Like most of the country, Democratic strength is concentrated in big cities and majority-minority areas. The South has a lot of rural, majority-Black areas (MS Delta, Black Belt, etc.) that are very visible on election maps but are generally way less populated than Republican-voting suburban or rural areas. So while a state like Alabama may have a lot of Atlas-red counties, Democrats consistently struggle to break 40% of the vote.
Republicans dominate with White voters in the South, especially in conservative Evangelical areas. Like other parts of the country, the recent trend has been for Republicans to do better with working class White voters than college-educated voters. A lot of Southern Republicans are significantly more moderate on economic issues than social issues, with government support of some welfare and agriculture programs being broadly popular.
Historically, most of the South was monolithically Democratic with a few notable exceptions (East TN, Texas Hill Country, etc.) This began to change in the 1940s and 1950s as Southern agriculture mechanized and urban professions in cities and suburbs became more prevalent. Urban and suburban Whites shifted to the Republican Party before rural White voters in the 1970s and 1980s, while today many of those same areas that first flipped Republican in the 20th century are trending towards Democrats.
This is generally the pattern throughout the South.
Agree with description. But have a question: wasn't a "migration" of whites to Republican party at least partly caused by growing role of Blacks in Democratic party, and the fact, that there are few Blacks in Republican party? "Comfortable environment", so to say...
P.S. I wrote a big (more then 50 pages in MS Word) paper "Political geography of the US", and published it on a Internet resource. But - naturally, it's written in Russian, and i don't have a lot of time for full translation of it into English. South takes biggest part of that paper - about 15-20 pages, it's political geography is really rich and varied)))
