We also need to look at Southern states that he carried by enormous margins. We have to look at states like Alabama.

In doing so, we have to examine the history of Alabama and see how white supremacy tracks across time and culminates with Trump.

The original capital of the Confederacy was in Montgomery, Ala. Of course, the South lost and Reconstruction commenced. But Alabama was divided between the anti-secession populists of the north and the counties in the south, as the Journal of Negro History pointed out in a 1949 article titled “Populism and Disfranchisement in Alabama.” After two elections for governors in which the populists did surprisingly well, coming within striking distance of winning, the flaming racist Democrats (that was the party of racists then) called a constitutional convention in 1901 with the express purpose of using the threat of the black vote — “Negro domination” was a phrase used — to make sure that the populists never had a chance again.

This to me was the most striking passage from the article:

“The Democratic State Executive Committee met in Montgomery on April 19 for the purpose of getting reports from the field and to brief candidates for delegates to the proposed convention. Emmet O’Neal, later to become governor of the state, stated that ‘the paramount purpose of the constitutional convention is to lay deep and strong and permanent in the fundamental law of the State the foundation of white supremacy forever in Alabama, and that we ought to go before the people on that issue and not suggest other questions on which we differ.’ Candidate Thomas J. Long, from Walker County, reminded his fellow candidates that ‘the way to win the fight is to go to the mountain counties and talk white supremacy …. I don’t believe it is good policy to go up in the hills and tell them that Booker Washington or Councill or anybody else is allowed to vote because they are educated. The minute you do that every white man who is not educated is disfranchised on the same proposition.”

Does this sound familiar? It’s the racial anxiety, divide-and-conquer tactics perpetually used on poor whites to persuade them to vote against their economic interests and for some mythological racial interest: You may be poor, but at least you’re not black. You should have advantage even over people more qualified than you. The lines are legion.