Whistling Past Dixie

[If my soul was made of stone]

I remember reading some articles from that time period that every state save Florida was not worth contesting as they are all part of the Bible belt or jesusland or whatever

I think that the "Jesusland" meme immeasurably harmed 21st-century political discourse. Even when people like James Carville mocked red-leaning areas beforehand, there still wasn't the spirit to completely give up on them or their environs in the name of some moral superiority. The dichotomy of red vs blue areas also harms literacy of elections that don't use the Electoral College, as it obscures the fact that margins matter even in safe areas.

There still hasn't been a Democrat who's won the presidency without carrying any ex-Confederate states, and until that happens "the South" as a whole is not worth triaging based on elitist conceptions of what a Democratic-leaning area should be, especially since many of the Dems' core demographics are concentrated there.

[If my soul was made of stone]

The book's premise was exactly correct, the Dems won Virginia because of DC, Richmond and not the rural southerners. Same goes with Georgia and Atlanta while NC is only competitive because of Charlotte and Raleigh.

That's a very revisionist take on North Carolina. Obama's victory there was as much built on rural areas remaining much less polarized than in states such as Georgia as his massive gains in the state's metropolitan areas. Clinton and Biden both overperformed Obama '08 massively in the metros, but the late-breaking rural slide in the state that was spurred on by the many nationalized tensions of the Obama years, along with exurban stagnation, prevented them from turning the state blue again.

While the rural South is still strongly Republican as a whole, turning out rural Black voters has always been key to Democratic victories there, as Biden and especially Ossoff and Warnock have demonstrated.