So two things with this:
1) It's a message that you shouldn't give up on any race. Bill won the GOP stalwart of Vermont. The GOP looks to have really locked down Iowa. Etc... Any race can flip, any location can flip. Sometimes really really fast.
2) This is why I tune out any articles about Dems losing state control if it doesn't explicitly mention the fact that a lot of Dem states were actually "Dem states." Mississippi was controlled by "Dems" until 2011, but ain't nobody gonna say we were ever a progressive state. The flagship university has bullet holes in its main building from when people shot at our first black student! In the 60s! Any argument about the Democratic Party really needs to differentiate between the party today or the party of yesterday because there's actually a fairly large difference.
Sometimes party dynamics change faster than individual voters' registrations. Before the Great Depression, Republicans had the reputation of being "out of touch coastal elites" who supported harebrained liberal causes such as civil rights; they could still credibly call themselves the party of Lincoln. Democrats, conversely, had the rural populism game
on lock. Those perceptions began to change throughout the '30s and '40s as Roosevelt extended some rights to African Americans (even though the New Deal excluded them from the really good stuff) and Truman desegregated the military. A schism developed in the Democratic Party between the liberals in the northeast and west and the old
populists in the south, culminating in the realignment that occurred after the Civil Rights Act.
Some states remained nominally Democratic largely because of ancestral voting patterns. Their daddies and granddaddies voted Democratic, so why wouldn't they? As you say, though, you couldn't call those people flaming liberals; they'd basically become modern
Republicans in everything but name due to the Southern Strategy. The opposite occurred in states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc. Liberal Republicans who supported civil rights, they bristled at the Southern Strategy and rejected the new Republican party, at least ideologically. They subsequently began voting mostly Democratic at the federal level, as the Democratic Party now more closely reflected their liberal views. In fact, you could probably call H.W. Bush the last gasp of that moderate northeastern Republican Party. With Clinton's victory the change had been pretty much cemented. Some individuals retained the Republican label - Jim Jeffords, e.g. - but they could't be compared to the rabid conservatives in the south (who, remember, had previously been populist
Democrats). Thus we see the current layout of Democrats dominating the northeast and west (and, until recently, the midwest) and Republicans ruling the south.
TL, DR: Most of the realignments can be attributed to Republicans' capitalizing upon the south's racism for political gain, and even though these changes may look "sudden," they only look that way because a lot of Democrats in the South voted and acted like modern Republicans but just never changed their party registration until recently.
Of course, you probably know everything I just wrote, but I felt like wasting time.
I might've just sounded the benji alarm.
