“If Biden, or another “moderate” wins the nomination, the Democrats have the chance to build a solid governing center-left coalition which will include millions of disaffected former Republicans, and states like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina.”
I live in Georgia, and I can tell you that a Biden / moderate candidacy won’t help build a center-left coalition. Georgia Democrats as members of the Dixiecrats were conservative pro-segregation, anti-civil rights politicos long after Reconstruction (contrary to your timeline), and we were a one-party state. For a brief time in the 60’s -70’s, progressive moderates (i.e. moderates who accepted the need for civil rights, etc., but who were rarely liberal) dominated electoral politics and local parties, but thanks largely to the “southern strategy” most of the original Dixiecrats defected to the Republican Party with its ideals of Reaganomics and the oppression of the working class and minorities. Even some of the “progressive moderates” changed stripes — check out the trajectory of Zell Miller, for example.
What we are left with in Georgia are ineffective local parties and an ineffective state organization. Most of the members could be considered moderate to liberal, but the dominant mode of party organization is inertia. The vast majority of Democrats who get elected in Georgia nowadays (from county to national level) are African-Americans in sequestered, gerrymandered (largely urban) districts. Republicans typically win state and national level contests by a 60–40 majority — that’s party line voting, because the same figures apply to races in which voters know little if any about the candidates running. Ideally, the 2018 victory of Lucy McBath in conservative Cobb County augurs well for candidates who take liberal / progressive stances (gun control in McBath’s case), but her conservative / moderate supporters were less likely to be “disaffected Republicans” as college-educated suburban women. There simply aren’t any Biden-types in elected office here, and there aren’t many true Biden supporters here either. Biden is popular with African-Americans in Georgia (and elsewhere) because of his association with the Obama administration; similar moderates like Klobuchar have little if any traction simply because they’re opposed to Trump and are not “radical.”
So it’s unlikely Georgia will end up with a third party center-left coalition. The last third party to do moderately well here was George Wallace’s American Independent Party, which carried five states in the 1968 Presidential election: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi.
And if Georgia doesn’t embrace a new center-left coalition party, it’s unlikely the other four southern states will either.
