Will the Midwest ever vote like the U.S. South?

[Scottholes 2.0]

Just a thought given the fact that the Midwest is aging faster than other regions.

[Sumner 1868]

...no.

[wesmoorenerd]

No. The South and the Midwest are very different and are trending opposite directions because of those differences. Democrats in the Midwest will never have the floor that they do in the South but they'll never sink so low with Midwestern whites as they had with Southern whites.

[Tekken_Guy]

No. The rurals in the Midwest will never be as red as those in the south. Also, I think you have some fairly liberal states in the Midwest, compared to few that exist in the south. Each region has a blue state (Illinois; Virginia), and a few swing states (Florida and North Carolina; Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), and some pinky-reds (Georgia and Texas; Ohio and Iowa). But there are far fewer deep red areas in the Midwest than the south. That being said, some of these southern states do have an untapped pool of black people that can move elections leftward, something that is lacking in the Midwest.

If it does happen, it will be because the south moved left rather than the Midwest moving right.

[brucejoel99]

No. The South and the Midwest are very different and are trending opposite directions because of those differences. Democrats in the Midwest will never have the floor that they do in the South but they'll never sink so low with Midwestern whites as they had with Southern whites.

[Del Tachi]

Yes.  The trends that began in AR, TN and KY 20 years ago have now shifted north into OH, IA and MO.

[Orser67]

I doubt that the Midwest will vote as Democratic as the South in my lifetime, but I do see the Midwest as moving away from the Northeast and towards the South, which is pretty big development. The Midwest and the Northeast have generally supported the same party since the Civil War, but going forward I think the basic alignment will be the Northeast and the West vs. the South and the Midwest.

[NCJeff]

Yes.  The trends that began in AR, TN and KY 20 years ago have now shifted north into OH, IA and MO.

This. Large parts of the midwest aren't so culturally different from the upper south, anyway.

[Frenchrepublican]

It really depends of your definition of the Midwest, Indiana and Missouri for example are smiliar to Kentucky or even to some extent Tennessee, they are fairly rural and have a large population of evengelical protestants. Ohio is clearly moving in the same direction and looks more and more like a southern state, the state has become more republican over the past few years and at the same time the Ohio legislature has passed a lot of conservative bills (the heartbeat bill for example). So it’s clear to me that some parts of the rural Midwest will look and vote more and more like the upper rural south.
At the same time the Midwest includes some very liberal states like Illinois and Minnesota which will remain fairly progressive culturally speaking. Generally speaking I think we will see during the next decade a shift between on the one hand culturally conservative midwestern states (Indiana, Missouri and Ohio) which will vote increasingly like the conservative south and upper midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan which will remain very competitive.

[RINO Tom]

Yes.  The trends that began in AR, TN and KY 20 years ago have now shifted north into OH, IA and MO.

This. Large parts of the midwest aren't so culturally different from the upper south, anyway.

Rural and conservative is not synonymous with "Southern."  VERY few parts of the Midwest are culturally similar to the South, mostly just far Southern Illinois, some parts of Southern Indiana and Ohio and - to the extent it counts - non-urban Missouri.  There is literally nothing "Southern" about, say, Nebraska just because it votes extremely Republican.

Anyway, as for the OP: absolutely not.

[Politician]

No. The South and the Midwest are very different and are trending opposite directions because of those differences. Democrats in the Midwest will never have the floor that they do in the South but they'll never sink so low with Midwestern whites as they had with Southern whites.

[NCJeff]

Yes.  The trends that began in AR, TN and KY 20 years ago have now shifted north into OH, IA and MO.

This. Large parts of the midwest aren't so culturally different from the upper south, anyway.

Rural and conservative is not synonymous with "Southern."  VERY few parts of the Midwest are culturally similar to the South, mostly just far Southern Illinois, some parts of Southern Indiana and Ohio and - to the extent it counts - non-urban Missouri.  There is literally nothing "Southern" about, say, Nebraska just because it votes extremely Republican.

Anyway, as for the OP: absolutely not.

Isn't Southern Illinois, southern Indiana, southern Ohio, and non-urban Missouri a large part of the midwest?  Those states account for half the EV's in the midwest..

[FalloutBoy97]

Lol no. The biggest mistake people on this forum make is assuming current trends will perpetuate forever. Look at the trend map for 2008 for example. Huge swaths of the midwest trended dem - Obama won WI MI and PA by large margins. The midwest is whiter and less educated than the country at large which is why it has trended R recently. But it is also much less religious and culturally conservative than the south and will therefore never be as republican.

[DabbingSanta]

Lol no. The biggest mistake people on this forum make is assuming current trends will perpetuate forever. Look at the trend map for 2008 for example. Huge swaths of the midwest trended dem - Obama won WI MI and PA by large margins. The midwest is whiter and less educated than the country at large which is why it has trended R recently. But it is also much less religious and culturally conservative than the south and will therefore never be as republican.

I totally agree with this. Missouri, the only Midwestern state that has definitely gone to the Republicans, has a certain southern feel to it politically other states in the region lack.

- Missouri voted for Stevenson over Eisenhower in 1956

- Republicans were not on the ballot in 1856. Lincoln got only 10% of the vote in 1860. Breckenridge got 19%.

- Missouri was claimed territory by the Confederate States of America.

- Missouri voted for the Democrat 18 out of 25 times from 1872 to 1968, including every election from 1872 to 1900.

It would be a mistake to compare the recent trends in Ohio or Iowa (true Midwest) to Missouri (Mid South) when their political histories are vastly different.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Missouri is not completely Southern though. Missouri is a patchwork of different origins, which is recounted in Kevin Phillip's Emerging Republican Majority. He talks about how you will have one county settled largely by New England Yankees and the one right next to settled by Southerners and for decades they voted as they shot in the Civil War.

Add onto that the German immigration, a percentage so high that Wilkie was hoping to win it because of German identity politics.

Missouri is very much like Ohio in this regard in that its settlement forms something of a checkerboard pattern. The one thing that actually makes Missouri different and thus more Republican is not that it has a Southern Region that used to vote Dem but now votes heavily Republican (SE MO and SE OH both of which had CDs that voted more Republican with Trump than the traditionally most Republican area of the state), but MO has the Ozarks, which is historically Mountain Republican support even before the realignments of the mid 20th century.

Since 2008, Missouri has been locked into alignment with Indiana, another Midwest state with a Southern settled region and lots of German settlement. Both Missouri and Indiana had less in the way of Yankee settlement and thus were far more Southern and also more German than the rest of the Midwest.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Lol no. The biggest mistake people on this forum make is assuming current trends will perpetuate forever. Look at the trend map for 2008 for example. Huge swaths of the midwest trended dem - Obama won WI MI and PA by large margins. The midwest is whiter and less educated than the country at large which is why it has trended R recently. But it is also much less religious and culturally conservative than the south and will therefore never be as republican.

Assuming Republican identity remains defined by religion and not by other factors like say trade or rust belt identity politics.

Even in the South, the areas that defined Southern both in terms of power and dominance were the upper class and educated whites living in metropolitan areas. These are the very same demographics that Republicans are losing ground in as generational change, Trump and other factors weigh them down.

The areas of the South where the GOP is making gains are those that are the most like the Midwest in terms of economic decline and decay. It is very reasonable not to expect the Midwest to vote like the South, but for the declining areas of the Midwest along with similar voters in other regions to vote likewise for the GOP.

[Wazza [INACTIVE]]

Yes, because the disparity in 2016 between the two regions was only 4 points...
Midwest 49-45 (R+4)
South 52-44 (R+8)
Taking into account that the Midwest is becoming redder and many of the larger southern states like Georgia, Virginia and Texas are becoming more blue, seeing a midwest redder than the South in the next few cycles is not only a possibility, but an expectation.