The “October surprise,” that peculiarly American tradition of a last-minute revelation intended to alter the course of a political campaign, has typically hinged on an act of unsavory behavior. In October of 2016, the public learned of vulgar comments that Donald Trump had made about women during an “Access Hollywood” shoot—though the extent to which this should be classified as a “surprise” is debatable. Trump won, anyway. Similarly, in early November of 2000, news broke of George W. Bush’s decades-old D.U.I. arrest, though, through the Florida recount debacle and a Supreme Court decision, Bush became President, too.

It is not surprising that an election as closely contested as this year’s Georgia governor’s race might also feature a late-season revelation, but the specific nature of it says more about attitudes in the state than it does about its target. On Monday, photographs surfaced showing Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee, participating in the burning of a Georgia state flag, in 1992, when she was a sophomore at Spelman College, in Atlanta. At the time, the flag was a source of great controversy in the state, because it incorporated the Stars and Bars of the Confederate flag. Only in a looking-glass view of democracy could opposition to a regime that defended slavery be considered a character flaw. Yet it is an issue with proven effectiveness. An attempt to change the flag nearly derailed Governor Zell Miller’s political career, in 1994, and, eight years later, Governor Roy Barnes lost his bid for reëlection partly as a result of his having successfully removed the Confederate elements from the flag.

The timing of the flag-burning photographs’ release, just two weeks before the election and the day before Abrams faces the Republican nominee, Brian Kemp, in a televised debate, suggests that it was meant to galvanize certain sectors of Georgia’s white Republican voters. The oddity lies in the implication that Abrams’s actions betray a disqualifying aspect of her character. Elements of the Confederate flag had been incorporated into the Georgia flag in 1956, as part of that state’s massive resistance against the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The threadbare defense of the Confederate flag that is used today—that it represents heritage, not hate, etc.—falls flat when considered against the circumstances under which it was instituted. Its existence is inextricably bound to the state’s legacy of Jim Crow and to the violence that was required to maintain it. And yet that defense has a long history in Georgia politics.

Fifty-three years ago, Lester Maddox, an entrepreneur who had failed in two previous attempts to be elected to public office, launched a quixotic campaign for governor of Georgia. Maddox, whom Newsweek denounced as a “backwoods demagogue out in the boondocks,” had been rejected as a candidate first to be mayor of Atlanta and then to be lieutenant governor, but his 1966 gubernatorial bid had one particularly valuable asset: it came just two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Maddox, the owner of an Atlanta restaurant called the Pickrick, refused to comply with the law and would not serve black customers. His indignation, expressed in the language of states’ rights and property rights, cemented his populist standing in a state that, only a decade earlier, had adapted its flag as a sign of resistance to integration. Maddox won his first political campaign, and was sworn in as governor.

The playbook of racist populism that was so key to the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was perfected in the South—Trump, in effect, treated the entire country as if it were the South in 1966—and the governor’s race is another testament to its durability. Brian Kemp, who currently serves as Georgia’s secretary of state, has used his office to try to suppress minority turnout—it was recently learned that he has held up fifty-three thousand voter-registration applications, seventy per cent of which were filed by African-Americans.

Yet there is a curious math involved in the calculation of this October surprise. The Georgia of 2018 is not the same as the one in which Lester Maddox’s populism took root, or even the one in which Roy Barnes lost office, in 2002. For one thing, the state’s black population has grown by nearly a million people since 2000, increasing its share of the populace by nearly four percentage points. African-Americans now account for a third of Georgia’s residents, and they will be a substantial portion of the electorate, suppression attempts notwithstanding. Abrams’s campaign strategy relies on minority registration, inspiration, and turnout in a way that no previous gubernatorial campaign in Georgia has. It is likely that a part of the state’s population will consider the burning of a Confederate-tinged flag twenty-five years ago to be an act of outrage that is disqualifying for the governorship. But there are likely many others for whom the idea of having a governor who had the nerve to burn a humiliating relic of racial subjugation is one whose time has come.