay marriage and those kind of things, you’re not going to succeed in what the new South is becoming.

You have to be about low taxes, about low regulation about economic opportunity, about safety in communities. About being solution-oriented. Because people that are in suburbs, have kids, they have families, they got stuff going on. They’re not watching cable news. They’re not on X all day. They just want to know, are you making their life easier and better, or are you making it worse?

And most of the time, they have a pretty clear idea of who’s making it worse.

BROOKS: And what about inclusion? If we’re talking about a South that’s increasingly more diverse, how do Republicans embrace that idea of inclusion?

MACKOWIAK: Yeah, I can tell you that from my perspective you always want candidates to reflect the demographics of the area that they’re trying to represent, right?

Whether that’s a congressional district, a state House district, a state for a statewide office, et cetera. Has our party, has the GOP done enough to recruit minority candidates, whether they be women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans? Absolutely not. We haven’t. Are we doing more than we’ve ever done?

Yes. Does every smart Republican I know wanna see more diversity among our candidates? Absolutely. That can be a challenge in the South. It just can. I would argue that many of those racial subgroups are more closely aligned to the Democratic Party in the South than probably they are in other parts of the country.

You’ll look at the Black vote in South Carolina that’s so significant in the presidential primary that will almost certainly lead to either Kamala Harris or Reverend Warnock from Georgia winning that primary in two years as one example of that. There are just not that many Black Republican voters in places like South Carolina and North Carolina. There just aren’t. So we gotta do more there. There’s no question.

BROOKS: Do you feel that the national party, the national GOP party, is getting that message? Do they understand what the new South needs in terms of candidates who can win?

MACKOWIAK: When you say national party, if you’re talking about President Trump and the MAGA wing, the answer is no.

If you’re talking about the people that run the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and the NRCC and the RNC —

BROOKS: Yeah, I guess that’s who I was — Okay, good. Yeah, that’s who I was talking about.

MACKOWIAK: Yeah. Yeah. That’s okay. Yeah, I think, ’cause I think they’re different, unfortunately.

Look, if you’re … President Trump should not have endorsed Mike Collins for U.S. Senate. He just shouldn’t have. He knows that now. He knows that was a mistake.

BROOKS: … How do you know that? How do you know that he knows that’s a mistake?

MACKOWIAK: Great question. You’re right. Getting a little bit of psychoanalysis here. I mean, okay. Look, I will say this. I will say something that your audience will not agree with, and that is President Trump is intelligent. Anyone that knows him knows that. I’ve actually been around him, and I believe he’s intelligent. That doesn’t mean he makes smart decisions all the time.

Yeah. Sometimes he makes very —

BROOKS: No, I think that’s an important distinction … very stupid decisions.

MACKOWIAK: Yeah, and I think in this case, just like with Ken Paxton, he made a poor decision related to that endorsement, and I know he regrets both. He does not wanna be taking Georgia off the map when he wanted to defeat Ossoff.

He does not wanna be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a state he won by 13 points in Texas two years ago to try to hold a Senate seat. He does not wanna be doing that, and this is going to affect the Senate majority profoundly.

BROOKS: Amanda, let me come to you, and I want to come back to you.

I wanna ask you about the Latino vote in the South. It’s growing rapidly outside of traditional hubs, spreading into states like Georgia and North Carolina. So talk a little bit about the strategies to reach and to maximize the political potential of that population.

NELSON: Not to keep banging the creator drum, but content creators, local content creators in those states are super essential for either party.

But, fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the Republicans have a terrible content creator strategy down the ballot. You can look at the convention, the convention that the Republican Party just had in Texas. They brought in all of their national creators to cover it for a national audience.

It was a complete flop, but the Democratic Party used heavily Spanish-speaking local Texas content creators, brought them into a hype house and had them cover it. And those impressions and that engagement level was much higher with the local content creators, and that’s a strategy that’s being replicated across every state in the South.

But the content creator ecosystem of the right is heavily focused on X. It’s heavily focused on big national creators who get all of their talking points from the comms team at the White House in one Signal chat, and they just spread those White House talking points. And those completely have no connection to both voters in the South and to Hispanic voters in the South or to voters in general, in my opinion.

But I think they’re a little bit out over their skis. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They don’t really know how to talk to voters in the South anymore and they certainly don’t know how to talk to a population that has been a direct victim of the right’s hostility this entire cycle.

BROOKS: Really interesting. Charles, close us out in the 10 or 15 seconds that remain. You heard Matt offer a storyline that we might be reading on November 4th. What’s the storyline you think you’re gonna be reading on November 4th?

BULLOCK: Yeah, I think that Democrats are gonna make gains, better gains than the last quarter century in probably both Texas and Georgia.

The question is, how big are those gains? And, part of the difference is that some Republicans are running just a base strategy, and that would be Paxton and Collins, just trying to mobilize the old Republicans. Others are taking a more sophisticated approach and looking towards the future and knowing that they have to, for the party and perhaps even for themselves, begin to get more Black, begin to get more Asian, more Hispanic votes.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.