W. Bush. This pattern continued in the 2004 election; the Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards received no electoral votes from the South apart from Maryland and Delaware, even though Edwards was from North Carolina, and was born in South Carolina. However, in the 2008 election, as many areas in the South became more urbanized, liberal, and demographically diverse, Barack Obama won the former Republican strongholds of Virginia and North Carolina as well as Florida; Obama won Virginia and Florida again in 2012 and lost North Carolina by only 2.04 percent. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won only Virginia while narrowly losing Florida and North Carolina. And in 2020, Joe Biden won Virginia, a growing stronghold for Democrats, and narrowly won Georgia, in large part due to the rapidly growing Atlanta metropolitan area, while narrowly losing Florida and North Carolina. While the South was shifting from the Democrats to the Republicans, the Northeastern United States went the other way. The Northeastern United States is defined by the US Census Bureau as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the New England States. Well into the 1980s, much of the Northeast – in particular the heavily suburbanized states of New Jersey and Connecticut, and the rural states of northern New England – were strongholds of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party made steady gains there, however, and from 1992 through 2012, all nine Northeastern states, from New Jersey to Maine, voted Democratic, with the exception of New Hampshire's plurality for George W. Bush in 2000. "Southern strategy" today Although Republicans gradually began doing better in presidential elections in the South starting in 1952, Republicans did not finish taking over Southern politics at the nonpresidential level until the elections of November 2010. , the South is dominated by Republicans at both the state and presidential level, with Republicans controlling 21 of the 22 legislative bodies in the former Confederacy, the sole exception being the Virginia Senate. Between the defeats of Georgia Representative John Barrow, Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu in 2014 and the election of Alabama Senator Doug Jones in 2017, there were no white Democratic members of Congress from the states that voted for George Wallace in 1968. Until November 2010, Democrats had a majority in the Alabama, North Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana Legislatures, a majority in the Kentucky House of Representatives and Virginia Senate, a