Chapter 34 Key Takeaways: Appalachia and American Politics

• Appalachia underwent one of the most dramatic political realignments in modern American history, shifting from a solidly Democratic region to a solidly Republican one over roughly fifty years. In 1960, coalfield counties voted 70-80 percent Democratic. By 2016, many of the same counties voted 70-80 percent Republican. The inversion was nearly mathematically perfect.

• Appalachian Democratic loyalty was rooted in economics, not culture — specifically in the New Deal, which brought federal relief, collective bargaining protections, and infrastructure investment to coalfield communities. The UMWA, enabled by federal labor law, delivered wages, benefits, and dignity. The Democratic Party was the party of the union, the working man, and the New Deal. This economic loyalty was sustained through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which directed significant resources to the region.

• The realignment was driven by multiple converging forces, not a single cause. These forces included: the decline of unions and the institutional structures that sustained Democratic loyalty; the rise of cultural conservatism as a political organizing principle (the "God, Guns, and Gays" formula); racial politics amplified by the Southern Strategy and its successors; the emergence of the "culture wars"; economic anxieties channeled into cultural identity; and the powerful "War on Coal" narrative that identified the Democratic Party as the enemy of coalfield communities.

• The "War on Coal" narrative was the catalyst that completed the political transformation of the coalfields. By providing a political explanation for coal's market-driven decline — by identifying the Democratic Party and the EPA as the villains — the narrative translated economic catastrophe into political action. The emotional power of the narrative derived from coal's centrality to community identity: defending coal was defending who you were.

• The 2016 presidential election was the watershed. Donald Trump's appeal in Appalachia combined a promise to restore coal, cultural identification with working-class identity, economic populism on trade, anti-establishment rhetoric, and a persona that resonated with voters who felt ignored and condescended to. Trump carried coalfield counties by the same margins — but in the opposite direction — that Kennedy had carried them two generations earlier.

• J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy provided a national audience with a cultural explanation for Appalachian political behavior, while Appalachian scholars argued that the cultural explanation obscured structural causes. Vance attributed Appalachian poverty primarily to cultural attitudes (lack of personal responsibility, dysfunctional families). Elizabeth Catte and other scholars argued that this recycled the discredited "culture of poverty" thesis and diverted attention from the actual causes: extraction, deindustrialization, and policy failures by powerful actors.

• The scholarly consensus supports the structural explanation. While cultural attitudes matter, they are shaped by material conditions, not the reverse. People develop survival strategies in response to poverty, and those strategies may appear, from the outside, like cultural deficiencies. Blaming Appalachian culture for Appalachian poverty obscures the role of coal industry exploitation, pharmaceutical company predation, inadequate government investment, and an economic system that extracted wealth from the region for over a century.

• Appalachia is not a political monolith. The national narrative of "Trump Country" focused on the coalfield counties — a relatively small subset of the region with a shrinking population. The broader Appalachian region includes cities, university towns, and racially diverse communities with significantly different political patterns. Black Appalachians, urban Appalachians, and young Appalachians voted differently from the white rural voters who dominated the narrative.

• The Appalachian realignment was not uniquely Appalachian — it was a regional expression of a national phenomenon. White working-class voters shifted from Democratic to Republican across the United States during the same period, driven by the same forces. But the Appalachian version had unique features: the depth of historical Democratic loyalty, the centrality of coal as a political symbol, and the intersection of economic collapse, the opioid crisis, and political realignment in the same communities.

• Votes are not just policy preferences; they are expressions of identity. When coalfield voters supported Trump, they were expressing not just an economic calculation but a statement about who they were and what they valued — working-class identity, cultural tradition, and a demand for recognition from a political system they felt had abandoned them. Understanding this identity dimension is essential to understanding the realignment.

• This chapter's obligation is to explain, not to endorse. The political choices of Appalachian voters — like all voters' choices — were made in a context shaped by forces beyond individual control. Understanding those choices requires analyzing the structural forces, political narratives, and cultural dynamics that shaped them, without either dismissing voters as irrational or treating their choices as inevitable.