Well, to be fair to Katy Padilla, I suppose during a Krispy Kreme–craving bout (not Stout, bout!), her zero-knowledge-of-history meter was flashing red, and the zinger she had ready to go got mangled in a dizzying, low-sugar struggle. It happens.

But the other side of me would love to think she’s simply trying to hold together her existing constituents while widening her base. After all, the Nazis called themselves National Socialists, and socialism has enjoyed a remarkable PR makeover among younger generations—many of whom seem to have learned their economics and history from professors who treat capitalism as the original sin of Western civilization.

Maybe Miss Stout is onto something after all!

But seriously, let’s take a little trip down history lane.

Remember 2008, when three of four prominent white-nationalist movement leaders reportedly urged their followers to vote for Barack Obama?

• Tom Metzger — Director of White Aryan Resistance, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, and, remarkably, a winner of a Democratic congressional primary in 1980.
• Ron Edwards — Imperial Wizard of the Imperial Klans of America, whose organization faced litigation over allegations connected to the brutal beating of a Latino teenager.
• Erich Gliebe — Chairman of the National Alliance and head of the white-power music label Resistance Records.
• Rocky Suhayda — Chairman of the American Nazi Party. He reportedly did not give his followers the same explicit instruction to vote for Obama.

And there’s more!

Who can forget the California KKK Grand Dragon who, when asked whom he liked for president, reportedly answered Hillary Clinton?

Or David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, endorsing left-wing Democrat Charles Barron for Congress?

Or the political overlap between certain white-nationalist figures and the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Now, before somebody hyperventilates into a paper bag, let me make something clear: I’m not arguing that every Democrat is a racist, that every Republican is innocent of racism, or that an extremist group’s endorsement automatically makes a candidate guilty by association. It doesn’t.

But consistency matters. If we’re going to use the political affiliations and endorsements of racists as evidence against one party, we should apply the same standard when the evidence complicates the narrative we prefer.

And that brings us to a little inconvenient history.

The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s as an anti-slavery party. Republicans played a central role in the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. During Reconstruction, Black Republican officeholders faced violent opposition from the Ku Klux Klan, whose campaign of terror targeted Republicans—Black and white alike.

That wasn’t some obscure footnote. It was a defining feature of the political struggle following the Civil War.

And when we get to the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s, the congressional voting records tell a story that doesn’t fit neatly into today’s partisan talking points. Republican support was essential to the passage of landmark civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Southern Democrats supplied much of the opposition, while substantial numbers of Democrats elsewhere supported civil rights.

So what happened to the familiar claim that the parties simply switched sides?

Here’s the problem:

• the evidence does not support the simplistic story that segregationist Democrats collectively packed their bags, joined the Republican Party, and transferred the entire historical burden of racism with them.

Consider the Dixiecrats and the congressional opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Most of the Democratic senators who opposed that legislation did not subsequently become Republicans. Strom Thurmond was a prominent exception, not proof of a wholesale migration. Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidates had been making substantial inroads in the South well before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That doesn’t mean the parties never changed, that race played no role in later electoral realignments, or that racism disappeared from Republican politics. It means the actual history is considerably more complicated than the bumper-sticker version.

As Bruce Bartlett wrote in Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (2008), p. ix:

“…virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.”

And Ann Coulter offered her own memorable formulation in Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (2012), p. 19:

“…not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.”

Those are sweeping formulations, and they deserve to be evaluated in their historical context. But they point toward a subject that is too often brushed aside: the Democratic Party’s long history of slavery, segregation, and resistance to civil rights—and the tendency to discuss that history as though a simple party switch somehow settled the matter.

So perhaps Miss Stout isn’t simply getting her history from a box of gourmet cookies. Perhaps she’s relying on a very selective reading of history to eke out a win.

After all, if you’re going to accuse your opponent of being a Nazi, it helps to know something about actual Nazis, the history of American racial politics, and the political company some American extremists have kept.

And if you’re going to lecture others about racism, you might want to make sure your historical argument survives contact with the congressional record.

(No racists were harmed in the making of this comment. A few oversimplified historical narratives, however, may require emergency medical attention.)