ATLANTA—America has a new political reality: Republicans’ generations-long grip on Southern politics has been torn apart.

Sweeping through the states of the old Confederacy, Democrats dismantled decades of GOP dominance in one night. They won Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia while capturing both the Senate races and governor’s mansions in Georgia and Texas. Throughout the region, down-ballot state offices and legislatures long held by Republicans flipped blue.

Even Mississippi, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1982, remains in play. Democrat Scott Colom is locked in a tight race with Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith that few saw coming. President Trump, who carried the state by more than 20 points two years ago, returned there last month to shore up support.

“You shocked the world,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) told a cheering election-night crowd in a downtown Atlanta hotel ballroom. “It’s no exaggeration to say you are making history tonight.”The sweep was so extensive in the Peach State that Democrats also won the races for lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state, as well as lower posts from agricultural commissioner to school superintendent. Democrats also took control of the Georgia state House for the first time in 22 years and nearly won over the state Senate.

The results immediately reset America’s political map, prompting speculation that states Republicans have long counted on might now be competitive battlegrounds in the 2028 presidential election. The outcome also triggered finger-pointing among GOP strategists and activists over who was to blame.

“It is a complete ass-kicking that is completely deserved,” said Ryan Mahoney, a veteran Georgia GOP strategist. “The Republican Party’s platform has been rewritten from the principles of Ronald Reagan to those of Trump, to things that are not conservative and things voters are not looking for.”Even key races Republicans won saw surprisingly tight margins. Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville won the governor’s race by 4 percentage points, compared with departing Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who won her 2022 race by nearly 38 points.

South Carolina Republican Alan Wilson was elected governor after a close contest with Democrat Jermaine Johnson. In Florida, the governor’s race in Trump’s adopted home state was tighter than expected, with Republican Byron Donalds narrowly edging his Democratic opponent.

While the Election Day rout was stunning, some forces that fueled the political earthquake were years in the making. The population across the 11 states of the former Confederacy has grown much more diverse in recent decades. Non-Hispanic white and Black residents, historically the region’s two largest groups, accounted for 68% of the Southern population last year, down from 83% in 2000, according to census estimates. Over the same period, the region’s share of Hispanics rose to 22% from 13%.

High turnout among Black and Hispanic voters lifted Democratic candidates across the South and helped make history. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms will become the first Black woman governor in the U.S. and the first Democrat to win a governor’s race there since 1998. Gina Hinojosa will become the first Hispanic governor of Texas, and James Talarico, who made courting Texas’ Hispanic voters a major part of his campaign, easily won his Texas Senate seat, overturning three decades of GOP supremacy in statewide elections there.

Backlash against Republican redistricting efforts, viewed by many as an effort to disenfranchise Black voters, fueled mobilization. In South Carolina, historic Black turnout helped Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews post a major upset over Republican Darline Graham, Trump’s handpicked candidate and the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally.

The Black vote also affected North Carolina’s Senate race, where Democrat Roy Cooper led Republican Michael Whatley, 59% to 39%. Cooper did even better in the 41 counties where the Black population tops the state average of 20%, and that account for almost 40% of votes. In each of those counties, Cooper’s vote share topped Kamala Harris’s in the 2024 presidential race by more than 5 percentage points.

Newcomers from other parts of the U.S. are also changing Southern identity. Since the pandemic began, the region has attracted a particularly large influx, according to the Census Bureau, which defines the South as 16 states and includes the District of Columbia. It estimates the South netted more than 1.2 million movers from the Northeast, 900,000 from the West and half a million from the Midwest. Many of those residents relocated to urban or suburban areas, driving population gains from metro Charlotte, N.C., to Greenville, S.C., to Nashville, Tenn. The influx is boosting the share of Black and Hispanic voters, who exit polls show lean Democratic.

For years, cities in much of the South were seen as Democratic islands in a sea of red. Bumper stickers were common on cars and trucks in Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Texas, and elsewhere, showing a blue dot on a red background. Everyone knew what it meant: a small Democratic urban core politically surrounded by Republicans. On Tuesday, those blue dots ballooned.

While the South was once heavily Democratic, the fight for civil rights, which Southern Democrats strongly opposed at the time, caused ruptures within the party. The Republican Party famously pursued a “Southern strategy” for years to woo white Southerners. Gradually, cultural issues like prayer in schools, gun rights and abortion led many conservative Southern voters to the GOP. Ronald Reagan also brought Southerners to the party.

Tuesday’s election results don’t necessarily mean a new dominant party has emerged, but rather that both parties will have to work harder, said Chris Grant, a Mercer University political-science professor. “The solid South is breaking up.”

“After last night, we are moving back to a two-party South,” said Christopher Cooper, a political-science professor at Western Carolina University. “It was a stunner.”Cooper cautioned that while Tuesday’s Democratic win was tectonic, that doesn’t mean it is permanent.

“In ’08, everyone said, ‘Oh, my God, North Carolina flipped for Obama. It’s blue now,’” he said. “No, it wasn’t. It flipped right back in the following cycle because it was right on the precipice.”Mahoney, the Georgia Republican strategist, said rural, working-class Southerners welcomed Trump’s populist message and backed him for years. “Those same voters now are thinking, ‘Man, we got duped,’ “ Mahoney said.

He said such voters, once the backbone of MAGA victories across the South, have been hit by inflation and soaring gas prices. They likely will stop voting in large numbers for the GOP and just stay home, he said.

“If we’re just left with country-club Republicans and big business, we are never going to win again,” Mahoney said.

The mood of rival Atlanta election-night parties displayed diverging fortunes.

The “Mike Collins for Senate” party in a suburban hotel was a classic MAGA affair: Fox News on two large televisions, young men in blazers, women in bright red dresses. Some older men wore caps that read “Freedom.”In past years, such rooms were packed, with cheers erupting as Republican victories were announced across Georgia and beyond.

But Tuesday, just 40 supporters showed, their eyes avoiding the screens. When TV announcers declared Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff had soundly defeated Mike Collins, no one reacted. An hour into the event, people started leaving.

Meanwhile, at a downtown hotel event for Ossoff and other Democrats, security lines snaked through the hallways and a ballroom was standing room only. Outside, revelers cheered, shouting, “Keisha!” as cars honked in support.