“We started in Alabama on the wrong side of history,” Mr. Jones said at the church. “Let’s not let those ghosts define us.” A day earlier, he had said: “Roy Moore represents a backward look. I’m tired of Alabama being an embarrassment around the country.”

To my knowledge no other candidate had addressed the Alabama inferiority complex so directly as Mr. Jones, with the exception of Wallace, arguing in the opposite direction. In 1963, Wallace had journeyed to Harvard to assure an incredulous student audience that Alabama had “good race relations.” In that same speech, he blamed immoral Yankee soldiers for the presence of light-skinned black people in Alabama.

Bob Zellner can attest firsthand to Wallace’s absurdities at Harvard’s Memorial Hall. Mr. Zellner, son of an Alabama Klansman, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1961 and became its first white field secretary. At the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, Mr. Jones praised him from the pulpit as one of Alabama’s civil rights heroes. Over 50 years ago, an astonished Wallace had singled him out from the lectern at Harvard, having discovered that the Alabama rebel had followed him north. “Oh, I know you,” Wallace said, labeling Mr. Zellner a troublemaking jailbird for the question he put to Wallace about Alabama’s police brutality and murders of civil rights workers.

“Alabama has always had a victim’s complex,” Mr. Zellner told me in an email. “Wallace was always ‘sending a message’ to the elite, pointy-headed rich people but he ended up turning one group of little people against other little people while helping the rich get richer. The worst available candidate, the most radical, would always get the most attention, the highest ratings.”

I had never met Mr. Zellner until I sought him out in Daphne. There we were, two native sons of the Heart of Dixie, bound by hope as part of a standing-room-only crowd that Mr. Jones said represented “a shining Alabama the way it was always supposed to be.” The audience was about equally composed of black and white, young and old. How many of those whites were crossover Republicans? That’s the question that will determine whether Alabama sends its first truly New South figure to Washington.

Like the national Republican Party, Alabama’s microcosmic version of Trump World was split along class lines. Even before the allegations about Mr. Moore’s predatory sexual history dropped, Mr. Jones seemed to be whittling Mr. Moore’s double-digit lead by assuring upper-class Republicans that their Confederate ancestors would recognize the “honor in compromise and civility.” His has been the most vigorous Democratic campaign in decades and, perhaps prophetically for Mr. Trump, the wealthiest Republican enclaves like Mountain Brook near Birmingham and Fairhope on Mobile Bay are covered with Jones lawn signs. Less affluent suburbs with highly educated professionals, like Vestavia Hills and Hoover near Birmingham, follow the pattern.

I asked two prominent Fairhope residents about how their wealthy peers would vote. One, a liberal, said his neighbors on Mobile Bay’s fashionable Eastern Shore would claim to support Mr. Jones and then secretly vote for Mr. Moore, a man they would not invite to their homes.