 Red Shirts were active again around the 1896 and 1898 elections, allied with the Democrats' appeals to voters to support white supremacy, in an effort to avoid voters moving to the Populist fusion candidate, as some had done in the 1896 gubernatorial election.The Red Shirts were part of a Democratic campaign to oppose the interracial coalition of Republicans and Populists, which had gained control of the state legislature in the 1894 election and elected a Republican governor in 1896.Such biracial coalitions had also occurred in other states across the South, in some cases overturning or threatening white Democratic control of state legislatures.