They say victory has a hundred fathers, and Doug Jones' upset win in the Alabama Senate race Tuesday night is no exception. Maybe it was the mounting accusations of child molestation facing Republican opponent Roy Moore that sealed Jones' victory. Maybe this was just the latest swell in the blue wave that washed over Virginia last month. Maybe it was the work of a small, but mighty, group of Jones volunteers who ran an expansive ground game.
Or maybe, it was the ground itself—the literal soil underneath voters' feet, which was once submerged underwater, leaving behind a uniquely fertile strip of land on which human beings committed unthinkable atrocities, the effects of which are still being felt today.
What? The Democratic National Committee didn't mention that in its emails? Then, allow us to explain.
Historians and political scientists have long observed that the map of slavery in the antebellum South looks almost exactly like the map of Democratic counties in America. It's that smile-shaped blue strip you see running through the center of Alabama, that vertical band of blue where Mississippi's western border meets Louisiana and Arkansas, the bright blue spot enveloping Atlanta, and the diagonal line connecting the southern tip of South Carolina to its northern border with North Carolina.
As some immediately noted Tuesday night, there remains an obvious, and devastating overlap between the location of slave era plantations and the locations of black populations in the South today.
But when geologist Steven Dutch first started analyzing electoral maps following the 2000 election, he saw a less obvious overlap. He saw the clearly defined outline of a rock formation that emerged more than 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.
"I saw this band arcing from Mississippi, across Alabama, Georgia, and up into South Carolina," Dutch, a professor emeritus of natural science at University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, says of his initial discovery. "I said, 'I know what that is. That’s a band of rocks on the geographic map of the United States.'"
Dutch began investigating why this overlap might exist. "Soils make agriculture, agriculture makes economies, the economy makes voting patterns," he says, explaining his thinking at the time. When Dutch undertook this research, he expected to find a clear tie between that soil and the current economy of the South.
The answer turned out not to be so simple. Dutch studied economic trends in the region and farming trends nationwide and found no explanation for why the band of blue existed where it did across the south. It wasn't until he looked at historic maps of the area that he finally realized what he was looking at. In the Cretaceous Period, much of this part of the country was underwater. As the sea creatures in the water died off, they left behind massive chalk formations, which eventually made for rich soil. The fertile soil created by those rock formations drew white plantation owners to this part of the South, and with them, millions of slaves. Dutch was right. The soil did create agriculture, which did create an economy of cotton, despicably built on the backs of slaves; it's just that economy ended hundreds of years ago.
"The present day [voting pattern] is a relic of that settlement pattern," Dutch says.
He wrote about his findings in 2002, and other researchers highlighted his work during past elections, but, Dutch says, the pattern persists today, particularly in Alabama. Looking at the map of results in the Senate race on Wednesday morning, Dutch mused, "Yep, there's that bright, blue band running right through Montgomery."
For Alabamians, this may seem an obvious observation about a reality they live everyday. But for outsiders—and for scientists—it is a not so subtle reminder that what can sometimes feel like distant history isn't so distant after all—even if it happened 165 million years ago.
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