What would we have to do to make WV and AR competetive again?

[Canis]

Pretty much how do we flip the south?

[Skunk]

Time travel to the 1990's.

[Mondale]

Have Jesus Christ return and campaign for the Dem party

[Averroës Nix]

Repeal the Civil Rights Act, along with a constitutional amendment or two.

[The Mikado]

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.

[Xeuma]

Have Jesus Christ return and campaign for the Dem party

Wouldn't be enough.

[AN63093]

Pretty much how do we flip the south?

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, 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.

[Teflon Joe.]

Have Jesus Christ return and campaign for the Dem party

Wouldn't be enough.

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?

[morgieb]

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.

[Alben Barkley]

Time travel to the 1990's.

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

[Wazza [INACTIVE]]

Repeal the Civil Rights Act, along with a constitutional amendment or two.

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

[brucejoel99]

Time travel to the 1990's.

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

Be careful what you wish for...

[Averroës Nix]

Repeal the Civil Rights Act, along with a constitutional amendment or two.

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

The question is about what would make them competitive again, not how they ceased to be competitive in the first place. Of course it's a bit of a nonsense question, for reasons AN69 describes in their post above.

Regarding which post, incidentally, I see no reason for Democrats to be sanguine about Mississippi. The state's black population is stagnant, it has a particularly high rural population share, it has no large metros, and it has about the lowest educational attainment in the country. Moreover, if there's one part of the country in which Democrats are unlikely to win over the kind of downscale white voters whom they've been losing in greater numbers since the '90s, it's the Deep South.

[gracile]

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

[Some of My Best Friends Are Gay]

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.

[Alben Barkley]

Time travel to the 1990's.

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

Be careful what you wish for...

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.

[AN63093]

Repeal the Civil Rights Act, along with a constitutional amendment or two.

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

The question is about what would make them competitive again, not how they ceased to be competitive in the first place. Of course it's a bit of a nonsense question, for reasons AN69 describes in their post above.

Regarding which post, incidentally, I see no reason for Democrats to be sanguine about Mississippi. The state's black population is stagnant, it has a particularly high rural population share, it has no large metros, and it has about the lowest educational attainment in the country. Moreover, if there's one part of the country in which Democrats are unlikely to win over the kind of downscale white voters whom they've been losing in greater numbers since the '90s, it's the Deep South.

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.

[RINO Tom]

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

[Does the title even matter?]

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

[538Electoral]

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.

[RINO Tom]

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

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.

[RoboWop]

Run a third party.

[cwh2018]

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.

[Canis]

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

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.

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