Not long after the polls closed on Tuesday night, Georgia Congressman John Barrow earned his place in history when he lost his reelection campaign to Republican Rick Allen by almost 10 points—a peculiar place he undoubtedly didn’t want. Barrow, a five-term Democratic incumbent with a conservative voting record that earned him endorsements from both the National Rifle Association and the Chamber of Commerce, was the last white Democrat in Congress from the Deep South.

This fact has occasioned some eloquent obituaries for that most endangered of political species, which is on the verge of extinction. Not only will there be no white Southern Democrats left in the House come January, but it’s a good bet there won’t be any white Southern Democrats in the Senate either (Mary Landrieu is likely to lose in the Louisiana run-off next month). Throw in the election of South Carolina’s Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate and, as The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson pointed out on Twitter, “there are now more black Republicans than white Democrats from the Deep South.”

Much as this is a problem for white southern Democrats, it's a crisis for black ones. That’s because blacks in the South—who, notwithstanding the very compelling counter-example of Tim Scott, are almost invariably Democrats—have for decades relied on coalitions with white Democrats to increase their political power. Lacking white politicians with whom they can build coalitions, black politicians are increasingly rendered powerless. (See my article in August about what this has meant for black people in Alabama.) The situation for southern black Democrats has only grown more dire after Tuesday’s midterms. To truly grasp the severity of the crisis, it’s instructive to look not at Congress and Barrow, but at state legislatures and a Democratic state senator from Alabama named Roger Bedford.

Bedford, a lawyer from the northern Alabama city of Russellville, was first elected to the state Senate in 1982. Over the next three decades, he became a fixture in Montgomery—surviving a broken neck; cancer; an infection suffered during a church mission trip that left him blind in one eye; an extortion indictment; and above all else, the state’s rising Republican tide. A conservative Democrat who was pro-gun and anti-abortion, Bedford for many years chaired one of the Senate’s budget committees—a perch he used to lavish obscene sums of government money on his district. The combination of his positions and his pork allowed him to escape the fate that befell so many of his fellow white Democrats in the state legislature as Republicans made gains and ultimately took control of it in 2010. Bedford, the Birmingham News’s Kyle Whitmire writes, had “the reputation of being bulletproof,” which made him “the Democrat that Republicans throughout the state loved to hate.”

On Tuesday, the Republicans finally got him. Bedford lost by 60 votes—out of more than 35,000 cast—to his GOP opponent. (The race is headed toward an automatic recount, but Bedford doesn’t sound like a guy who thinks he’s going to win.) As recently as four years ago, Bedford was one of 13 white Democrats in the Alabama Senate. After the Republican route in the 2010 elections, that number was slashed to four. Aggressive redistricting by the new Republican supermajority—which made white districts whiter and black districts blacker; and which led to a civil rights lawsuit that will be argued in the U.S. Supreme Court next week—caused two of those four white Democrats not to seek reelection this year. That meant that this past Tuesday, the only two white Democratic Senators on the ballot in Alabama were Bedford and Billy Beasley, the latter of whom represents a majority-black district. Assuming the results hold, Bedford’s defeat means the Alabama Senate has now lost its last white Democrat from a non-majority-minority district.