“We cannot endure as a city of haves and have-nots,” said Jennifer Roberts during her inauguration as the 53rd mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, in early December. Rough around the edges and unpretentious, Roberts is an ex-foreign service officer who upset a centrist incumbent in the Democratic primary on a platform of raising the minimum wage for city employees and expanding nondiscrimination protections for LGBT citizens.

Never close with the Democratic establishment, and opposed by Charlotte’s largest newspaper, Roberts prevailed anyway by channeling racial and class frustrations in a city gripped by economic inequality. And her message of social and economic justice held special meaning for the striking fast-food workers who packed both the audience and an overflow room for her maiden speech—not to protest, but to celebrate.

Progressive politics may work in a Seattle or a New York City, but they’re not supposed to win campaigns south of the Mason-Dixon. Southern states voted as one Democratic bloc for almost a century after the Civil War, until the landmark civil rights measures of the 1960s combined with Richard Nixon’s election strategy to coax “the old Solid South into the Republican South,” says William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Democrats in the South generally responded to this shift by leaning right and picking off conservative voters where they could. Think of centrist politicians like Lloyd Bentsen, Blanche Lincoln, Sam Nunn, or Bill Clinton. But the Blue Dog Democrat has been pushed to the brink of extinction in the era of President Barack Obama, in the South as surely as everywhere else, and a new coalition of unapologetically liberal Democrats like Roberts have taken control of their party. They may be nearly powerless outside urban, cosmopolitan areas in the South, but these Democrats believe the demographics are on their side to build a liberal Southern majority in the future.

The Democratic Party in the South has changed for good. The Obama presidency in one sense has been a political disaster for southern Democrats, who lost control of West Virginia and saw North Carolina take a hard right turn after the state went for Obama in 2008. But overlooked in this story of defeat is how Obama accelerated the transformation of southern Democrats into “a party of young people, minorities, and educated people, especially educated women,” says Frey.