It’s still roughly three months before The Elephant in the Room hits bookstore shelves (September 1), but an adaptation from the book appears in this month’s Atlantic Monthly.

Here’s the link, though it’s subscriber only.

In the piece, I look at whether the GOP’s balance between South and West is going off kilter. I argue that, yes, the GOP is tilting too far South, leaving open the way toward a Democratic revival in the interior West.

For the non-subscribers (and, really, shame on you), here’s an excerpt:

PURPLE MOUNTAINS
Could the interior West—long seen as an archetypal red region—be turning blue? The fate of the Republican Party may hinge on the answer
By Ryan Sager

After the 2004 election, plenty of people noted that a shift of 60,000-odd votes in Ohio would have handed the Electoral College to John Kerry. But there was another place—less remarked upon—where a shift of similar magnitude would have done the same trick: the Southwest. Fewer than 70,000 votes among Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, with their collective nineteen electoral votes, could have swung the election just as surely as Ohio’s 60,000. And with George W. Bush winning by margins of 5 percentage points, 3 points, and 1 point, respectively, these were swing states by any definition of the term.

…

Signs of a possible Democratic resurgence in the West have been slowly accumulating since 2000. In 2004, Democrats took over both chambers of the Colorado legislature and sent the Democrat Ken Salazar to the U.S. Senate to replace a retiring Republican, Ben Nighthorse Campbell; Salazar’s brother John also won the open U.S. House seat in Colorado’s Third District, which was vacated by a Republican. (This turned out to be one of only two open Republican seats in the House picked up by Democrats that year.)

That same year, Montana elected its first Democratic governor in two decades: Brian Schweitzer, a rancher who flaunted his love of guns. Democrats won four out of five statewide offices in that election and also took control of Montana’s house and senate. Counting Schweitzer, Democrats now hold the governorships of four of the eight states that make up the interior West; in 2000, they held none. New Mexico’s Bill Richardson and Wyoming’s Dave Freudenthal each replaced two-term Republican governors in 2002, the same year that Janet Napolitano became the first elected Democratic governor of Arizona since the 1980s. While it’s possible to read too much into victories at the state level, something is happening throughout the West.

…

If the political center of the GOP continues to drift southward, the party risks catalyzing another geographic realignment on a par with that which brought it to power—starting up in Montana and running south. Many of the West’s mountains are already turning purple. They may yet turn blue.

So, if this piques your interest, you may have to fork out for the magazine.