Regional realignment?

Matt Yglesias recently posted this election map from 1976 (note: Dems are red and GOP is blue, as was traditional before the late 90s). As he notes, it really shows how much times have changed. Back then, the Democrats' coalition was the South and about half of the Rust Belt. That coalition is not coming back...

...or is it? As in, is this the Republicans' new regional coalition?

Traditionally, we think of the Upper Midwest, with its manufacturing workers, union power, and Catholic "white ethnic" population, as Democrat territory. But it is in states like Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania that Republicans have made the biggest gains (their only gains, really) in recent years. I can't help but attribute this to race. White-tribalism seems to be almost as strong in the Upper Midwest as in the South, and manufacturing is fading fast. Just look at the anti-Obama vote in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have been slowly, steadily making their gains in the West. California, once solidly Republican, is now a liberal bastion. And Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona are trending Democratic. The West, as I see it, is basically a libertarian place; it depends heavily on (nonwhite) immigration, foreign trade, and entrepreneurship for its economy. Besides low taxes and deregulation, Republicans never had anything to offer the West, and those two things are pretty played out; now their anti-immigration frenzy and Southern Baptist moralizing crap are threatening to turn the entire West as Democratic as it once was solidly Republican.

So is this the shape of the new regional coalition balance in the U.S.? A liberal northeast (plus Minnesota, Wisconsin, and maybe Illinois) allied with a libertarian West, against a South and Rust Belt desperate to preserve America's whiteness? It's not here yet, but I can see it happening.