<p>This study examines the role racial resentment plays in shaping trust toward state and federal government across different regions of the USA. Special attention is placed on the South, where historical discourses around states’ rights were often tied to racially salient issues. Drawing on survey data from White respondents in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES), this paper deploys a series of ordinal logistic regressions to analyze how racial resentment predicts distrust in state and federal government across the South and non-South. Models incorporate ideological and demographic controls, cluster standard errors by state, and include state-level fixed effects. Findings reveal that, among White respondents, racial resentment significantly lowers the odds of expressing distrust in state government in the states of the former Confederacy, while increasing distrust in states outside of the South. This finding holds even when comparing the states of the former Confederacy to Republican-controlled states outside of the South and when restricting the sample to Republican-identifying respondents, suggesting a historical-institutional dynamic that extends beyond partisan ideology. The findings suggest a path-dependent dynamic in which the South’s long-standing fusion of racial conservatism with states’ rights discourses has produced enduring attitudinal legacies. These legacies continue to shape regional patterns of political trust in ways not fully explained by partisan affiliation.</p>