While you’ll still find the occasional good ole boy like Joe Sam Queen serving in a state legislature, the rising Democratic stars in the South are Jeff Jackson, Stacey Abrams, Karen Carter Peterson, and Megan Barry, who come from cities and sound more like Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama than Zell Miller or Dick Harpootlian.

“If it weren’t for gerrymandering, Blue Dogs could be competitive in certain rural districts,” says Mills, the Democratic strategist. But a trial balloon in North Carolina proposing Heath Shuler—formerly one of the U.S. House’s most stalwart Blue Dogs—for U.S. Senate quickly popped. Instead, Democrats are poised to nominate an outspoken liberal, former ACLU attorney Deborah Ross. “Statewide, the Blue Dog may be dead,” says Mills.

It’s true that John Bel Edwards won the governorship of Louisiana last year as a pro-life and pro-gun Democrat, but his socially conservative positions are “not the future of Democratic politics in the South,” says Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Conservative white voters are not part of the future Democratic coalition and that makes conservative Democrats an endangered species.”

Southern Democrats are increasingly looking to borrow from the playbook of Terry McAuliffe, who was elected governor of Virginia in 2013 by running an “unapologetically liberal campaign” that worked because “Virginia is a different place than it was 10 years ago,” says Teixeira. Virginia isn’t alone. “The Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia are experiencing high population growth, and the diverse population, given time, will vote Democratic,” says Frey of the Brookings Institution. “Florida is no longer part of the South. Georgia will turn into North Carolina, one day so might Tennessee, and the $64,000 question is when Texas is going to turn.”

According to “States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974–2060,” a 2015 report coauthored by Frey and Teixeira, America will go from 80 percent white in 1980 to less than 44 percent in 2060, when Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Florida join Texas as majority-minority states. A change will be “fueled by a combination of immigration of Asians and Latinos and the reverse migration of blacks,” says Teixeira.

That “reverse migration” has been happening for decades now, but continues to accelerate. New York, Chicago, and Detroit are experiencing losses in their black population as “children and grandchildren move back to the South,” says Frey, noting a shift to cities like Raleigh, Charlotte, Houston, and Atlanta “that will affect the suburban South in ways we would never have understood 20 years ago.”

Demographics are already making the difference in Houston, where liberal state representative Sylvester Turner was elected mayor in December despite losing 71 percent of the vote in white precincts, and in Louisiana, where Edwards won by running up the score in parishes Obama carried in 2012.

Southern Sun Belt states may ultimately become more important for Democratic campaigns than the aging Rust Belt. North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida already have a higher percentage of liberals than Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, New Hampshire, or Ohio. And “if Democrats win Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, they deny Republicans the White House,” says Bitzer, all else staying equal.

But Democrats can’t rely on demographics alone. “Even with demographic changes we have to have a winning message,” says former Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean. Indeed, Democrats can expand the Obama coalition. Jennifer Roberts won the mayoralty of Charlotte by taking Black Lives Matter seriously and by offering an economic agenda tailored to the working class. Her focus on the minimum wage should be emulated by Democrats who wish to unite the Obama coalition with rural non-voting whites, because “when Democrats do appeal to the white working class it will be through economically populist ideas, not pandering,” says Teixeira.

“It’s still too soon to declare the end of the Solid South, but the politics of these states will change because Republicans will have to change,” says Teixeira, to catch up with the demographics that lean left in the long term.

“One of two things will happen,” says Dean. “Either the South becomes Democratic or the Republican Party will moderate.” Based on what we’re seeing in the 2016 GOP primary, the safe bet is on a bluer South.