Share

Email Print Comments Share

And, of course, this longstanding political divide is laid over parallel topographic, cultural and religious divides. Look at South Carolina in these maps of Baptist and Methodist affiliation in the United States. Upland South Carolina is Baptist, while the low country is split between the denominations, with a few more populous counties dominated by the relatively moderate Methodist church.

This, in turn, reflects the settlement patterns of southern Appalachia vs. the coastal south. As David Hackett Fischer demonstrated in his epic “Albion’s Seed,” the Southern lowlands were settled by aristocratic Cavaliers: nobles who came out on the wrong side of the English Civil War, as well as nobles’ younger sons, who were not poised to inherit lands in England. Accompanying the Cavaliers were indentured servants and, later, slaves.

The culture they created reflected the top-down one they came from; you see it in the aristocratic politics that were embraced (in the Democratic Party in the early 1900s, and the Republican Party in the later 1900s), the embrace of more liturgical variants of Protestantism, and the plantation economy, which transformed into an embrace of big business as the state industrialized.

The highlands, by contrast (remember, the northwestern tip of South Carolina is actually considered a part of Appalachia), were largely settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants. This wave of immigration represented almost the exact opposite of Cavalier culture. The Scotch-Irish were viscerally anti-establishment, an attitude that still pervades many aspects of their descendents’ outlook: anti-big religion, anti-big government, anti-big banks, and anti-big business. These were the people that Andrew Jackson -- our first Scotch-Irish president -- invited to his first inauguration, and who proceeded to get drunk and trash the White House.

So what we have is a white electorate in South Carolina that has persistently been divided between evangelical, populist voters in the highlands, and more moderate, pro-business, establishmentarian voters on the coastal plains. It is the very divide that South Carolina Republicanism itself grew out of. In the 1928 election, Herbert Hoover received 6 percent of the vote in South Carolina. But he ran a relatively respectable race in coastal counties like Beaufort (23 percent) and Charleston (29 percent).

If you look at maps of the 1952 and 1960 elections, the moderately conservative, establishment Republican candidates ran especially well in the coastal regions during the general election, while the more populist interior counties stuck with the party of Jackson and FDR. Indeed, these counties didn’t fully get on board with Republicanism until the 2000s.

This divide persists through today. Consider Map C:

Map C shows McCain counties and Huckabee counties from the 2008 primaries. McCain’s are in blue, Huckabee’s are in red. Note how similar these maps are to the maps above. In other words, South Carolina is still split between more populist up-country voters and establishment low-country voters. If I had money to bet, I would put in on Saturday’s vote looking a whole lot like this, with Romney performing increasingly better the closer the county is to the Atlantic seaboard.

Given this divide, it should not be surprising that we actually have an overall electorate that is somewhere between Iowa and New Hampshire, and where a moderate, pro-business, establishmentarian Republican can flourish. Consider the following table (using 2008 exit poll numbers):

So this is why Mitt Romney, who won New Hampshire handily and effectively tied for first in Iowa, is doing well in South Carolina. It goes a long way toward explaining why the sum of Romney’s and the now-dropped-out Jon Huntsman’s percentages in the RCP Average was a near plurality of the non-Ron-Paul vote (a category unto itself), and why the next-largest share goes to Newt Gingrich -- a reasonably "establishment" candidate himself. And it explains how John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney captured a combined 51 percent of the South Carolina primary vote in 2008.

South Carolina is simply not a place where a populist rabble-rouser can automatically be expected to win. Its Republican Party prefers moderately conservative, pro-establishment figures. Think Lindsay Graham and Carroll Campbell. It is actually fairly fertile territory for Romney, and if he does end up winning on Saturday, it should come as a surprise to no one.