Given how badly President Trump is flailing, you could be forgiven for asking if it’s possible that he, like Walter Mondale and George McGovern before him, could lose 49 states. It’s highly unlikely, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility. What he almost certainly cannot do is lose all fifty. This is because Alabama is stubborn.

There hasn’t been much polling out of Alabama because everyone assumes that Trump will carry it, but we can look at the polling that was done back during the primaries and compare it to a survey that was taken in mid-May and just added to 538’s list of polls.

As you can see, back in February, no Democrat was able to crack 40 percent in head-to-head matchups with Trump. Bloomberg did reach forty, probably because he’s best known as a Republican. Even with three-to-six percent undecided, Trump was able to near or surpass 60 percent support against everyone but Bloomberg.

This wasn’t a surprise. The Republican presidential candidate has topped 60 percent in Alabama in every election since 2000, when George W. Bush only carried 57 percent there.

In February, Biden tested slightly better than Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg, but the difference was well within the margin of error. When Biden was tested again in mid-May, his numbers looked close to Bloomberg’s old numbers. But Biden had only gone up by a single point. The change was all coming out of Trump’s hide, as he tested five points lower. It was a worse result for him than in any of the February head-to-heads, yet not shocking considering all of the chaos that had engulfed the country in the interim.

What stood out was not so much that Trump went from a net advantage of 20-27 points against an array of Democrats to an advantage of only 14 percent against just Biden, but that Biden was still stuck under 40 percent. Watching Trump fuck every single thing up did increase the number of Alabamans who were disinclined to commit to his reelection, but didn’t add anything perceptible to his opponent’s level of support. Perhaps if, like Roy Moore, Trump were credibly accused of child molestation this would change, but short of that it is hard to envision anything that could get Biden to a plurality in Alabama.

It’s been more than a month since the survey showing Trump up over Biden 53-39, and it is possible that Trump is now below 50 percent there. But it’s doubtful that Biden’s level of support has moved up more than a point or two. This is because Alabama is the least elastic state in the Union. According to analysis done by 538 in 2018, only Washington DC shows less movement between the two major parties.

Alabama takes the prize among states because it combines a high level of the two least persuadable voting blocs in the country: white evangelicals and blacks. It’s also probably the state where those two blocs are most rigidly locked into their partisan preferences.  Simply put, whites in Alabama see the Democratic Party as a party for blacks, and blacks see the GOP as the party for whites. As issues of racial justice have risen to the forefront of the national political conversation in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it’s doubtful that this has diminished Biden’s challenge in attracting the support of white Alabamans and it certainly hasn’t improved Trump’s standing with the state’s black population.

There are other states that are not likely to abandon Trump, including Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia in Appalachia, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska in the Plains States, and Idaho and Wyoming in the Mountain West. But you never know. The most recent survey out of Arkansas only has Biden down two points. For my money, Alabama is still Trump’s safest state, and his best assurance that he won’t surpass McGovern and Mondale in his futility.