Chapter 34: Appalachia and American Politics — From Yellow Dog Democrats to Trump Country

"My grandfather would vote for a yellow dog before he'd vote Republican. My father voted for Clinton twice and Bush once. I voted for Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016. Three generations, and every one of us thought we were voting for the same thing — somebody who'd look out for working people. We just disagreed about who that was." — Voter, Pike County, Kentucky, 2019 interview

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Trace the political realignment of Appalachia from solidly Democratic (New Deal coalition, union households, FDR through LBJ) to solidly Republican (accelerating in the 2000s-2010s), identifying the multiple causes of the shift
2. Analyze the interplay of economic anxiety, cultural conservatism, racial politics, union decline, and the "culture wars" in driving the realignment — understanding that no single factor explains the transformation
3. Evaluate J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and the scholarly response to it, particularly Elizabeth Catte's What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, as competing narratives about what Appalachian politics means
4. Assess what Appalachian voting patterns actually reveal about American politics — and what they do not — while resisting the temptation to treat an entire region as a monolith

A Note on This Chapter's Approach

This chapter examines one of the most consequential political transformations in modern American history: the realignment of Appalachia from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican one. The chapter's obligation is to explain this transformation — to identify its causes, trace its timeline, and analyze its significance — not to endorse any political party, candidate, or ideology.

This is a history textbook, not a political pamphlet. The people of Appalachia, like all Americans, have the right to vote as they choose, and the historian's job is to understand why they chose as they did, not to tell them they chose wrong. At the same time, the historian's obligation to accuracy requires examining the claims made by all political actors — including claims about coal, regulation, cultural values, and economic policy — against the available evidence.

The analysis that follows attempts to be fair to the people it describes while being honest about the forces that shaped their choices. Where the evidence is ambiguous, the chapter says so. Where the evidence is clear, the chapter says that too.

The Yellow Dog Democrats: Where It Started

To understand the scale of Appalachia's political transformation, you must first understand where the region started.

For most of the twentieth century, large portions of Appalachia were among the most reliably Democratic places in the United States. The term "Yellow Dog Democrat" — meaning someone who would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote Republican — was coined in the South but applied with particular force in the Appalachian coalfields. In Mingo County, West Virginia, in McDowell County, in Harlan County, Kentucky — in the union hollows where the UMWA had organized miners through decades of bitter struggle — the Democratic Party was not a political preference. It was a tribal affiliation, as deeply embedded in community identity as church membership or family name.

The roots of Appalachian Democratic loyalty were economic, not cultural. They ran straight to the New Deal.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, the Appalachian coalfields were in crisis. The Great Depression had devastated an already vulnerable coal economy. Miners were unemployed, hungry, and desperate. The coal companies — which had fought unionization with armed guards, blacklists, and evictions — were the enemy, and the Republican Party was perceived as the party of the coal companies.

Roosevelt changed everything. The New Deal brought direct relief to coalfield communities: the Civilian Conservation Corps put men to work building roads and parks, the Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity to communities that had never had it (Chapter 22), and — most critically — the federal government's support for collective bargaining through the Wagner Act (1935) enabled the UMWA to organize the coalfields on a scale that had never been possible before. The union delivered wages, benefits, safety protections, and dignity. The Democratic Party had enabled the union. The loyalty was forged.

This loyalty was sustained through subsequent Democratic administrations. Harry Truman maintained the New Deal framework. John F. Kennedy campaigned personally in the West Virginia coalfields during the 1960 presidential primary — his famous handshakes in Mingo County and Logan County were calculated to win the state's primary, but they also communicated a message that coalfield communities received with visceral force: a man who wanted to be president had come here, to these hollows, to ask for their votes. Kennedy won West Virginia, and West Virginia gave him the momentum to win the nomination.

Lyndon Johnson deepened the bond. The War on Poverty (Chapter 23) — launched from the front porch of a home in Martin County, Kentucky, in 1964 — directed unprecedented federal resources toward Appalachian communities. The Appalachian Regional Commission, the Appalachian Development Highway System, the food stamp program, Head Start, Medicaid — all were products of the Johnson administration, and all flowed disproportionately to the communities that needed them most.

The result was a region in which Democratic voting was near-universal in many counties. In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy carried every coalfield county in West Virginia. In 1964, Johnson carried them by even larger margins. In some counties, the Democratic share of the vote exceeded 80 percent. The Republican Party barely existed as an organized force in the southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky coalfields.

This was not uniform across all of Appalachia. The mountain Republican tradition — rooted in Civil War Unionism, anti-slavery sentiment, and the areas that had broken from the Confederacy — persisted in parts of western North Carolina, east Tennessee, and the northern West Virginia panhandle. These areas had voted Republican since the 1860s, for reasons that had nothing to do with modern conservatism and everything to do with Civil War memory. The political landscape of Appalachia was, even in the mid-twentieth century, more complex than the "Yellow Dog Democrat" label suggested.

But in the coalfields — the heart of industrial Appalachia — the Democratic Party was dominant, and the basis of its dominance was economic: the party had delivered jobs, unions, infrastructure, and the promise that government would work for working people.

The Cracks: 1968-1992

The first significant cracks in Appalachian Democratic loyalty appeared in 1968, and they were connected to forces that were reshaping American politics far beyond the mountains.

Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign and its Southern Strategy — the deliberate effort to attract white Southern voters alienated by the Democratic Party's support for civil rights legislation — was aimed primarily at the Deep South. But its effects rippled into Appalachia. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both passed under Democratic presidents, had generated backlash among some white voters who perceived the Democratic Party as prioritizing the interests of Black Americans over their own.

In Appalachia, this racial dimension interacted with class in complex ways. The coalfields had a history of interracial unionism — Black and white miners had fought side by side in the mine wars (Chapter 17) and worked side by side in the mines. But interracial solidarity in the workplace did not always translate to interracial solidarity in politics, particularly when politicians deliberately framed racial progress as a threat to white working-class interests.

Nixon carried several Appalachian states in 1968 and swept the region in 1972. But his victories were driven by national factors (opposition to the Vietnam War protests, the counterculture, and George McGovern's perceived liberalism) more than by a fundamental realignment of Appalachian political identity. Many Appalachian voters who supported Nixon for president continued to vote Democratic in state and local elections. The Yellow Dog Democrat label still applied at the county courthouse and the state legislature, even if it was fraying at the presidential level.

Jimmy Carter temporarily restored the Democratic hold in 1976, winning Appalachian states as a Southern moderate who spoke the cultural language of rural America. But Ronald Reagan's 1980 and 1984 campaigns accelerated the erosion. Reagan's appeal in Appalachia was partly economic (his promise of lower taxes and less regulation resonated with small business owners and the self-employed) and partly cultural (his persona of rugged individualism, patriotism, and traditional values aligned with Appalachian self-image).

Reagan's coalition married economic conservatism to cultural conservatism in ways that had lasting consequences for Appalachian politics. The Religious Right — the coalition of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians that became a major political force in the 1980s — found fertile ground in Appalachia's deeply religious communities. Issues like abortion, school prayer, and opposition to gay rights mobilized voters who had never before thought of themselves as political activists but who felt that their values were under attack from a secularizing national culture.

The emergence of what commentators called the "culture wars" — the framing of American politics as a conflict between traditional values and secular liberalism — created a new axis of political identity that cut across the old economic axis. A union miner in Harlan County who voted Democratic because the party supported his union and his paycheck might also be a devout Baptist who opposed abortion, supported school prayer, and owned guns. As long as the economic axis dominated, he voted Democratic. As the cultural axis became more prominent, his loyalties began to shift.

The Accelerating Shift: 1994-2008

The pace of realignment accelerated dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s.

The 1994 midterm elections — Newt Gingrich's "Republican Revolution" — brought a wave of Republican victories in Appalachian congressional districts that had been Democratic for generations. The "Contract with America" platform combined fiscal conservatism, welfare reform, and cultural traditionalism in a package that appealed to white working-class voters who felt increasingly alienated from a Democratic Party that they perceived as focused on urban, minority, and professional-class interests.

The "God, Guns, and Gays" framing. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Republican strategists had developed a tripartite cultural formula for winning Appalachian voters: opposition to gun control, opposition to same-sex marriage, and alignment with evangelical Christian positions on social issues. This formula was devastatingly effective because it mapped onto genuine values held by a large majority of Appalachian voters — values rooted in religious faith, rural self-reliance, and a culture in which gun ownership was woven into daily life (for hunting, for protection, for heritage).

The Democratic Party's evolving positions on these issues — support for gun control measures, support for LGBTQ+ rights, and a generally secular-progressive cultural orientation — created a growing gap between the national party's positions and the cultural values of many Appalachian voters. This gap was not imaginary. It was real, and the Democratic Party's inability (or unwillingness) to bridge it contributed significantly to the realignment.

The 2000 presidential election was a watershed. Al Gore — a senator from Tennessee, a man who should have been able to carry the Appalachian South — lost his home state and lost overwhelmingly in the coalfields. Gore's association with environmental causes (he had published Earth in the Balance in 1992) and the Clinton administration's modest environmental regulations made him vulnerable to the earliest versions of the "War on Coal" attack.

George W. Bush carried Appalachia comfortably in 2000 and overwhelmingly in 2004, the latter aided by the post-9/11 patriotic surge and by Karl Rove's strategic deployment of same-sex marriage ballot initiatives in swing states — a tactic designed to mobilize conservative Christian voters.

The 2008 election presented a complex picture. Barack Obama's primary campaign against Hillary Clinton in the spring of 2008 revealed deep fissures. Clinton won the West Virginia primary by 41 points, the Kentucky primary by 35 points, and most Appalachian counties across the region by enormous margins. Obama's losses in Appalachia during the primary were driven by multiple factors — his unfamiliarity to these communities, his association with urban and academic culture, and, unmistakably, his race. Exit polls in the West Virginia primary showed that a significant percentage of voters cited race as a factor in their vote.

Obama lost Appalachia in the general election as well, though he won the presidency nationally. The coalfield counties that had given 70-80 percent of their votes to JFK in 1960 gave 20-30 percent to Obama in 2008. The realignment was nearly complete.

The Coal Catalyst: 2008-2016

The "War on Coal" narrative (analyzed in Chapter 32) became the catalyst that completed the political transformation of the coalfields.

Obama's comment during the 2008 campaign — that under his energy plan, "if somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them" — was played on an endless loop in Appalachian political advertising. The quote, taken from a longer statement about cap-and-trade policy, was presented as evidence that the Democratic president intended to destroy the coal industry deliberately.

For coalfield communities already reeling from coal's market-driven decline, the "War on Coal" narrative provided a political explanation for an economic catastrophe. It said: your pain is real, it was inflicted deliberately, and the Democratic Party — the party your grandfather voted for — is responsible.

The emotional power of this narrative cannot be overstated. Coal was not just an industry in these communities. It was an identity (Chapter 32). When politicians said they would "save coal," they were not just promising economic policy. They were promising to save a way of life, a sense of self, a connection to generations of fathers and grandfathers who had gone underground to do the hardest work in America.

The fact that no president could save coal — that the market forces driving its decline were beyond any president's control — was less important than the fact that someone was promising to try. And the contrast between Republicans who promised to fight for coal and Democrats who were perceived as attacking it was, in the coalfields, the most powerful political message of the era.

The Democratic Party's Self-Inflicted Wounds

The Appalachian realignment was not merely a story of Republicans winning votes. It was also a story of Democrats losing them — and not only through the impersonal forces of cultural and economic change, but through specific strategic decisions that communicated, to Appalachian voters, that the party no longer wanted or needed them.

The infrastructure of Democratic politics in the coalfields — the county committees, the precinct captains, the union endorsements, the candidates who showed up at fish fries and church picnics — withered over the decades as the national party's attention and resources flowed elsewhere. By the 2010s, many Appalachian counties had Democratic committees that existed only on paper, with no active members, no local candidates, and no visible presence in the community.

This was partly a consequence of resource allocation. The national Democratic Party, facing an increasingly expensive and nationally competitive electoral map, directed its resources toward swing states, major media markets, and demographic groups that it believed were growing (urban voters, minority voters, college-educated professionals) rather than toward rural communities whose electoral contribution was small and shrinking. The calculation was arithmetically rational and politically catastrophic: by abandoning the coalfields, the party confirmed the very narrative that was driving voters away — the narrative that Democrats did not care about working-class rural communities.

Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy — implemented during his tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009 — was an exception, directing party resources to rebuild local organizations in every state and county, including rural Appalachia. The strategy was controversial within the party but produced significant results, contributing to Democratic gains in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Dean's successor, Tim Kaine, and subsequent chairs shifted resources back toward battleground states and data-driven targeting, effectively reversing the fifty-state approach. The Appalachian organizing infrastructure that the fifty-state strategy had begun to rebuild was allowed to atrophy.

The result was a vicious cycle: as fewer Democrats won elections in Appalachia, the party invested less in Appalachian organizing, which meant fewer competitive candidates, which meant fewer victories, which justified further disinvestment. By the mid-2010s, the Democratic Party had largely conceded the coalfields, and the concession was self-fulfilling.

Some Appalachian Democrats — labor organizers, community activists, local officeholders — continued to fight, building grassroots organizations and running campaigns on economic populist platforms that echoed the party's New Deal roots. These efforts produced occasional victories and demonstrated that the coalfield realignment was not predestined. But they were swimming against a tide of national party strategy, cultural change, and the overwhelming force of the "War on Coal" narrative.

2016: The Watershed

The 2016 presidential election completed what decades of gradual realignment had begun.

Donald Trump carried Appalachian counties by margins that defied historical precedent. In McDowell County, West Virginia — the county that had given 73 percent of its vote to JFK in 1960 — Trump won 74 percent of the vote. In Mingo County: 79 percent. In Pike County, Kentucky: 80 percent. In Harlan County: 85 percent. The inversion was almost mathematically perfect: counties that had been 70-80 percent Democratic two generations earlier were now 70-80 percent Republican.

Trump's appeal in Appalachia was overdetermined — there were more reasons for his success than any single explanation can capture:

The coal promise. Trump told coalfield audiences what they wanted to hear: "We're going to put the coal miners back to work." He donned a hard hat on stage. He promised to roll back environmental regulations, withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and reverse what he called Obama's "war on coal." The promise was implausible — the market forces killing coal were indifferent to presidential rhetoric — but it was the only promise being made.

Cultural identification. Trump's persona — his bluntness, his combativeness, his contempt for the "establishment," his willingness to say things that polished politicians would not — resonated with voters who felt that polished politicians had ignored and patronized them for decades. Trump did not talk like a politician. He talked like a man at a diner counter, and in communities where distrust of professional political class was deep and justified, that mattered.

Economic populism. Trump's trade rhetoric — his opposition to NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, his promise to bring back manufacturing jobs, his framing of globalization as a threat to American workers — spoke directly to the economic anxieties of communities that had watched their industries leave and their wages stagnate. The Democratic Party's association with free trade agreements (NAFTA was signed by Clinton, the TPP was championed by Obama) made it vulnerable on this issue.

Immigration. Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric resonated in communities that, while not directly affected by immigration, understood immigration as a symbol of a changing America in which their own place was diminishing. The fear was less about specific immigrants than about a sense of cultural displacement — the feeling that the America these voters knew was being replaced by an America they did not recognize and did not belong in.

Race. The racial dimension of 2016 in Appalachia is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Research consistently showed that racial resentment — measured through survey questions about whether discrimination against white people was a significant problem — was a stronger predictor of Trump support than economic anxiety alone. This does not mean that every Trump voter in Appalachia was motivated by racism. It means that racial attitudes were one factor among many, and that any honest analysis must include it while recognizing its complexity.

Hillary Clinton. Trump's opponent was uniquely vulnerable in Appalachia. Clinton's comment in a March 2016 interview — "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business" — was, like Obama's 2008 quote, taken out of context (the full quote described a transition plan that would support displaced miners), but it was devastating in the coalfields. It confirmed the narrative that the Democratic Party was the enemy of coal communities. Clinton won the Democratic nomination despite losing the West Virginia primary to Bernie Sanders by 15 points — Sanders' economic populism resonated in Appalachia in ways that Clinton's technocratic competence did not.

The Role of Union Decline

The collapse of the United Mine Workers of America — traced in its economic dimensions in Chapter 32 — had political consequences that cannot be overstated. The UMWA was not merely a labor organization. It was a political institution, a social network, a community anchor, and one of the most effective mechanisms for translating working-class economic interests into political action that the United States has ever produced.

At its peak in the mid-twentieth century, the UMWA was one of the largest and most powerful unions in the country. In the coalfields, the union hall was where miners gathered, where political candidates came to seek endorsements, where voter registration drives were organized, where the community's collective political voice was forged. The UMWA endorsed candidates, donated to campaigns, mobilized voters on election day, and — critically — provided a framework for understanding politics in class terms. The union taught its members to think of themselves as workers whose interests were aligned with other workers and opposed to the interests of the coal companies and their political allies.

This class-based framework was the foundation of Democratic loyalty in the coalfields. You voted Democratic because you were a union member, and the union was Democratic, and the Democrats were for working people. The framework was simple, coherent, and grounded in material experience: the union had fought the coal companies for better wages and safer working conditions, the Democratic Party had supported the union, and therefore the Democratic Party was on your side.

When the union weakened and eventually collapsed, the political framework collapsed with it. There was no longer an institutional structure connecting individual miners to the Democratic Party, no longer a framework interpreting politics through the lens of class interest, no longer a mechanism for voter mobilization that was rooted in the daily experience of working-class life.

The institutional void left by the union's decline was filled — but not by an equivalent institution. It was filled by media (particularly conservative talk radio and, later, cable news and social media), by churches (whose political orientation leaned conservative on cultural issues), and by a new set of political entrepreneurs who offered a different framework for understanding the world — one organized not around class but around culture, not around workers versus bosses but around "real Americans" versus "coastal elites," not around economic interest but around identity and grievance.

This transformation — from class politics to identity politics, from union hall to television screen, from economic solidarity to cultural solidarity — was one of the most consequential political shifts of the late twentieth century, and it happened faster and more completely in the Appalachian coalfields than almost anywhere else in America.

The 2020 Election and Beyond

The 2020 presidential election confirmed that the Appalachian realignment was not a one-time response to a specific candidate but a durable structural change.

Donald Trump won West Virginia with 69 percent of the vote in 2020 — slightly higher than his 2016 margin. In Kentucky, he won with 62 percent. Coalfield counties continued to deliver overwhelming Republican margins. McDowell County gave Trump 79 percent, up from 74 percent in 2016. The trend was not weakening; it was deepening.

The entrenchment of Republican dominance extended down the ballot. State legislatures in West Virginia and Kentucky, which had been Democratic strongholds for most of the twentieth century, flipped to Republican control. In West Virginia, the state legislature became overwhelmingly Republican — a development that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. County-level offices that had been held by Democrats for decades shifted to Republican candidates or were won by candidates who had switched parties.

The realignment was no longer a presidential phenomenon. It had permeated every level of Appalachian politics, from the county courthouse to the state capitol to the U.S. Congress.

Joe Manchin — the Democratic senator from West Virginia who had won election in 2010 and reelection in 2018 by positioning himself as a moderate, pro-coal, pro-gun Democrat — became the last vestige of Appalachian Democratic representation at the federal level in the coalfield states. His ability to survive in an increasingly Republican state depended on his personal brand and his calculated distance from the national Democratic Party on cultural and energy issues. When he announced he would not seek reelection in 2024, West Virginia's transition to single-party Republican representation at the federal level was essentially complete.

The Deeper Question: What Was Lost?

The political realignment of Appalachia raises a question that goes beyond partisan preference: What happens to a community when it becomes a one-party region?

Political competition — the existence of two or more parties that genuinely contest elections — serves functions beyond the selection of officials. It forces candidates to appeal to diverse constituencies, to address a range of concerns, and to be accountable for their performance. When a region becomes so reliably aligned with one party that the general election is a formality, politicians have less incentive to respond to constituent needs, less accountability for failure, and less reason to deliver on promises.

In the coalfields, the consequences of one-party dominance were already visible. Republican politicians who won election by promising to restore coal faced no political consequences when coal did not return. Democratic politicians who might have proposed alternative economic strategies could not get elected. The range of policy options available to coalfield voters narrowed, because only candidates who adhered to the Republican cultural and economic framework could survive a primary, and general elections were uncontested.

This was not unique to the Republican Party — the previous era of Democratic one-party dominance in the coalfields had produced its own problems, including entrenched corruption and complacency. The problem was not which party dominated. The problem was domination itself — the absence of meaningful competition that forces politicians to earn their constituents' support by delivering results.

Hillbilly Elegy and Its Critics

Into the middle of this political transformation dropped a book that became, for a national audience, the explanation of what was happening in Appalachia.

J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, published in June 2016, told the story of Vance's childhood in Middletown, Ohio — a Rust Belt town with deep Appalachian roots — and his family's origins in Breathitt County, Kentucky. The book described a culture of dysfunction: unstable families, substance abuse, violence, a "learned helplessness" that prevented people from improving their own lives.

Vance's argument, stripped to its essentials, was cultural: Appalachian and working-class white communities were failing not primarily because of structural economic forces but because of cultural pathologies — a culture that did not value education, that made excuses for bad behavior, that blamed outsiders for problems that were rooted in personal and community choices.

Hillbilly Elegy became a massive bestseller. It was the book that every coastal professional read after Trump's election to understand "what happened." It was reviewed glowingly in the New York Times and the Washington Post. It was adapted into a Netflix film. Vance was invited to speak at elite institutions across the country, positioning himself as the translator between Appalachia and America.

The scholarly response was ferocious.

Elizabeth Catte, a historian and East Tennessee native, published What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia in 2018 as a direct rebuttal. Catte argued that Vance's cultural explanation was not merely incomplete but dangerous — that it recycled the same "culture of poverty" thesis that had been applied to Appalachia (and to Black communities) since the 1960s, that it blamed individuals for structural failures, and that it obscured the actual causes of Appalachian poverty: extraction, absentee ownership, deindustrialization, and policy choices made by powerful actors far from the mountains.

Catte and other scholars — including contributors to the 2019 anthology Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy — made several specific critiques:

Vance was not really writing about Appalachia. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio — a Rust Belt town, not an Appalachian mountain community. His family had roots in Breathitt County, but his lived experience was suburban and urban. Treating his memoir as representative of "Appalachian culture" was like treating a single family's story as representative of an entire region of 25 million people.

The cultural explanation erased structural causes. Vance's emphasis on personal responsibility and cultural dysfunction diverted attention from the structural forces — coal industry exploitation, deindustrialization, inadequate government investment, corporate malfeasance — that had created the conditions he described. Blaming Appalachian culture for Appalachian poverty was like blaming a patient for their disease while ignoring the pathogen.

The book served a political function. By locating the problem in culture rather than structure, Hillbilly Elegy provided a narrative that was comfortable for both conservative audiences (who heard a vindication of personal responsibility) and liberal audiences (who could feel sympathy for Appalachian dysfunction without being implicated in its causes). What neither audience had to confront was the possibility that the economic system itself — the one that had enriched them — had produced Appalachian poverty as a predictable consequence of extraction and exploitation.

The critique of Hillbilly Elegy was not a defense of Trump or of Appalachian voting patterns. Catte and other scholars were clear that the political realignment of Appalachia required explanation, and that part of that explanation involved cultural conservatism and racial politics. But they insisted that these factors be placed in their structural context — that cultural attitudes are shaped by material conditions, and that understanding why people vote as they do requires understanding the economic and social forces that shaped their lives.

What Appalachian Voting Patterns Actually Reveal

The national narrative of Appalachia as "Trump Country" — a monolithically conservative, overwhelmingly white, culturally regressive region that voted against its own interests — was, like most national narratives about Appalachia, a simplification that obscured more than it revealed.

Appalachia is not a monolith. The Appalachian Regional Commission's definition of Appalachia encompasses 423 counties across 13 states, with a combined population of approximately 26 million people. This territory includes cities (Pittsburgh, Asheville, Knoxville, Chattanooga), university towns (Blacksburg, Morgantown, Athens), industrial corridors, agricultural regions, tourism destinations, and the coalfield hollows that dominate national imagery. The political behavior of Buncombe County, North Carolina (which contains Asheville and votes Democratic) is radically different from the political behavior of Mingo County, West Virginia (which votes overwhelmingly Republican). Treating "Appalachia" as a single political entity is as misleading as treating "the West Coast" or "the Northeast" as a single entity.

The coalfields are not all of Appalachia. The national narrative focused on the coalfield counties — the places where Trump's margins were largest and the political transformation was most dramatic. But the coalfield counties are a relatively small subset of the Appalachian region, with a relatively small (and shrinking) population. The political story of Appalachia's larger population centers, university towns, and diversified economies was different — and received almost no national attention because it did not fit the "Trump Country" narrative.

Appalachian voters are not irrational. 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. For many Appalachian voters, their interests included not only economic concerns but cultural concerns: the preservation of a way of life, the defense of values they believed were under attack, and the sense that at least one political figure acknowledged their existence and respected their identity. Whether these concerns were well-served by the politicians they voted for is a legitimate question. But the assumption that economic interests should trump all other interests — that a voter is irrational for caring about anything other than their paycheck — is itself a form of condescension.

The realignment was not uniquely Appalachian. The political transformation described in this chapter — white working-class voters shifting from Democratic to Republican — occurred throughout the United States, not just in Appalachia. Rust Belt communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania; rural communities across the Great Plains and the South; small towns throughout the country — all experienced similar shifts during the same period. What happened in Appalachia was a regional expression of a national phenomenon, driven by the same forces (deindustrialization, union decline, cultural conservatism, racial politics) that were operating everywhere.

And yet, the Appalachian version had unique characteristics. The depth of the historical Democratic loyalty made the inversion particularly dramatic. The centrality of coal as both economic driver and political symbol gave the "War on Coal" narrative a specificity and emotional power that generic Republican messaging could not have achieved. And the intersection of economic collapse (Chapter 32), the opioid crisis (Chapter 33), and political realignment in the same communities at the same time created a compounding crisis that was distinctly Appalachian in its intensity.

The Media Lens: How Appalachian Politics Was Covered

After the 2016 election, a particular genre of journalism proliferated: the "Trump Country" piece. National reporters — overwhelmingly based in New York, Washington, and other major cities — traveled to Appalachian communities to interview voters and report on why they had supported Trump. The resulting articles, television segments, and documentaries followed a predictable template: a reporter visits a struggling community, interviews residents at a diner or a church or a shuttered factory, records their grievances and their hopes, and returns to the coast with a story that tells the national audience what "those people" are thinking.

The genre was well-intentioned in most cases. The reporters were often genuinely trying to understand a political outcome that had surprised them. But the genre had structural problems that limited its explanatory value and, in some cases, reinforced the very stereotypes it purported to challenge.

The diner interview problem. The format of the "Trump Country" piece — a reporter arriving in a community, spending a day or two, interviewing a handful of people, and then departing — produced coverage that was superficial by necessity. You cannot understand the political economy of a coalfield community in forty-eight hours. You cannot understand the history of extraction, the role of the union, the impact of the opioid crisis, the texture of daily life, or the complexity of any individual voter's decision in the time it takes to write a feature story. The resulting pieces tended to reduce complex political choices to simple narrative arcs: people are angry, people feel forgotten, people want someone to listen.

The white male focus. The overwhelming majority of "Trump Country" pieces interviewed white men — usually older, usually working-class, usually in diners, barbershops, or the parking lots of closed factories. This produced coverage that systematically excluded the political perspectives of Black Appalachians, women, young people, and the substantial minority of white voters who did not support Trump. The cumulative effect was to construct an image of "Appalachian politics" that was, in reality, the politics of a specific demographic subgroup within a diverse region.

The condescension problem. Many "Trump Country" pieces, despite their sympathetic intentions, carried an implicit subtext: these people are exotic, their choices are puzzling, and we have come here to explain them to you. This was a contemporary version of the "discovery" of Appalachia that Chapter 14 described — outsiders arriving in the mountains, observing the inhabitants, and reporting their findings to a distant audience. The power relationship was the same: the observer had the platform, the vocabulary, and the authority to define what was seen. The observed had the experience but not the power to control how that experience was represented.

The best coverage of Appalachian politics came from journalists who were embedded in the communities they covered — reporters like Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, who lived in West Virginia and reported on the opioid crisis with intimate local knowledge, or the staff of local outlets who understood the communities they served well enough to ask the right questions. The worst coverage came from parachute journalists who arrived with their stories already written in their heads, looking for quotes that would confirm their predetermined narratives.

Appalachian Politics Beyond the Coalfields

The national narrative reduced "Appalachian politics" to the politics of the coalfields. This was an error that obscured the political diversity of the broader region.

Asheville, North Carolina — an Appalachian city with a population of approximately 95,000 in Buncombe County — voted overwhelmingly Democratic in every election during the period of coalfield realignment. Asheville's politics were shaped by its university community, its arts and tourism economy, and an influx of progressive-leaning residents attracted by the city's culture and natural setting. Buncombe County voted for Biden in 2020 by a significant margin. It was as Appalachian as McDowell County — it was surrounded by the same mountains, shaped by the same Cherokee heritage, and connected to the same regional history — but its politics were radically different.

Blacksburg, Virginia — home to Virginia Tech, in the heart of the New River Valley — voted Democratic by wide margins. The university's faculty, staff, and student population created a political dynamic that diverged sharply from the surrounding rural counties. The New River Valley exemplified the urban-rural political divide that increasingly characterized Appalachian politics: the towns voted one way, the countryside voted another, and the two camps often seemed to inhabit different political realities despite sharing the same zip codes.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — the largest city in the Appalachian region by the ARC's definition — was solidly Democratic. Allegheny County (which contains Pittsburgh) voted for Biden by 20 points in 2020. Pittsburgh's politics were shaped by its transformation from a steel city to a technology and healthcare hub, by its large university population, and by its racial diversity.

These examples do not disprove the coalfield realignment. They do demonstrate that "Appalachian politics" is not a single story. It is many stories, and the national obsession with the coalfield story — dramatic and compelling as it was — came at the expense of the other stories that were equally Appalachian and equally important for understanding the region.

The Danger of Explanation as Endorsement

A textbook that explains why Appalachian voters supported particular candidates risks being read as endorsing those candidates. This chapter does not do that.

A textbook that explains the structural forces driving political realignment — and that names economic anxiety, cultural conservatism, racial politics, and corporate manipulation as contributing factors — also risks being read as dismissing voters' agency or patronizing their choices. This chapter does not do that either.

The historian's task is to explain, with as much accuracy and empathy as the evidence allows, why human beings made the choices they made. Appalachian voters made choices in a context shaped by forces beyond their control: the collapse of their economic base, the destruction of their social institutions, the targeting of their communities by pharmaceutical companies, and the competing narratives offered by political parties seeking their votes. Understanding those choices requires understanding that context — not to excuse or condemn, but to see clearly.

Primary Source Analysis

"I voted Democrat my whole life because they were for the working man. But the working man don't exist anymore, not around here. The mines are closed. The union's gone. The Democrats are talking about things I don't understand — climate change, trans rights, whatever — and the Republicans are talking about saving our jobs. Maybe they can't save them. But at least they're talking about it." — Voter, Logan County, West Virginia, 2017

"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. But most of us just felt like one party forgot about us and the other party at least remembered our name." — Voter, Floyd County, Kentucky, 2018

"The Democrats lost this county when they stopped coming here. Used to be, your Democratic state senator would show up at the fire department fundraiser, the football game, the church picnic. When's the last time a Democratic candidate for president came to McDowell County? Kennedy did it. Johnson did it. After that? Nobody." — Local political observer, McDowell County, West Virginia, 2019

"Then and Now" Comparison

Then (1960): McDowell County votes 73% for John F. Kennedy. Mingo County: 72% Democratic. Harlan County: 68% Democratic. The coalfields are the Democratic Party's most reliable base outside the Deep South. Union membership is near its peak. The UMWA is a political powerhouse. Democratic candidates visit the coalfields regularly, seeking endorsements and votes.

Now (2016-2024): McDowell County votes 74% for Donald Trump. Mingo County: 79% Republican. Harlan County: 85% Republican. The coalfields are among the most Republican areas in the United States. Union membership has collapsed. The UMWA is a shadow of its former self. Republican candidates visit the coalfields to promise coal restoration; Democratic candidates largely avoid them.

The question: The same communities, two generations apart, voting with the same intensity but for opposite parties. What changed — the communities, the parties, or both?

Whose Story Is Missing?

The narrative of Appalachian political realignment is almost always told through the voices of white men in coalfield communities — because they are the demographic that shifted most dramatically and because their shift had the most visible electoral consequences.

But Appalachian politics is not exclusively white, male, or conservative:

Black Appalachians continued to vote overwhelmingly Democratic throughout the period of realignment. In counties with significant Black populations, the racial divide in voting was stark: white voters shifted Republican while Black voters remained Democratic. The political realignment was, in significant part, a racial realignment — a fact that the standard narrative, focused on white voters, often obscures.

Women in Appalachia did not vote monolithically. While white women in rural Appalachia increasingly voted Republican, there was significant variation by education, urban/rural location, and age. The gender gap in Appalachian politics was real but is rarely analyzed with the same attention given to the coal miner's vote.

Young Appalachians — particularly those with college education — showed different political patterns than their parents and grandparents. The generational divide in Appalachian politics mirrored the national generational divide, with younger voters trending more progressive even in deeply conservative counties.

Urban Appalachians — in Asheville, Pittsburgh, and university towns — voted quite differently from rural Appalachians. The political diversity within the region was significant and is erased by treating "Appalachia" as a monolith.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

Your County's Political Transformation

1. Electoral data: Research the presidential election results in your selected county for 1960, 1976, 1992, 2008, and 2020. Create a table showing the Democratic and Republican vote shares. What pattern do you see?

2. Local politics: Has the party realignment that occurred at the presidential level been replicated at the local level? Who controls the county commission, the school board, the state legislative seats? Did local politics shift at the same time as presidential politics, or on a different timeline?

3. Union presence: Was there a significant union presence in your county? If so, trace the union's decline and assess whether it correlates with the political realignment.

4. The "War on Coal" question: If your county was a coal-producing county, how did the "War on Coal" narrative affect local politics? If your county was NOT a coal-producing county, what were the primary issues driving political change?

5. Diversity of views: Interview (or research the views of) at least two residents of your county who hold different political positions. What do they identify as the most important issues facing the community? How do their perspectives reflect or challenge the narratives described in this chapter?

Chapter Summary

The political realignment of Appalachia — from one of the most reliable Democratic regions in the United States to one of the most reliable Republican ones — occurred over roughly fifty years, driven by multiple converging forces: the decline of unions and the economic institutions that had sustained Democratic loyalty, the rise of cultural conservatism as a political organizing principle, racial politics that were amplified by the Southern Strategy and its successors, the emergence of the "culture wars" (particularly around guns, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights), and the powerful "War on Coal" narrative that identified the Democratic Party as the enemy of coalfield communities.

The 2016 presidential election completed the realignment, with Donald Trump carrying coalfield counties by margins that were the mirror image of those won by John F. Kennedy two generations earlier. Trump's appeal combined a promise to restore the coal industry, cultural identification with working-class identity, economic populism on trade, and a combative anti-establishment persona that resonated in communities that felt ignored and condescended to by the political establishment.

J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy provided the national audience with a cultural explanation for Appalachian political behavior, while Appalachian scholars — particularly Elizabeth Catte — argued that the cultural explanation obscured structural causes: extraction, deindustrialization, and policy failures that created the conditions Vance attributed to cultural dysfunction.

The political transformation of Appalachia was not unique to the region — it reflected a national realignment of white working-class voters — but it had uniquely Appalachian features: the centrality of coal as both economic driver and political symbol, the depth of the historical Democratic loyalty that was overturned, and the intersection of economic collapse, the opioid crisis, and political realignment in the same communities at the same time. Any honest analysis of what happened must resist the temptation to treat the region as a monolith, to dismiss voters' choices as irrational, or to explain a complex transformation with a single cause.