Fannin, Pickens, Gilmer and Towns counties in Appalachian Georgia are Deep-red counties which I can respect. They’ve consistently voted for Republicans since the 1870s, and their ancestors, like East Tennesseeans, were more sympathetic to the Union. Fannin, in particular, was the ONLY county in the entire Deep South and West South Central states to not vote for FDR, only voting for Democrats William Jennings Bryan (1900) and Jimmy Carter (1976) since 1868.

Similarly, East Tennessee – the most mountainous and least plantation-friendly region of the state – contained the most solidly-Republican congressional districts – CD-01 and CD-02 – in the ex-Confederate South. They have always elected Republican representatives – and never elected a Democrat – to Congress since 1870. They also had a history of seeking separation from Tennessee over the issue of Confederate secession.

They are literally the only counties whose white people can say “I’m a Republican because my great-great-great-great grandpapa voted Republican, none of them were slaveowners, the Confederate bastards killed my 3rd cousin x-times removed for desertion or draft resistance, and we resisted their children’s kleptocratic Dixiecrat rule by holding the only Republican primaries in the whole state”.

They were likely racist, too (of course!), but perhaps not to the extent that the Dixiecrats in plantation-land were. Maybe they didn’t feel so much of an impulse that poor white people should vote with the rich white people for the same party to preserve the Deep South’s pecking order.

So they were OG Southern Republicans – Appalachian folk who resisted outside governance and monied aristocrats alike – who voted that way loooooong before the Second Reconstruction made the Democratic brand less popular among the Dixiecrats’ descendants and made it hip to vote GOP.