Alabama is the most Evangelical state in the country — better than two in five residents are counted in an Evangelical Protestant congregation, more than anywhere else — and for a century its politics ran as solidly one way. From Reconstruction onward it was Democratic, by the arithmetic of the Solid South and the disenfranchisement that held it, not by open contest. That world is gone, and its mirror image has taken its place: Alabama gave Donald Trump a thirty-point margin in 2024, its widest in five cycles, and sends a U.S. House delegation of five Republicans to two Democrats — both Democratic districts majority-Black, one of them redrawn by federal court order in 2023.
The harder story runs underneath. Alabama is still poor — 45th of fifty in household income, 43rd in college degrees — but the slope has turned. On the 2024 Nation’s Report Card its fourth-graders posted the largest math gain in the country and the second-largest in reading, the only state besides Louisiana to clear its pre-pandemic marks. The gains narrow by eighth grade, and adult attainment will take a generation to follow. But no state’s youngest students are climbing faster.
It is a regional pattern. Between 2020 and 2024 the South drew 2.7 million people from the rest of the country while the Northeast lost 1.2 million and the Midwest a half million — the first region in a generation to grow on domestic migration alone. Alabama is no Texas or Florida, but it runs in the same current: the country’s center of gravity is shifting south, and Alabama is part of why.