The relatively narrow loss by Herschel Walker in the U.S. Senate race in Georgia last week has me reflecting on a class of voters all but extinct now: Yellow Dog Democrats.

For those too young to have encountered it, the term used to refer to Southerners so devout in their loyalty to Democrats that they would vote for a yellow dog on the Democratic ticket before they’d vote for a Republican.

The late word maven William Safire wrote that the term first arose in 1928.

But as a concept, it goes back much further, to the Republican Party’s formation in the 1850s as a political vehicle opposed to slavery.

You didn’t find a lot of Southerners aligned with that position in those days.

And over the decades, the loyalty endured: Republicans were the enemy.

That’s the South I came of age in. Anybody who wanted to win an election ran as a Democrat.

The seeds of change were sowed in the mid-1960s, when civil rights legislation championed by the Democratic administration – and opposed by Southern Democrats – became the law of the land.

“We have lost the South for a generation,” President Lyndon Johnson is said to have remarked after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There’s no evidence that he actually did say it, but the observation is nevertheless true. And a generation – given the South’s well-documented ability to hold a grudge – might well be an underestimate.

And so the evolution to what we have now in the South: Yellow Dog Republicans.

The evidence: 1.7 million Georgians in this month’s runoff voted for Walker, arguably the least-qualified candidate ever put forward by a major party in a major election.

Need we recount his political inadequacies? They are myriad, including difficulties with telling the truth, residency in a state other than the one he ran in and a tendency to ramble on about vampires and werewolves. And yet they didn’t matter to those 1.7 million people who put an X by his name.

I understand that. And I understand why.

Whatever his failings (see “myriad,” above), Walker could have safely been relied on to side with his fellow Republicans on any issue that came before the Senate. And that’s all that those 1.7 million voters in his camp ask of a senator: Oppose whatever Democrats favor.

Dating back to our college dorm days and debates, my late best friend and I disagreed on this very topic. He believed an elected official should always vote in a way that reflected the majority will of the people he or she represented.

I countered that, given the fickle nature (and frequent bone-headedness) of the majority at any given time, I’d prefer that the official use his or her presumably informed status to vote for the best outcome, regardless of its popularity.

It’s safe to say that, at least in the South, more people agree with my best friend than with me. That would explain why – sticking with Georgia here – Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green just comfortably won reelection, despite the fact that she makes Walker look stable by comparison.

One rare exception to Yellow Dog Republicanism took place not long ago in the South. In a 2017 special Senate race to fill an unexpired term, Alabama voters elected a Democrat, Doug Jones.

But it took a Republican candidate, Roy Moore, credibly accused of a history of preying on teenage girls at the local mall, and the near-unanimous support of Black voters, to provide that 1.5-point win. (White voters still went for Moore 2-to-1.)

Two years later, given a second chance, Alabama replaced Jones by giving the political neophyte and high school civics failure Tommy Tuberville a 20-point victory. Tuberville, however long his tenure might be, will not be looked back upon as a lion of the Senate.

Ditto our own Marsha Blackburn. But, just as Tuberville will be and Walker would have been, she will remain a reliable vote (and an embarrassing voice) on the Republican side. Which is to say: They are all Yellow Dogs.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.