ATLANTA — Republican presidential candidates will debate Wednesday within walking distance of where George Wallace staged his “stand in the schoolhouse door” to oppose the enrollment of Black students at the University of Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement.
Alabama Gov. George Wallace makes an election campaign speech for his wife, Lurleen, on Nov. 8, 1966, in Wetumpka, Ala.
The state that propelled Wallace, a Democrat and four-term governor, into national politics is now dominated by Republicans loyal to Donald Trump, another figure who leans heavily on grievance and white identity politics. The former president will not be on stage in Tuscaloosa but remains the favorite to win the Republican nomination again.
Alabama’s path since Wallace’s rise helps explain the 2024 dynamics and how Republicans evolved nationally from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Trump. Certainly, Trump argues he helps all races as a defender of everyday Americans forgotten by Washington elites. He even used that as a defense against four criminal indictments, accusing establishment powers of attacking him as a way to quash citizens. That sort of approach resonated in conservative strongholds like Alabama long before Trump.
People are also reading…
“Alabamians, and I think most people, just don’t like to be told how to live,” said former state Republican chairwoman Terry Lathan, referencing Alabama’s motto: “We dare defend our rights.”
For Wallace, that meant fighting federal authorities on integration and then running nationally with the slogan “Stand Up for America.” Trump set up his 2016 rise by spending years questioning the citizenship of President Barack Obama, the first Black president. Like Wallace, Trump is backed strongly by culturally and religiously conservative whites moved by his slogan: “Make America Great Again.”
“Different from Wallace, but Donald Trump is offering a form of nostalgia,” said national GOP pollster Brent Buchanan, who founded his Washington-based firm, Cygnal, in Alabama.
Historian Wayne Flynt said the common thread across the eras is a swath of voters “who feel they are not paid attention to … that there’s not much future for them.” Trump, like Wallace, he said, has “brilliantly analyzed the angst and anxiety.”
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, gestures as Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., speaks during a rally Feb. 28, 2016, in Madison, Ala.
That doesn’t mean Alabama Republicans are in lockstep. Lathan, who said “we know how wrong Wallace was” for his racism, backed Trump during her chairmanship. Now she supports Ron DeSantis; she called the Florida governor a “Reagan conservative who gets things done without being a bully.”
But, she acknowledged Trump’s “steamroller effect” makes him “very popular in Alabama.”
Wallace, a four-time presidential candidate, was governor for 16 years spread from 1963 to 1987. That period marked a Southern political realignment, spurred in part by President Lyndon Johnson signing civil rights legislation in the 1960s: Democratic-controlled states shifted to Republicans in presidential politics and, later, other offices.
Alabama Democrats, especially, cite deep historical roots involving racism, class and urban-rural divides when explaining Wallace, Trump and the decades between them.
Southern Alabamians’ shift to Republicans accelerated in 1964, the first presidential election after Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, signed the Civil Rights Act. Republican challenger Barry Goldwater opposed the act and won five Deep South states. It was Alabama’s first flip from Democrats since Reconstruction.
Wallace won four Deep South states as an independent in 1968. Yet in 1970, he secured his second term as governor only through a close Democratic primary runoff.
Meanwhile, Wallace retooled his pitch for a national audience. He sneered about “inner-city thugs” and a “liberal Supreme Court” and Washington “overreach” — a coded version of his Alabama campaigns. It wowed working-class Democratic primary audiences beyond the South. Flynt, the historian, said Trump “does best almost exactly where George Wallace did best, and for many of the same reasons.”
In 1968 and 1972, Wallace held raucous rallies, railing against protesters. At New York City’s Madison Square Garden he said such behavior in Alabama “gets a bullet in the brain.” Wallace’s 1972 campaign ended with a bullet in his spine; it paralyzed him from the waist down.
Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he adopted the “Southern strategy” — law-and-order and cultural rhetoric similar to Wallace’s — to stave off Wallace. Ronald Reagan employed his versions in 1980 and 1984 landslides.
Today, Alabama’s two U.S. senators represent two styles of Republican politics, offering a rough analog to Southern Democrats’ split in Wallace’s heyday.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., during a news conference March 30, 2022, in Washington.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville is a Trump acolyte. He talked to Trump from the Senate floor as Trump supporters began storming Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021; now he’s blocking military promotions to protest Pentagon policies for servicemembers seeking abortions.
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., speaks to the media during a news conference Sept. 27 on Capitol Hill in Washington, as Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, looks on.
Sen. Katie Britt, meanwhile, is a former head of the state chamber of commerce and chief of staff to Sen. Richard Shelby, the old-guard dealmaker who was first elected as a Democrat before switching to the Republican Party in 1994. Like her old boss, Britt operates more behind the scenes and campaigns generically on “conservative Alabama values.”
Still, she avoids criticizing Trump.
Buchanan, the Republican pollster, said: “It’s Donald Trump’s world and we’re all just living in it.”
These are the people most likely to be burdened by medical debt in the US
These are the people most likely to be burdened by medical debt in the US
Of every five adults in America, two are currently saddled with debt from a medical procedure, emergency room visit, dental procedure, or other health care expense.
Care Better analyzed data from the Kaiser Family Foundation to visualize which groups of Americans are most likely to hold medical debt. The numbers come from a survey fielded from Feb. 25 through March 20, 2022. The survey included 2,375 adult respondents and is nationally representative of the overall American population.
The responses reveal an uneven distribution of medical debt, dampening the economic potential for a subset of the American population. Stakeholders in the health care sector pin this on a variety of factors, including lack of insurance. Americans who don’t have health insurance are more likely than those who are insured to carry medical debt. But insured Americans report carrying medical debt, too.
The average health care plan sponsored by an employer carries a deductible higher than what many Americans report they can afford in emergency out-of-pocket expenses, according to the American Hospital Association. Nearly 2 in 5 Americans reported in 2022 that they couldn’t afford a $400 emergency expense, and the typical deductible is around $1,400 per year.
The AHA reports that every year, its members provide tens of billions of dollars worth of uncompensated care for those who need it, and encourages health plans to ensure “that the coverage they offer provides protection against unaffordable bills and medical debt.”
Over the last decade, health care costs have risen faster than inflation in most years, and they have certainly increased faster than wages, which were largely stagnant prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. These costs are hitting Americans with the lowest incomes and highest expenses the hardest.
