Huh. Helps explain this retrospectively rather funky-seeming map:
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(from Atlas,
click here for the full page)
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(from Wikipedia,
click here for the full page, with the Red for Republicans-Blue for Democrats color scheme more commonly used in the present day)
These geographically odd results were probably also the result of GOP nominee Hal Suit being a Northern-born (he was a native of Youngstown, Ohio) neo-Carpetbagger (although he was arguably an "ancestral Southerner," as both of his parents were born in North Carolina) who was perceived at the time (correctly or incorrectly) as possessing certain "socially liberal"-leaning tendencies; Suit, interestingly enough, was anti-death penalty, and he won the 1970 Republican gubernatorial primary against James L. Bentley, a segregationist-leaning former Democrat who was born in a county within Georgia (Upson), which - in addition to being geographically located near dead center of the state, far away from the ancestrally Republican Civil War-Era pro-Union counties of the far North of the state - had at that point
never voted for a Republican Presidential candidate before in the entire history of the Republican Party (the first time that Upson County ever voted for the GOP nominee for president would be 1972, two years later).
