A TikTokker noticed something alarming about Donald Trump’s recent campaign stops.

— white whirlwind, stirring past —

A TikTokker, speakthetruth101, noticed that a significant number of Donald Trump’s campaign rallies have been held in former sundown towns.

Screenshot of X post by Bill Madden, posted August 31, 2024.

In case you are unaware, sundown towns are a relic of segregation days, where municipalities — mostly in the North — had either codified or informal rules stating that people of color who did not live in their town had to depart by sundown. These ordinances were enforced by harassment, violence, or death. These towns tended to occur in the North rather than the Southern states because most Southern states had so many unspoken racial rules that the idea that any one town would single itself out for enforcement would have been redundant.

The video went viral, as speakthetruth101 seemed to notice something no one else had; and so it splashed onto the pages of Daily Kos, where there’s now a lively discussion.

First, the video was shared by one diarist, who alerted the Daily Kos community to this TikTokker’s warning. Then a regular diarist wrote something more substantial, pulling out some historical highlights. The interesting thing about the latter diary¹ is that it called into question whether or not these sundown-town stops constituted a pattern. In other words, is this really a live issue?

That diary landed yesterday. The author said in several follow-up comment replies that he could see a problem if the towns are still practicing sundown activities or if there is active Klan activity there (I say, good luck determining that about an underground organization). But, if not, then probably not.

The author, whose work generally speaking I very much enjoy, does not seem to have considered that Trump may be visiting these areas to rekindle or to activate longstanding yet dormant attitudes in order to drive political behavior (i.e., voting). Indeed, that might be the result, whether or not Trump seeks it.

When I first saw the video, I immediately thought back to two papers that seemed like they might bear on the situation. The first has to do specifically about Klan activity in the ’60s and how social rearrangements from that agitation reverberated in voting patterns decades later. The second, of a similar theme, focused particularly on anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany well after the Nazi era and how those persisted over time.

The first source, “Political Polarization as a Social Movement Outcome: 1960s Klan Activism and Its Enduring Impact on Political Realignment in Southern Counties, 1960 to 2000,” written in 2014, revealed:

“Net of other variables, the increase in Republican voting was, on average, 3.701 percent higher in Klan counties compared to non-Klan counties when considering the change from the 1960 vote for Nixon to the 1980 vote for Reagan. The estimated Klan effect is particularly strong when considering the change from the 1960 Republican vote to the 1992 vote for George H. W. Bush (4.890 percent). When examining change over four decades, from 1960 to 2000, Klan counties show an average 3.434 percent greater increase in Republican voting compared to non-Klan counties.”²

“Polarization in local contexts resulting from Klan activism … helped ensure that voting realignment would be lasting rather than temporary.”³

“We are not arguing that the civil rights-era Klan exerted continual influence on voting outcomes even after its collapse in the late 1960s. Instead, we assert that its actions in the 1960s helped dislodge voters from preexisting party loyalties and contributed to a restructuring of network ties that would reinforce the link between segregationist preferences and Republican voting over time.”⁴

Image source: National Post

In the second source, “Nazi indoctrination and anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany” (2014), the authors said:

“Where anti-Semitism was already prevalent before World War I (WWI), the Nazi message of racial hatred produced many more zealots than elsewhere. This suggests that indoctrination is particularly effective where it can exploit preexisting stereotypes and beliefs, leading to a ‘magnification effect.’”⁵

“In combination, these results suggest that Nazi indoctrination — in school, through propaganda, and in youth organizations — successfully instilled strongly anti-Semitic attitudes in the cohorts that grew up under the Nazi regime, and that the differential effect is still visible today, more than half a century after the fall of the Third Reich.”⁶

“[A]ttitudes on average persisted in the same location — where voters turned to anti-Jewish parties in the 1890s and 1900s, they are still much more anti-Semitic today.”⁷

“[W]e show that in towns and cities where indoctrination was most effective — and the share of extremists in the 1930s cohort is particularly high — there is markedly higher anti-Semitism also among those born after 1945, 1955, 1965, and even after 1975. [This is true even after controlling for historical anti-Semitism. This implies that effective indoctrination in the 1930s created an ‘echo effect,’ with the share of committed anti-Semites higher than one would expect based on historical anti-Semitism alone.] These findings suggest that by reinforcing preexisting racial hatred, Nazi indoctrination contributed importantly to the long-term persistence of anti-Semitism in Germany. And conversely, the strong interaction with preexisting attitudes suggests that confirmation bias played an important role in shaping anti-Semitic beliefs.”⁸

“The fact that Nazi indoctrination was particularly effective in areas where anti-Semitic beliefs were already widespread suggests that confirmation bias may play an important role in intensifying attitudes toward minorities.”⁹

Now, the Daily Kos essayist noted that, of Trump’s ten campaign stops from July 20th to August 17th, none of those featured sundown towns. Indeed, it would appear that only four of twenty stops had been sundown towns, so that didn’t indicate anything truly noteworthy. 

People in the comment section thanked the essayist for bringing in a voice of skepticism (not that the original diary that introduced the community to the TikTok video was breathless or had its hair on fire!). But there were some things the author didn’t note. Namely, what speakthetruth101 was pointing out was that the last several stops were indeed sundown towns. Of the last three, all three were sundown towns. Of the last six Trump rallies, four could be put in that category. Four out of six is ~ 67%, while three of three is 100%. That’s a lot.

Another thing that my friend at Daily Kos neglected to do was to attend to the timeline. My first question was, when did this trend start, and did anything else coincide with that era?

What I did initially was to find out what stops fell after the point that President Biden withdrew from contention. He stepped aside July 21st. That date coincides with that stretch of Trump rallies that the essayist did analyze. So that wasn’t the turning point. I looked more closely.

The rash of sundown town visits began August 20th, in Howell, MI. This stop was not counted in the running tally of places at which Trump has campaigned, but it drew a lot of press attention, as exemplified by this Washington Post article. I wondered, what else was happening around that time?

Ah, yes. The Democratic National Convention started August 19th, set to nominate the first Black female and first Asian-American female to a major-party ticket. Right.

Had anything else occurred around that time? Yes. Those reading may recall that the Trump campaign underwent turnover in mid-August. Chiefly, Trump brought into his retinue Corey Lewandowski, who had previously run Trump’s first presidential campaign (and who had been a named figure in the Mueller report). Lewandowski’s motto in 2016 was “Let Trump be Trump.” With that as his calling card, odds are that a shift in campaign behavior occurred at the point he embarked on the Trump team.¹⁰

As for the sundown stops themselves, all were Northern towns, as one would suspect: Howell, MI; La Crosse, WI; Johnstown, PA; and Mosinee, WI.

Trump supporters set up banners in preparation for his visit in Howell, Michigan, reading “White Lives Matter” and “Race over Nation.” Image source: News from the States, August 19, 2024.

The Washington Post, in the aforementioned article, noted that Howell has had a history of Klan activity. As for the other three listed here, La Crosse was noted for Klan membership back in the ’20s, and Johnstown also attracted press in the early ’20s for Klan violence. As for Mosinee, it earned fame in 1950 for a mock overthrow of the town by “Communists” (play-actors who wanted to teach Americans a lesson about dangerous Reds), in addition to being a town where a person of color lived nowhere within its borders.

Of such towns, McVeigh et al., writing in “Political Polarization,” emphasized:

“[W]e find that the measure of adjacency to Klan counties significantly predicts increased Republican voting in the two longer time spans [that is, 1960-1992 and 1960-2000]. … These findings suggest that geographic clustering of Klan activism facilitated the endurance of the Klan’s influence over time.”¹¹

And why is that? Because such polarizing agitation threw people into new groupings, embedding them in new social structures, wherein they encountered entire slates of different ideas.¹²

So we know that Klan activity of sixty years ago has resonance, persisting in time as well as in space. Thus, it does matter that Trump is visiting these places. Whether or not he does so with an eye toward any particular goal, the fact that his current message revives so many themes that echo those of the Klan banner means that he may indeed reactivate attitudes that otherwise would have lain dormant.

speakthetruth101, a modern-day town crier, should be thanked for raising his voice. Without his crisp attention, the rest of us may never have become aware of this pattern in Trump’s recent selections of venues for his rallies. I applaud his detective work. As for the latest diary on the subject over at Daily Kos, I hope the diarist revisits the essay after re-examining the assumptions that informed the work. While this isn’t a hair-on-fire moment, it deserves the attention being paid to it.

1. ‘Diary’ — Daily Kos lingo — is another term for essay.

2. Rory McVeigh et al., “Political Polarization as a Social Movement Outcome: 1960s Klan Activism and Its Enduring Impact on Political Realignment in Southern Counties, 1960 to 2000,” American Sociological Review (2014), Vol. 79, No. 6, p. 1161. Emphasis added.

3. Ibid., p. 1146.

4. Ibid., p. 1161.

5. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Nazi indoctrination and anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany,” PNAS (2014), Vol. 112, No. 26, p. 7931.

6. Ibid., p. 7933.

7. Ibid., p. 7933. Emphasis added.

8. Ibid., p. 7935. Bracketed section in the original.

9. Ibid., p. 7936.

10. Several others joined the Trump team at this point as well, including Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewicz, Taylor Budowich, and Tim Murtaugh.

11. McVeigh et al., op. cit., p. 1161. Emphasis added.

12. Ibid., p. 1148.