Chapter 34 Exercises: Appalachia and American Politics

Exercise 1: Tracing the Realignment

Chapter 34 describes the political realignment of Appalachia as occurring in roughly three phases: initial cracks (1968-1992), accelerating shift (1994-2008), and completion (2016).

a) Create a timeline of the realignment, identifying at least two key events or elections in each phase. For each event, explain what happened and why it mattered for Appalachian politics.

b) The chapter identifies multiple causes of the realignment: union decline, cultural conservatism, racial politics, the "culture wars," and the "War on Coal" narrative. Rank these causes in order of importance, and explain your reasoning. (There is no single correct ranking — the exercise is about articulating your analysis.)

c) Did the Appalachian realignment happen because the voters changed, because the parties changed, or both? Identify specific ways in which the Democratic Party changed its positions or priorities between 1960 and 2016, and specific ways in which Appalachian voters' priorities shifted.

d) Research the political realignment of another historically Democratic region (e.g., the Deep South, the Rust Belt, or a specific state). How does the timing and causes of that realignment compare to the Appalachian experience?

Exercise 2: Analyzing the "War on Coal" as Political Narrative

The "War on Coal" narrative is discussed in both Chapter 32 (as an economic explanation) and Chapter 34 (as a political force).

a) Summarize the "War on Coal" narrative in one paragraph. What did it claim? Who were the villains? What was the proposed solution?

b) Summarize the structural/market explanation of coal's decline in one paragraph. What did it identify as the primary causes? How did it differ from the "War on Coal" narrative?

c) Why was the "War on Coal" narrative more politically effective than the market explanation, even though the market explanation was more accurate? What does this tell us about the relationship between truth and political effectiveness?

d) Can you identify a contemporary political narrative (from any party or ideology) that similarly channels a complex structural problem into a simpler political story with identifiable villains? Analyze how the narrative works and what it obscures.

Exercise 3: The Hillbilly Elegy Debate

Read the discussion of Hillbilly Elegy and its critics in Chapter 34 and Case Study 1.

a) In your own words, summarize Vance's core argument about the causes of Appalachian poverty. Then summarize Catte's core argument. What is the fundamental disagreement between them?

b) Evaluate one specific claim from each author: - Vance: "Cultural attitudes (lack of personal responsibility, tolerance for dysfunction) are a significant cause of Appalachian poverty." - Catte: "Locating the problem in culture rather than structure diverts attention from the actual causes of poverty and absolves powerful actors of responsibility." Which claim do you find more persuasive, and why?

c) The chapter notes that Hillbilly Elegy "told America what America wanted to hear." What did America want to hear? Why was the cultural explanation more appealing to a national audience than the structural explanation?

d) Write a 500-word book review of Hillbilly Elegy from the perspective of someone who grew up in the Appalachian coalfields. Your review should engage with both Vance's argument and the scholarly critiques, while centering the perspective of someone who has lived the experience Vance describes.

Exercise 4: Electoral Data Analysis

Using the electoral data discussed in Chapter 34 and Case Study 2, or data you research independently:

a) Select three Appalachian counties (one from each of three different states). For each county, research the presidential election results for 1960, 1980, 2000, and 2020. Create a table showing the Democratic and Republican vote shares for each election.

b) Chart the data as a line graph. When did each county's shift from Democratic to Republican occur? Was the shift gradual or sudden? Did the three counties shift at the same time, or on different timelines?

c) For each county, research what was happening economically during the period of the most dramatic political shift. Was there a mine closure? A factory closing? A population decline? How does the economic context correlate with the political shift?

d) Now compare your three Appalachian counties to a non-Appalachian county that also shifted from Democratic to Republican during the same period (e.g., a Rust Belt county in Michigan or a rural county in the Great Plains). Is the Appalachian realignment a unique regional phenomenon, or part of a national pattern?

Exercise 5: The Populism Question

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump appealed to West Virginia voters in 2016, despite having very different policy positions. Chapter 34 and Case Study 2 describe this as evidence of a populist impulse.

a) Define "populism" in your own words. What distinguishes populism from other political orientations (liberalism, conservatism, socialism)?

b) Identify the specific elements of Sanders' and Trump's messages that appealed to West Virginia voters. What did the two messages have in common? Where did they diverge?

c) The case study notes that a significant number of Sanders primary voters in West Virginia said they would vote for Trump in the general election. How do you explain this? What does it reveal about the nature of political motivation in the coalfields?

d) Populism has a long history in Appalachian politics — from the mine wars of the 1920s (Chapter 17) to the War on Poverty (Chapter 23) to the present. Identify at least two earlier moments of Appalachian populism from previous chapters and analyze how they compare to the populism of 2016.

Exercise 6: The Monolith Problem

Chapter 34 warns against treating Appalachia as a political monolith.

a) Using the ARC's definition of Appalachia (423 counties across 13 states), identify at least three Appalachian counties that voted differently from the "Trump Country" narrative in 2020 (i.e., counties that voted Democratic or were closely contested). What distinguishes these counties from the coalfield counties that voted overwhelmingly Republican?

b) The chapter notes that Black Appalachians, urban Appalachians, young Appalachians, and college-educated Appalachians often vote differently from the white rural voters who dominate the national narrative. Research the demographic composition of your selected counties from part (a) and explain how demographic factors correlate with political behavior.

c) Why does the national media tend to treat "Appalachia" as synonymous with "white rural coalfield voters"? What are the consequences of this conflation for the political representation of Appalachians who do not fit that profile?

d) The chapter states that the condescending framing — that Appalachian voters were "voting against their own interests" — "assumed that the speaker knew better than the voter what the voter's interests were." Evaluate this critique. Is it ever appropriate to argue that voters are acting against their own interests? Under what circumstances? And who gets to define what someone's "interests" are?

Exercise 7: Primary Source Analysis

Read the three primary source excerpts in Chapter 34 (the Pike County voter, the Floyd County voter, and the McDowell County political observer).

a) Each speaker offers a different explanation for the political realignment. Identify the core explanation in each excerpt.

b) Are the three explanations contradictory, or can they coexist? Is it possible that the realignment was simultaneously about economic anxiety, cultural identity, and institutional abandonment?

c) The Floyd County voter says: "People act like we switched parties because we're dumb or racist. Some of us are dumb. Some of us are racist. Just like everywhere else." What work is this statement doing? How does the voter simultaneously acknowledge and resist the stereotypes applied to Appalachian voters?

d) The McDowell County observer identifies a specific behavior — politicians "coming here" — as the key to political loyalty. What does physical presence communicate that policy papers and television ads do not? How does this connect to the broader theme of Appalachian communities feeling invisible to the national political establishment?

Exercise 8: Synthesis — Connecting Chapters 32, 33, and 34

Chapters 32, 33, and 34 describe three interconnected crises in modern Appalachia: economic collapse, the opioid epidemic, and political realignment.

a) Identify at least three specific connections between these three crises. How did economic collapse contribute to the opioid crisis? How did both contribute to political realignment? Are there feedback loops — does political realignment affect economic policy or the opioid response?

b) The three chapters describe three different forms of exploitation: coal companies extracting mineral wealth, pharmaceutical companies extracting profit from pain, and political parties extracting votes from grievance. Compare these three forms of extraction. What do they have in common? How do they differ?

c) If you were writing a single chapter that combined all three crises into one narrative — the story of what happened to the Appalachian coalfields between 2000 and 2020 — what would the central argument be? Draft a one-paragraph thesis statement.

d) The three chapters together paint a grim picture. But they also contain examples of resistance, innovation, and resilience (the Coalfield Development Corporation, harm reduction programs, community organizing). Write a 500-word essay arguing that these examples offer genuine hope for the future of coalfield communities, or arguing that they are insufficient to address the scale of the crisis. Support your argument with specific evidence from the chapters.