Democrats Rush to Regroup in the Southern Battlegrounds

With critical races in Georgia and North Carolina just two years away, the party is soul-searching on a time crunch.

For some Democrats in the South, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victories in Georgia and North Carolina this month crystallized a nagging fear that the inroads they had made in these presidential battlegrounds could be dismissed as a fluke.

The party had hoped to keep Georgia blue this year while flipping North Carolina, which seemed tantalizingly close after President Biden lost it by a slim margin in 2020. Instead, organizers and operatives said, a difficult political environment and disjointed operations on the ground hampered the party’s ability to engage voters.

In the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss, there has been a lot of finger-pointing, and many theories about what the party must do going forward. The angst is by no means unique to the South. Mr. Trump won all seven swing states, from the Midwest to the Sun Belt, with reliably blue regions driving right. But with competitive races for governor and U.S. Senate just two years away in Georgia and North Carolina, the party’s soul-searching is crunched for time.

Frustrations have escalated, with long-simmering intraparty fights about messaging, leadership and resource allocation spilling out into public view.

“It was probably structure and strategy,” said Mayor Van Johnson of Savannah, Ga., and a Democratic National Committee member. He said he felt Democrats in Georgia had done the best they could with limited investment. But of Ms. Harris’s campaign, he added: “I don’t feel like they entrusted us with what we felt we needed on the ground. They gave us what they thought we should have.”

Southern Democratic organizers and officials have spent years imploring the national party to invest in the region despite its conservative lean. Their push was based in large part on demographic shifts in states like Georgia and North Carolina, where they argued that the influx of young people and people of color would favor the party over time. They saw proof of concept particularly in Georgia, where the voting rights activist Stacey Abrams narrowly lost the governor’s race in 2018; Mr. Biden won in 2020; and Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were elected not long after.

But those were hard-fought, narrow victories. And in the wake of a drubbing this year, several Democratic leaders and organizers said their party must grapple with the overwhelming message that voters sent about the durability of their coalition — and the resources needed to keep it intact.

Ms. Harris’s campaign and its allies spent nearly $600 million on advertising, and hired dozens of paid staff members, to keep North Carolina and Georgia in play. The vice president outperformed Mr. Biden’s 2020 performance in Georgia by more than 70,000 votes, and in North Carolina by 31,000, but still lost to Mr. Trump by well over 100,000 votes in each state. Mr. Trump increased his support with traditional Democratic constituencies and won a larger share of the vote in urban counties meant to be Democratic bastions.

“It is still a story of what Stacey Abrams was asserting, I would say, in her campaign strategies, which is, ‘Look, Georgia’s trending blue. It’s just a matter of time,’” said Bernard L. Fraga, an associate professor of political science at Emory University who studies voter turnout. That argument appears to have been blunted this year, he added, “because of big gains in turnout among whites and smaller gains in turnout among African Americans.”

Democrats cite several reasons for falling short at the top of the ticket in the South. Some believe the party failed to harness the momentum that Ms. Harris generated in the region during the early weeks of her three-month campaign. Others pointed out that there were fewer galvanizing statewide races there, unlike in 2020, when two U.S. Senate contests juiced voters’ and donors’ enthusiasm. And others argued that the void left by an underfunded network of grass-roots organizers gave way to overreliance on campaign staff members, who were not well-versed in the region’s cultural and political landscapes.

“A lot of people were looking at the rallies and volunteers’ sign-ups, and thinking that that automatically was translating to work on the ground,” said Cliff Albright, a founder and the executive director of Black Voters Matter, which worked to turn out Black voters in nearly a dozen states this year. “What we’re now learning is that that translation was not necessarily happening.”

Democrats were also weighed down by national trends that came into stark relief in Georgia. After a Venezuelan migrant killed Laken Riley, a University of Georgia college student in February, her death ignited anti-immigrant fervor on the right that placed the blame on Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris’s immigration record. Issues like abortion access and preservation of democratic norms did not appear to sway a broad swath of suburban voters and moderate conservatives, as Democrats had hoped they would. And the economy remained an overwhelming driver of voters’ preferences.

“I think that there was some good policy, but the American people and Southerners need to feel it in their gut,” said Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of deep-red Kentucky who was considered as a possible running mate for Ms. Harris. “If you’re talking about the outrage of the day in Washington, D.C., and you’re talking about the crazy thing a politician said last night, and then you’re talking about jobs, you’re only talking about jobs a third of the time. That focus and feel is something that I think we’ve got to work at.”

That work comes as Republicans in the South see the next midterm election cycle as a chance to cement their dominance. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who will lead the Republican Governors Association this year, has been widely floated as a possible candidate for U.S. Senate when his term ends in 2026. And on Friday, the state’s G.O.P. attorney general, Chris Carr, announced his campaign for governor, saying that he would “fight to keep Georgia red.”

Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said the next leader of the Democratic National Committee should have a new “Southern strategy” — that is, a method of engaging states in the Deep South to keep them competitive and to elect state leaders who could challenge Mr. Trump’s policies. She pointed to Democrats’ wins down the ballot to argue that the strategy was already working and could be expanded with more resources.

In North Carolina, the party flipped enough seats to break Republicans’ Statehouse supermajority, and elected the state’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Stein, to the governor’s mansion. Democrats there also won statewide races for superintendent of public instruction and claimed victory in a race for a state Supreme Court seat. In Georgia, the party gained two seats in the Statehouse and made inroads at the municipal level.

Those results are why the national party should continue putting resources into the region, rather than pulling up stakes — something leadership has “absolutely” done in years past, Ms. Clayton said. It starts, she said, with reigniting the party’s base.

“If this party is actually going to say that Black voters are the base of it, we’ve got to be organizing the South,” said Ms. Clayton, who became the country’s youngest Democratic Party state chair when she was elected last year at 25.

In Georgia, a number of Democrats have publicly and privately called for the state’s Democratic Party chair, U.S. Representative Nikema Williams, to step down before her term ends in 2027. Ms. Williams’s detractors argue that her position as a sitting congresswoman — she represents Atlanta — impedes the round-the-clock fund-raising and organizing required of a full-time state party chair.

Mr. Ossoff, up for re-election in 2026, is among those privately calling for her ouster. He directly expressed his desire for a new state party chair to Ms. Williams shortly after the presidential election, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange. Ms. Williams’s allies say she is unlikely to let outside pressure influence her next steps — but she has endorsed a key change to state party rules that would mandate the chair position be a full-time and paid role, setting her on the path to moving aside before her tenure ends.

In a statement, Ms. Williams noted the vice president’s increased vote share in Georgia and handful of statehouse seats the party won.

“We cemented the Peach State’s status as a battleground state heading into the 2026 cycle, and we’re going to keep doing the work needed to re-elect Senator Ossoff, a Democratic governor, and Democrats up and down the ballot,” she added.

Still, Democrats say that the political map remains in play for them under a Trump presidency.

“Apparently, some may have forgotten that a battleground state is a state that can swing in either direction depending on the issues and the environment and the candidates,” said Michael Thurmond, the chief executive of DeKalb County, a deep-blue suburb of Atlanta. “The pendulum swung back towards Trump, but it wasn’t a major landslide, and that should provide encouragement for all Democrats as we look towards 2026.”