If you know what the result will be, why vote? I suspect that the turnout was higher for the Demicratic primaries than the general election in the first haf of the 20th century.
Of course. But the fact, that in a state with, ostensibly, many hundreds of thousands eligible voters there was not even an attempt to energize some 50 thousands to try to defeat the official candidate means one of two things: a) there was an enormous coincidence of preference of all citizens b) there was no feasible way of running any political campaign outside the Democratic Party. The latter, of course was the case.
You could argue that 1924 vote did express the "will of South Carolina", but 1928 clearly disproves it. With the reviled "wet" Catholic Al Smith on the ballot, SC still reports 91.31% for the Dems. But this "overwhelming" tally still represents only 62,700 (exactly) votes, out of the total of less than 70,000 votes cast. Now, don't tell me that there weren't 70,000 people in SC who believed that Al Smith was worse than Herbert Hoover (or, for that matter, than the Antichrist himself). If they didn't want to vote Republican, there must have been something to prevent them from registering another candidate. For almost 2 generations SC never had the D candidate get less than 90% of the vote, nor did it have even 150 thousand voters show up.
By the way, even though most other Southern states in 1924 were equally uncompetitive, the turnouts were still substantially higher. Something was particularly bad in that state. A poor one-party apartheid state where almost all citizens, whatever their race, were denied political rights, that's what South Carolina was in 1924.
