It was exceptionally strong for Perot in 1992 for a Southern county, and the same year it gave 14.5% of the vote to "other" (not Perot). Does anyone know if that was also Fulani? Atlas doesn't specify. I wonder if there is some odd institution there that could explain the unusually high independent votes.
It's a scattering: more than half of the other vote went to Howard Phillips, the Taxpayers Party candidate, but Fulani got 2.5%, and John Hagelin, Andre Marrou, and Bo Gritz all got over 1%. George County was Fulani's best county and Marrou's eighth-best county (this despite Marrou finishing in seventh place in the county); it didn't place in Gritz's top ten because of his very strong performance in Mormon country. I imagine it was Phillips's best county, and probably it was high on the list for Hagelin, too.
It's unclear why the miscellaneous vote was so high in George County, but there has to be a story there.
Thanks!
Took a closer look into it and still having trouble finding anything especially unusual about the county (for being a mostly white, rural Deep South county). Lucedale looks very generic. The main institutions are a public hospital, a local prison, the county public schools, a Wal-Mart supercenter. The churches are pretty typical of the Deep South: Baptist, Assemblies of God, Church of Christ. There does appear to be a Mormon church in Lucedale, which is not common in the rural South, but it seems to be quite small and definitely trying to lay low (they don't have any signage at all if you look at it on Google Street View) so can't be a noticeable influence. No college or seminary or even a big factory or something that might make it a little bit unique.
