Prohibitionists probably outnumber drinkers among Southerners.
I can see that possibility.
Today's conservatives, with their reduction of conservatism to "reducing the size of government," have forgotten the Election of 1928, and indeed, the entire Prohibition Movement.
Prohibitionism (or "temperance") began among orthodox Puritan clergymen, but as Puritanism gave way to Unitarianism it became a "left wing reform" cause of the same order as abolition, women's rights, world peace, vegetarianism, and socialism. To this day certain conservatives harp on the "leftist origins" of the temperance movement (even Marx listed it among the impotent utopian socialist movements, and the extreme racialist and anti-Semite Revilo P. Olver referred to the Prohibition era as "Bolshevism"). Yet by the 1920's things had changed completely--prohibitionism was now an integral part of "100% Americanism" and was championed by Fundamentalist preachers, the Ku-Klux Klan, and Henry Ford.
Now that conservatism has placed "small government" above all other considerations it would be unthinkable for a contemporary conservative to advocate prohibition. And for their part, the Left began to oppose it once the idea was no longer theirs and the Left today touts the "failure" of prohibitionism, while refusing to learn that same lesson with regard to such things as tobacco and guns. Er . . . personally, I don't put tobacco and guns in the same category; I'm against gun control but I'd love to see tobacco outlawed outright.
Anyway, the fact that the belief that alcohol consumption is inherently sinful now reigns in the part of the county that has long been associated with spirits is just another of the ironies of American politics.
Our next lesson will be how the arch-conservative anti-Jacobin Federalists of the early Federal period became the radicals of the abolition and Civil War eras!