The Modern Sunbelt: Economy, Politics, and Climate Change (1966-2024)

For this final post in my long Sunbelt series, I will conclude with a short summary of why each of the 3 states I’ve been examining (Arizona, Texas, and Florida) has stood out in national importance, from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s to today. All have grown spectacularly in population in recent decades- by why, and how much in each case? When did each shift in party control, and especially when did “culture war” Republicans come into power? Unlike the now-ironclad grip that MAGA Republicanism now has on Texas and Florida, why has Arizona turned “purple” in its politics in the 2020s? Finally, how is the political leadership in each responding to ever-increasing harm (of many sorts) from climate change?

In the interest of sanity, I have made further restrictions: for Arizona, almost entirely a focus on Maricopa County (Phoenix and suburbs); for Texas, on the 4 largest cities overall (Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio). For Florida, just about the southern third (especially the Tampa, Orlando, and Miami metro areas). The topics for each will vary somewhat by the state…

So- on to Arizona and Maricopa County. It’s important to really understand how fast Phoenix and its suburbs have grown! The city itself was blocked from expanding its land area by 1960, and since 2000 the suburbs have even expanded outside Maricopa. The county gained over 500,000 in the ‘70s, 600,000 in the ‘80s, over 900,000 in the ‘90s, 700,000 in the ‘00s, and 400,000 in the ‘10s; by now the metro area has passed 5 million, surging far out into the Salt River Valley (part of the Sonoran Desert) and beyond. Phoenix itself is now essentially tied with Philadelphia as the 5th largest US city! All of this migration has been fostered by relatively affordable housing (fostered by pro-development local governments), an attractive dry sunny climate, and high-paying industries, especially aerospace and electronics (particularly semiconductors). Phoenix now has a lot of corporate headquarters (the mining giant Freeport McMoRan, U-Haul, Best Western, etc.). The Biden Administration is now lavishly funding and celebrating semiconductor makers Intel and (Taiwanese) TSMC. Besides attracting young tech workers, Phoenix has also attracted middle-class families, especially from California (notorious for extreme housing costs and higher taxes), and retirees (between 2008-2021, more elderly migrants than anywhere else!). Ethnically, the city and county have rapidly diversified; as recently as 1970, the city was 93% white; now whites and Hispanics (mostly of Mexican descent) are practically even (at just over 40% each). About 650,000 are foreign-born. The Black population has been growing rapidly since 2020 (though it’s still just over 7% of the total).

In politics, Arizona had, up to 1966 (since statehood in 1912, as one of the last two states in the Lower 48), 11 Democratic governors and 4 Republican (originally having 2-year terms, extended in 1968 to 4 years). Its US senators were also mostly Democrats (dominated by one in particular, Carl Hayden, who, from 1912 to 1968, was in office for 56 years!). On the other hand, the Republicans have controlled the state legislature for almost the entire period from the ‘60s to today (increasingly through manipulating the drawing of districts), and Phoenix’s Maricopa County was also Republican-run for almost the entire time from 1949 to 2020. Politics up to 1966, both at the state and city levels, were very undemocratic, with district lines drawn to favor rural over city politicians, and the votes of minorities suppressed (Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American). Arizona has the 3rd largest Native American population, with 22 federally recognized tribes and about 320,000 members, yet until 1970 all had to pass literacy tests to vote (it took even longer for election materials to be translated into their languages!).

In 1966, the reapportionment of districts mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court began to take effect (the so-called “one man, one vote”), and for a time politics became much more competitive. By then there was already a moderate-conservative split beginning to develop within the state Republicans; it was Arizona’s own Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, who helped to kick off modern national conservatism in 1964. Though Goldwater lost, Republican candidates have carried Arizona in all but two elections since: 1996 (Clinton) and 2020 (Biden, by just 10,000!). The state’s most important politician after Goldwater was John McCain (1936-2018), elected to the Senate in 1986, and the Republican nominee in 2008 (a famous feud started in 2015 when candidate Trump deemed McCain a “loser” for being captured in North Vietnam!). Thanks to the rapid population growth mentioned above, Arizona has been steadily gaining electoral votes (from just 5 in 1964 to 11 today). In another sign of the state’s national influence, Pres. Reagan appointed Arizona’s Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court (its first woman) in 1981. The state Republicans began a sharp swing to the right in the “Tea Party” midterm elections of 2010; one example has been Flagstaff dentist Paul Gosar in the U.S. House, who has called for the execution of former top general Mark Milley! He was one of the three Congressmen from Arizona who voted against certifying Biden’s election on Jan. 6, 2021 (the state Republicans also tried to overturn Biden’s victory, while defeated 2022 candidate for governor Kari Lake has yet to concede and is now running again!). While some Republicans, and a majority of the state’s large Mormon population, have opposed Trump (including the former Speaker of the state house), most party officials do support him. As for the surprise Democratic victories of 2020 and 2022, they have been achieved by an unprecedented Hispanic and Native American mobilization, and by large Democratic majorities in Maricopa County (it has over half the state population). The latest (and unfolding) controversy has been caused by the state supreme court, which has a conservative majority appointed by former Gov. Ducey; it has just reinstated an 1864 abortion law (banning it in all cases except to save the mother’s life!)- far harsher than the 15-week ban passed by the Republican-majority legislature…

Phoenix being in a desert, with only about 7 inches average rainfall, water has been a primary environmental issue from its founding. For a long time, the water of the Salt River upstream, backed up by the Roosevelt Dam in 1911, was sufficient not just for the growing city, but for creating an irrigated farm breadbasket around it. When the city started to grow much faster in the ‘50s, the subdivision of farms into small house lots actually cut water needs for quite awhile (since homeowners used much less than farmers). Once growth inevitably outpaced the Salt River supply, people everywhere began to drill wells and pump up groundwater, with no regulation (resulting in some dramatic soil sinking by the ‘70s!). Under pressure from many directions, the state legislature enacted a first-in-the-nation Groundwater Management Act in 1980. It established a set of urban districts in which use of water is supposed to be kept below aquifer replenishment. The next big water event was the completion of the Central Arizona Project, the most expensive water engineering so far in US history ($4.7 billion!), in 1994; it pumps water, uphill and for 336 miles thanks to massive pumping stations, all the way from the Colorado River (the region’s only large river) to Phoenix, and beyond to the second largest city (Tucson). 

Thanks to the CAP and increasingly careful regulation and conservation, the two cities have managed to avoid water overuse despite a long-term severe drought, and a combined population that’s now 5.5 million! There IS a broader water crisis, but it is due to the total lack of groundwater regulation outside the Act districts! The risk of overuse got much greater in 2014, when a big Saudi-owned corporation, Fondomonte, moved into a rural valley and began spectacular pumping- to grow alfalfa for export as cattle feed to Arabia!! The neighbors to those farms soon found their wells drying up. The new governor, Katie Hobbs, has taken two dramatic actions in 2023-24: she has paused Phoenix suburban development that can’t show a credible water supply, and she has ended all of the Saudi leases! The state’s right-wing Republicans have not been helpful; instead, in this election year they have launched an all-out campaign of climate change denial (one legislator has called the idea of human-caused change “anti-God”!) and resistance to Gov. Hobbs. Congressman Gosar has called Hobbs’s development moratorium: ““an impulsive scare tactic.” “It scared people, it really did,” he said, adding, “We have plenty of fresh water. It’s just the distribution that’s the problem.”” (newrepublic.com) In the “real world”, Phoenix and Arizona are confronting global climate change- in their case prolonged heating and drying. This has meant record dust storms and wildfires already, and in the summer of 2023 Phoenix had the worst heat wave of any American city ever: 54 days of 110 degrees or above!! The homeless and elderly particularly suffered, including third-degree burns just from touching the pavement! No state or local government can be expected, by itself, to end such extremes, though it can do damage reduction (such as tree planting and white pavements). No question- environmental issues, especially water, are thoroughly intertwined with politics and the limits of growth in this election year- while Arizona is one of just seven critical election swing states.

Except for Arizona’s recent political swing from red to purple, Texas has followed a broadly similar path in the last half-century or so. Though, following the old cliche, “everything is big(ger) in Texas,” all of its trends have been much “bigger” too, especially its population growth. Demographically an overwhelmingly rural state up to the 1940s (and of course far larger than Arizona!), Texas has urbanized in spectacular fashion in recent times. Instead of just one big metro area like Arizona, it has developed four, all now each in the millions, while the state population has surpassed 30 million (second only to California’s- a state with which it is now frequently compared). It has been adding 3 to 4 million every decade! The only slowdown has been during an oil price downturn in the ‘80s. Houston (the nation’s 4th largest city) and Dallas-Fort Worth are the population heavyweights, while Austin gets the award for the fastest growth. In 1966, it numbered just 232,000; today, 58 years later, counting its many suburbs, it’s 2,228,000! As for just about all large US cities, there has been just as much transformation in ethnic diversity. Texas had just three large groups up to the mid-‘60s: “Anglo” whites (holders of almost all the political and economic power since the days of the Texas Republic in the 1830s); Blacks (originally the South’s largest slave population); and Mexican-Americans (at that point still overwhelmingly in the western and southwestern rural counties). Blacks (thanks partly to the “Return Migration” from North back to South) and Latin Americans (including most of the immigrants from below the border) have flocked into the cities. Houston’s mix is now about evenly divided between Anglos and Hispanics (much like Phoenix), but it also has major populations of Vietnamese, (Asian) Indians, and Chinese. In sum, today just over half of Texans, in the nation’s second largest state, live in just the 4 big metro areas! An interesting comparison in US versus European human density, though: Texas is about the same size as France. But France holds more than double, almost 68 million! And the Paris metro holds over 11.2 million (as many as Houston’s, Austin’s, and San Antonio’s metros combined!).

In this modern period, Texas’s economy, politics, and environmental issues have been completely intertwined. While the fossil fuel industry (in Texas’s case oil and natural gas; coal has never been very significant) has been world-famous since the landmark Spindletop oil strike in 1901, as an employer it has declined greatly over time (and the state’s economy has greatly diversified). But the enormous wealth generated by oil and gas (which has had a rebirth with the fracking boom of the 2000s) has continued to be used for political purposes throughout. Besides the traditional farming and ranching, Texas’s economy has expanded into aerospace (most famously with the arrival of NASA’s Manned Space Center in Houston in the ‘60s), and now electronics (especially centered on Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth). These high-paying jobs, combined with affordable housing (until recently!) and low taxes (no state income tax!), have been the driver of the extraordinary urban migration touched on above. In turn that migration has given the state equally extraordinary electoral clout (now 38 votes, again second only to California!).

The state’s modern politics can broadly be divided into three phases: first, from the mid-‘60s to early ‘90s, one, with the collapse of one-party Jim Crow Democratic rule, of increased democracy and party competition (in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other reforms) Next, the heyday of the ‘90s Republican “Bush dynasty” (in Texas’s case, George H.W. and his son George W.), coinciding with the general decline of the state Democratic Party. Finally, starting with the landmark 2002 election and up to today, the state has returned to one-party control (but this time Republican), thanks in large part to aggressive gerrymandering and voting legislation, while Democratic influence has shrunk (now entirely confined to city and county governments). The reason that the 2002 election was so important was largely due to one man: Tom DeLay. Through his alliances, planning, and funding; what a journalist of the time called “young, spruced-up white guys with an ability to quote Scripture” as candidates. and especially his hard-nosed gerrymandering of districts, DeLay and the Republicans were able at a single stroke to elect 88 of their party, taking over the state House and effectively eliminating the Democrats from statewide offices!

No Democratic candidate has won the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976, and no Democrat from Texas has been in the US Senate since 1993. This last phase has been characterized by ever-more-radical right-wing “culture-war” values and legislation (at the state level, but also influencing Congress). That rightward political shift has happened as the state has experienced its fastest population growth ever, and both trends have collided with more and more “natural” climate change-related disasters (severe drought and heat, more severe hurricanes, etc.). While the governments of the major cities have broadly recognized the climate danger, state politics has been dominated by climate deniers. These crosscurrents, which connect of course with similar battles in national politics, are making for a very turbulent period in Texas history!

Environmentally, Texas has always posed significant challenges to its human populations. It has a pattern of cyclical droughts, sometimes severe ones, which particularly impact its dry western and northwestern (Panhandle) sections. Droughts, obviously, affect agriculture and drinking water, and the drying of the landscape can lead to catastrophic wildfires. To the east, Texas’s flat Gulf Coast has always been vulnerable to hurricanes (including, in the days before weather forecasting, the one with the greatest loss of life in American history, the unnamed storm that struck Galveston in 1900). Houston, the state’s largest city, has therefore been the city most recently affected by hurricanes.

In the modern period, as it has undergone its exceptional urban population growth, Texas’s environmental issues have certainly become more grave. First, its climate has been steadily warming since the 1970s, at the rate of an average of .6 degrees F. per decade. That may not sound like much, but it has meant that droughts and heat waves have become more severe, and the fire season is now at least a month longer. Texas has suffered especially severe heat effects in the summers of 2011 and 2023 (including the biggest wildfires ever). Paradoxically, a massive winter freeze in 2021 knocked out power (and in turn drinking water for millions), especially impacting gas power plants (which had not been winterized). At the same time, Texas’s hurricanes have become frequent and, most dangerously, have brought more extreme rainfall (a consequence of increased ocean evaporation). 

The worst storm yet has been Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which deluged the Houston area for 6 days- with up to 60 inches of rain!! Texas’s loose building regulation meant that tens of thousands of homes in the area were built on floodplains. The torrent overwhelmed the two aging upstream dams (Addicks and Barker), completed in 1945 and 1948. The Corps of Engineers was forced to open the gates of both to send the floodwaters out to sea- through residential neighborhoods! To add to it all, the flood knocked out the cooling system at a chemical plant, causing the chemicals to overheat, ignite, and explode. The surrounding neighborhood had to be evacuated, and tens of thousands of pounds of toxins were released into the nearby water. All in all, over 100 died, over 30,000 were made homeless, and the cost was over $125 billion! Funding has been set up for a very expensive flood control project, involving a system of large diversion tunnels. Another scheme, the so-called “Ike Dike” which would be a concrete barrier across Galveston Bay, would likely be the most expensive engineering project in American history, and is on hold for now.

The way in which all of this (extreme heat, fires, water issues, floods) has been politicized largely has to do with the outsize role that the fossil fuel industry continues to have in Texas politics (even if it’s no longer central to the state economy). Fossil fuel taxes pay for over half of the state’s revenue, allowing it to do without an income tax (and hence drawing in migrants). Although Texas is by far the greatest state emitter of greenhouse gases (equivalent in emissions to Iran!!), thus adding immeasurably to both global and local climate change, its Republican governments have refused to take basic emission control measures (such as encouraging EVs, speeding up energy conversion to renewables, stopping methane leaks from oil and gas wells, etc.). Indeed the state Education Board has proposed even eliminating language about the science of climate change from public school textbooks! Meantime the state is also headed for a water crisis. While the government has focused on building new reservoirs, groundwater pumping has been left up to 98 individual districts, none of which have the power to stop overuse (whether for green lawns or big industries!). The big cities have started implementing climate action plans, including cooling measures like tree planting, white pavements, and water regulation, but all without state support.

This post, and series, has turned out to be much longer than I had expected (sorry, readers!). In the interest of space I’ve condensed my last planned section- on Florida. I’ve realized that its trajectory (demographic, economic, political, environmental) is really remarkably similar to the patterns I’ve already outlined for Arizona and Texas. Specifically- enormous (and, until the ‘70s virtually unregulated) population growth and building (alongside attracting millions of tourists), especially since the opening of Disney World in 1971. That growth has greatly magnified Florida’s political significance- it too has gone through a series of phases: from being a Jim Crow one-party Democratic state, to becoming a swing state (while electing minorities and women from the ‘70s on), to (since the early 2000’s) tight control by right-wing Republicans (as Trump’s adopted home, it was the only state to increase its votes for him in the 2020 election). In turn, like Texas, its state government has in recent years made strides in preserving its unique Everglades ecosystem, but, to avoid scaring off tourists and investors, has tried to downplay a host of environmental threats, aggravated by climate change (such as increasingly damaging hurricanes, sea level rise, and contamination of the water supply). Already some Floridians are leaving. We’re about to see if its soaring economic growth will continue. 

The same is true for Arizona and Texas. Already insurance companies are, in the face of climate change, sharply raising rates, or leaving these states altogether. In essence these states are laboratories for the American future: can we make the hard political choices to achieve environmental sustainability, in time to avoid catastrophe? In the meantime, how can our fastest growing cities cope with searing temperatures, more extreme weather, and water shortages? The stakes could not be higher.

RESOURCES: for all, Wikipedia.org. Multiple authors and entries.

PHOENIX & ARIZONA:

Bolin, Bob, Sara Grineski, and Timothy Collins. “The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA,” Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No.2, (Winter 2005), pp. 156-168.

Paoletta, Kyle. “The Water Wars Deciding the Future of the West,” newrepublic.com (Oct. 30, 2023).

Ross, Andrew. “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City.” (2011- Phoenix)

Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. “Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics.” (2013)

Talton, Jon. “A Brief History of Phoenix.” (2015)

VanderMeer, Philip. “Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860-2009.” (2011)

TEXAS:

Behnken, Bruce. “Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas.” (2014)

Campbell, Randolph B. “Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State.” (2003)

Cunningham, Sean. “Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right.” (2010)

Gibson, Carrie. “El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America.” (2019)

“Handbook of Texas” (multiple authors and entries- tshaonline.org)

Krochmal, Max. “Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era.” (2016)

Minutaglio, Bill. “A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas.” (2021)

Philpott, Ben. “Looking Back at Texas’ Republican Decade,” texastribune.org (Oct. 23, 2012).

Reid, Jan, and Lou Dubose. “The Man With the Plan,” texasmonthly.com (Aug. 2004). About Republican Tom DeLay and the 2002 elections.

FLORIDA:

Barnett, Cynthia. “Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.” (2007)

Davis, Jack E. “An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and The American Environmental Century.” (2009) Recommended.

Green, Amy. “Moving Water: The Everglades and Big Sugar.” (2021)

Grunwald, Michael. “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise.” (2006) Highly recommended!

Landis, Michael. “Of Mice and Municipalities,” werehistory.org (June 18, 2016)

McCally, David. “The Everglades: An Environmental History.” (1999)

Mormino, Gary R. “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.” (2005)

Poole, Leslie Kemp. “Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century.” (2015)

Revels, Tracy J. “Dreams and Nightmares: Central Florida and the Opening of Walt Disney World”. und.

(https://www.journaloffloridastudies.org/files/vol0108/Revels-Dreams-Nightmares-WDW.pdf)

-“-“Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism.” (2011)