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Sixty-four years ago, the great political scientist V.O. Key published a truly beautiful work of scholarship. The title was "Southern Politics." The thesis was simple: The typical depiction of Southern politics as uniform and monolithic was badly flawed. As Key demonstrated, the political cultures of the various Southern states were actually quite rich and varied.

Yet here we are, six decades later, and pundits continue to treat the South as a monolithic mess of reactionary rednecks. The South Carolina primary in particular has been depicted as akin to the Iowa caucuses but with a bigger electorate -- dominated by populist evangelicals who simply wouldn’t tolerate a Massachusetts moderate as the nominee. Surely its votes would go to a Rick Santorum or a Rick Perry, or even a somewhat more establishment-friendly Newt Gingrich. Most observers never saw Mitt Romney’s lead in South Carolina -- presently a robust 7.6 percent -- coming.

This analysis badly misunderstands the white vote in the state (and when we’re talking about a South Carolina Republican primary, we’re really talking mostly about white voters, as well as about most of the state’s white vote). It also overlooks the basic cleavage in white Southern politics as a whole. For nearly 200 years, it has been divided between residents of the coastal plains and residents of the Appalachian foothills. This divide played out first between Democrats and Whigs, then within the Democratic Party, then between Republicans and Democrats, and finally, within the Republican Party.

Let’s start by looking at two maps:

Map A is the second Democratic gubernatorial primary between Burnet Maybank and Wyndham Manning. Counties in red went to Manning, counties in blue went to Maybank. Map B shows the results of a referendum on liberalizing liquor sales. Red counties voted no, blue counties voted yes.

Now note that the liquor referendum took place in 1940 and represented South Carolina’s decision to end prohibition in that state. The Maybank/Wyndham primary took place in 1938. This is emblematic of the low country/high country divide.

Here is Key’s description of the 1938 race, and the basic split in South Carolina as a whole:

“Regardless of the disposition to explain a sectional vote in terms of patronage, deals, arrangements, alliances, the chances are that the sectional groupings manifest in the 1938 Maybank vote represent a deeper sectional unity that provided a framework within which alliances could be made. . . . [T]he uplanders perhaps still feel an antipathy toward aristocratic Charleston, as it was pictured in the agrarian crusade, an antipathy kept alive by persistent evangelical condemnation of that city as the symbol of all sin. Then, too, Charleston has always insisted on home rule, and its neighboring counties, with a lesser approach to unanimity, oppose prohibition.”

This divide stretches back even farther in time, and across the South. While South Carolina didn’t allocate presidential electors by popular vote until the 1860s, in states with similar geographic divides, such as Alabama, the highlands typically backed the Democrats. For example, Madison County, Alabama (Huntsville), went about 75 percent for Democrat Lewis Cass in 1848, while Montgomery County gave about two-thirds of its vote to Zachary Taylor, the candidate of the Whigs. In the 1880s and 1890s the Populist vote in South Carolina was concentrated in these upland areas of South Carolina; this is true of other Southern states as well.