A handful of local elections in Mississippi is hardly a blue wave. But Democrats across the South hope what just happened there is the start of something big -- the first ripple of a Democratic comeback in the Deep South. They've formed at least three new regional political groups to try to make that happen, including one called South Forward that assisted in four winning mayoral campaigns, providing direct mail, radio ads, get-out-the-vote calls, and staff support.



A Democratic comeback will be a tall order, to say the least, in a region whose political story in recent decades has been a steady march toward the GOP. "It's hard to conceive we could go any farther down," chuckled Don Fowler, the South Carolinian who chaired the Democratic National Committee in the 1990s and is now chairman of South Forward. "But where can you find a place where a new Democratic thrust would be more welcome and could do more good?" The South, of course, has been Democratic before: the post-Reconstruction, pre-Civil Rights era when it was the party's "Solid South." But Nixon's "Southern Strategy" began a decades-long realignment toward the GOP at all levels of government. In 2012, Republicans took over the Arkansas state legislature, and Democrats now do not control a single legislative chamber in the old Confederacy.



If you're looking at the 2012 electoral map, with its solid swath of red stretching from the Carolinas to Texas, Democrats' bid for a Southern rebound may sound like a lot of bluster and wishful thinking. But it may not be completely far-fetched. President Obama, after all, won Florida and Virginia twice and North Carolina once. In 2012, he got 44 percent of the vote in South Carolina and Mississippi and 45 percent in Georgia -- the best showing by a Democratic nominee in three decades.



Much hype has attended Battleground Texas, a project to flip the Lone Star State by a group of Obama campaign alums. But Obama lost Texas by 16 points. He lost Georgia by just 8 points. (Early in the 2012 campaign, Democratic strategists made some noises about making a play for Georgia. When I asked Obama adviser David Axelrod about it this week, he insisted that was not merely an attempt to fake out the opposition. "We seriously looked at it," he told me in an email. "It fell slightly outside our parameters for full investment, but was intriguing.")



The demographics of the South are changing fast. Quite simply, all of the states of the old Confederacy are getting less white, said Chris Kromm, director of the Durham, N.C.-based Institute for Southern Studies, a research center founded by civil-rights-movement veterans. "I don't think there's any question there is a lot of potential [for Democrats] there given how rapidly the landscape of the South is changing," he said, calling it a "highly volatile moment in Southern politics."

