Talk Elections

Pretty much how do we flip the south?

Time travel to the 1990's.

Have Jesus Christ return and campaign for the Dem party

Might as well ask how you're going to flip Utah.

Actually, that's probably more likely in the long term (long term means more than a decade) than Arkansas or West Virginia.

Wouldn't be enough.

This is a different question than the topic question ("What would we have to do to make WV and AR competitive again?")  Which one are you interested in discussing?

The answer to the first Q (how do we flip the south), that is already underway (or has already happened in some states).  VA has flipped, NC and FL are competitive, GA is probably going to flip in either 2020 or 2024, and TX is trending D and could flip in the next 20 years.  MD and DE never went R, if you count them as Southern states (I do, many others don't).  It's not the entire South, sure, but Dems are already competitive in a large part of it and the most EV-heavy states.

Your second question (how to make WV/AR competitive again), is somewhat nonsensical.  WV and AR were never really "competitive" states, they were solid D states and then flipped.  AR especially, was a one-party state for most of American history.  At really no point in US history could it be said to be a "competitive" state, where both parties had a legitimate shot at winning it.  Maybe 2000, but that's really it, and I'm not even sure about that.

If really what you're asking is what would have to happen for WV/AR to become D states again- a realignment where the demographics in those states become part of the D base again.  

If you're looking for a Southern state that is likely to flip D (and perhaps surprisingly so, to some people), what you want to look for is MS, not WV and AR.  There is already a thread on that discussing it extensively (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=299900.0), but the long and short of it is- there is a long-term demographics problem there for the GOP that isn't hard to discover and will soon become pretty apparent, maybe as early as the 2030s.

What about if it's against a Roy Moore type who has a even worse sex scandal with a black boy, and the Dem is Joe Manchin and has picked Jesus Christ as his VP?

West Virginia = would require the Dems to become more of a social democrat/populist party and the Republicans to move in a technocratic, socially liberal centre-right direction. I don't envision this happening any time soon.
Arkansas = hard to imagine it. There's no real union strength here unlike the industrial Midwest, and the base which made the South safe Democratic is 99% deceased.

I wish I could do this just about every day now.

Yes, clearly the 1964 Civil Rights Act is what caused Arkansas and West Virginia to become red states in the 2000s...

Be careful what you wish for... (https://youtu.be/-TGj227OVKY)

Nothing. WV and AR are gone barring a massive realignment.

Basically what morgieb said. Republicans become socially liberal/fiscally conservative while Democrats become the opposite. this would definitely put West Virginia in play, and possibly Arkansas, and much of the Deep South, too.

LOL, that doesn’t change anything. I WOULD stop 9/11. All it would take is stuffing a few ballot boxes in Florida. Or just teaching some old Jewish voters in Florida how to deal with Hanging Chads. Or just moving myself and a handful of friends to Florida.

I don't want to derail this thread, so I'll primarily just refer back to my post above which has a link to a thread that goes in much, much more detail and has some good analysis within.. I'd invite you to review that thread.  The one sentence summary is- none of those factors you mention are relevant, because growth is so low in MS and the GOP vote consists of mostly white seniors which will soon be outnumbered by the black vote such that it becomes mathematically impossible for the GOP to win there.  This is, obviously, assuming the GOP continues to decisively lose the black vote, but I see no reason to not believe that will continue to be the case.

A Democratic Night King to resurrect an undead army of Yellow Dogs.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004//pages/results/states/WV/P/00/epolls.0.html

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=WVP00p1

Those states won't be won by Democrats again for decades at least.

Texas, Georgia, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina are southern states immediately possible for 2020. States like South Carolina and Mississippi may be within reach within a decade or two. The rest won't flip for a very long time.

Not sure what knowledge you're trying to bestow upon me, but said Yellow Dogs would have been dead and/or so old as to not statistically affect the "60/65 and older" category quite a while ago.

Run a third party.

Theses states appear to be safe for the foreseeable future for the GOP, the only way they will become competitive is if the democrats can start to win back ground with whites without college degrees.  It appears that unless there is a genuine split in the conservative vote these states will not be won by the democrats for the next 20 years or so.  If a GOP candidate  were to be defeated on a scale similar to McGovern then they would probably flip.

Yeah they just changed how they vote the 65+ Category backed Manchin in 2018
https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/west-virginia