What is the Sunbelt?

Why does it matter so much in 2020 & why it will be the most important region in the country going forward?

A thread...

The Sunbelt arethe states stretching across the southeast and southwest running from California to Florida and up to Virginia. They came into prominence in 1992 when Democrats broke the GOP stranglehold on the Presidency. By narrowing or losing whites, it opened a path to win.

In 1992, GOP presidential strongholds California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Georgia flipped.

In 1996, we won Arizona and Florida.

Then, Ed Rendell spent more time cheating on his wife, dinners with fat cats, chasing voters in the depopulating Rust Belt/Northeast and destroying Gore 2000 instead of investing in the Sunbelt.

Over that period, only California and New Mexico moved permanently into the Dems column.

Then came Obama.

Obama saw the America that existed and not the America that the Democratic political class think existed.

Team Obama saw where Black, Latinx and Asian voters live. This truly matters because our political power comes from areas the media ignores.

73% of blacks live in the Sunbelt. 58% live in the Southeast or what I call "The Black Belt." Over half of the Black population lives in 10 states.

These figures will grow in the 2020 census and likely grow going forward.

These Black voters live in a different world.

The Sunlbet plays a critical role in shaping the Black experience. Blackness is different everywhere you go. It holds the 2 major ancestral Black cultures in the US - Geechee-Gullah and Creole. Their infleunce & rivalry has traveled from coast to coast & powered civil rights.

They deal with a lot more in-your-face conservatism, impacted more by voter suppression, outright racist politicians, challenges in accessing quality healthcare and reproductive choices with fewer options when it comes to abortion and affordable birth control.

The modern criminal justice system harms these Black voters the most. 7 of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates are Southern states with huge black populations, and 9 out of 10 are considered to be apart of the Sunbelt.

The nation's poorest education systems are in this region and its poorest rural areas. Nearly all Black rural residents live in the rural/exurban South and nearly half of Blacks in this region live there.

It is cripppled with bad infrastructure, investment & looting of land.

Black Republicans and separatists groups have weakened the ability of Blacks in this region to assemble the voting power to take over.

Using issues like homophobia, hostility towards non-Black immigrants and hatred towards non-American born Blacks.

Then came Obama, Harris, Patrick and Booker. Who pushed back against these folks first and produced an environment to run up the Black vote.

Instead of homophobia they embraced queer voices - past & present in the movement & showed a Black & Brown coalition can work.

Their work largely left small conservative separatist cults which I deem Hoteps like the Hebrew Isrealites and pockets of very religious Black Catholic voters outside the tent.

So how did this change the electoral map for Obama & the modern party.

Obama was able to go from low 80 to high 80 Black support to the 1st and 3rd highest Black turnout to mid to high 90s support.

It flipped the Sunbelt states of Nevada, Colorado and Virginia from GOP strongholds to Democratic strongholds.

Black voters aren't the only group that is making a dominant footprint in the Sunbelt. 73% of Latinx live in the Sunbelt. 54% live in the Southwest or what I call "The Latinx Belt." Over half of the Latinx population lives in 7 states.

These figures are EXPLODING!

While the Black Belt runs from Texas to Virginia with tons of majority-Black rural/exurban counties, the Latinx belt runs from California to Texas with a slew of rural/exurban predominately Latinx counties.

Add in the Latinx dominate part of the Sunbelt and you have a run down of the states that are the most hostile to the existence of BIPOC voters.

Yet, there is more. 68% of Asian voters live in 3 states. The 3 biggest in the country - California, Texas and Florida.

One enthnic group is not carrying the water for Dems to win statewide. In the Eastern Sunbelt outside of Florida, Latinx voters are the winning margin needed to win Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina & South Carolina.

In the Western, Blacks do that in NV, CO & AZ.

With these core group of voters with many similar needs and also a set of different issues to fix disparities, 2020 has opened up the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Georgia. In a wave, South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama.

Winning or narrowing the gap in these states can win a state chamber in 2020. That means a near 50/50 house split in those House seats crafted after the Census.

It also means closing the door on the Presidency & House to the GOP AS IT IS CURRENTLY CONSTRUCTED!

With white college educated voters rapidly becoming Democrats and the suburbs becoming more diverse, the coalition of the ascending can rebuild a nation destroyed by the Nixon/Reagan/Trump resentment coalition.

This does not mean other states matter.

What it means is that Democrats no longer need to court and elevate Ed Rendell, Joe Lieberman and their ilk.

They can make an appeal to Black, Latinx, Asian, queer, religious minorities, college educated whites and immigrants that fix disparities and promotes economic growth.

The rest...can stay mad and fade into irrelevance.

END OF RANT!

Forgive my spelling and grammatical error.

One last thing. If you read this whole tweet and understand the power of what is going on in the Sunbelt, ask yourself why making DC, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands is not a priority.