Sen. Obama's clinching of the Democratic presidential nomination has unleashed a flurry of analysis about "the new election map," an issue Facing South has covered for a while now.

Key to the "new map" is speculation that Obama will put new states in play for the Democrats, including the South and West. First, today's Washington Post:

An early analysis suggests there will be new battlegrounds added to the map this year, with Virginia, Colorado and Nevada among them. [...]

The Midwest remains the most concentrated competitive region of the country, but advisers to McCain and Obama agree that the election could turn on the outcome of contests in the Rocky Mountain States and the South.

As further proof that the Post and New York Times can't agree on much, the Times also offers a piece today which comes to the same conclusion, but mentions a completely different set of states:

Senator Barack Obama's general election plan calls for broadening the electoral map by challenging Sen. John McCain in typically Republican states -- from North Carolina to Missouri to Montana -- as Mr. Obama seeks to take advantage of voter turnout operations built in nearly 50 states in the long Democratic nomination battle.

Aside from Florida, the two Southern states that come up most as possible "swing states" are North Carolina and Virginia. We'll be looking in-depth at these states and their role in the 2008 elections, so stay tuned.

One interesting note: Some commentators have started referring to N.C. and V.A. as "mid-Atlantic" states, suggesting they are somehow separate from the South. This seems like an attempt to pry these states from their Southern context and history, an especially useful shifting of terms for those who have argued that the South could never be politically competitive ("but those states are different").

There's still a lot that's "Southern" about North Carolina and Virginia, and Facing South reader JS, for one, cannot abide such attempts to strip them of their Southern identity, as he wrote us in a letter:

I am hurt and appalled by the increasing tendency to refer to Virginia as a "Mid-Atlantic" state. My family have a long history here, and we've always considered ourselves--proudly--as Southerners. Do other people have share my chagrin? If so, do you know of anything we can do to alter these circumstances?

UPDATE: Today, the political junkies at MSNBC's First Read name North Carolina as the bellwether state for testing "the new map." As they write:

Of all the new Obama targets, North Carolina is the one that will tell us whether there is such thing as a new Obama Democratic coalition.