Every presidential election cycle brings talk of the handful of “swing” precincts that candidates chase relentlessly in the campaign’s final stretch — places like the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the counties ringing Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati in Ohio, or Florida’s famed “I-4 corridor” stretching from Tampa through Orlando to the Atlantic coast. The underlying idea is always the same: as those bellwether areas go, so goes the state, and sometimes the nation.
Alabama has never really been one of those places. The state has voted reliably Republican in presidential elections since Barry Goldwater carried it over Lyndon Johnson in 1964, with only two exceptions in the decades since — George Wallace’s home-state win in 1968 and Jimmy Carter’s victory over Gerald Ford in 1976. There’s no serious debate about which party will carry Alabama’s electoral votes in a general election.
But that doesn’t mean South Alabama is irrelevant to presidential politics — particularly during the Republican primary season. The Mobile and Baldwin County area saw a steady stream of candidate visits over recent months, including a stop by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, and appearances from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and businessman Donald Trump on the Republican side — all jockeying for delegates ahead of the so-called SEC primary, when Alabama and several neighboring Southern states vote on the same day.
Closer to home, a different kind of regional pattern has been taking shape — one that cuts across state lines rather than following them. Stretching along Interstate 10 from the New Orleans suburb of Slidell, Louisiana, through the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast and on toward Jacksonville, Florida, sits a corridor of reliably Republican territory built on a mix of rural, church-going conservative voters and residents of coastal cities and suburbs whose politics tend to run more on fiscal and economic lines.
That mix may help explain why Trump has held rallies up and down the I-10 corridor — in Pensacola, Biloxi and Mobile — each of which drew unusually large crowds even by the standards of a crowded primary field. Former Florida Congressman Joe Scarborough, now host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said on his show that Trump’s Pensacola rally was unlike anything he’d witnessed in his hometown. “I was at George W. Bush’s campaign rally in 2004, at the final stages of that unbelievable presidential race in early November,” Scarborough said. “I saw Reagan come to Pensacola twice in 1980. I saw the crowds. I never saw anything like that in my hometown before. It’s absolutely staggering, here we are — in early January. I’ll be honest with you — I guess seeing it in your own hometown, I don’t get it as far as the size of these crowds go. It’s like nothing I saw with Reagan. It’s like nothing I saw with Bush. It’s nothing I saw with any political candidate what I saw come out of Pensacola last night.”
Trump wasn’t the only candidate drawing energized crowds in the region. Ted Cruz held a well-attended event in Daphne, and Ben Carson spoke to a large gathering at the University of South Alabama in Mobile — both signs that campaigns see real value in courting voters along this stretch of the Gulf Coast, even outside the traditional swing-state map.
Part of what ties the region together, despite falling under three different state governments, is a shared sense of regional identity. Communities along the I-10 corridor from southwest Alabama through the Mississippi Gulf Coast and into the Florida Panhandle share television and radio markets, follow many of the same newspapers, root for the New Orleans Saints, and build large parts of their local economies around coastal tourism. Public schools in the region even dismiss for Mardi Gras. Politically and culturally, these areas are often viewed as the outliers within their own states — less rigidly traditional than the rest of Alabama or Mississippi, and less affluent and cosmopolitan than the rest of Florida.
None of that makes the I-10 corridor a decisive swing region in the way Ohio or the I-4 corridor can be in a general election. But the populations along this stretch of the Gulf Coast are large enough, and turn out with enough intensity, that presidential campaigns can’t afford to ignore them during the primary. Mobile — the region’s largest city and the one sitting roughly at its geographic center — has increasingly found itself a stop on the primary circuit, a small but telling sign of how national campaigns are looking beyond the traditional swing-state map when courting Republican primary voters in the Deep South.