Paul Krugman's column today is about "left behind" places in the US. Exhibit A is West Virginia, which indeed has the lowest level of prime-age men's employment in the country:
But here's the thing: West Virginia has always been poor. Personal income in 1950 was a dismal 32% lower than the US average and central Appalachia was practically the poster boy for American poverty in Michael Harrington's famous 1962 study, The Other America. Personal income is still dismal today, but it's actually gotten a little better:
Likewise, employment in West Virginia has been lower than the US average forever. But it's also gotten steadily better. This chart is for all workers, not just prime-age men, because that's what the BLS gives us:
In 1990 the participation rate in West Virginia was 12 points less than the national average. Today it's only 7 points less.
So yes: West Virginia is poor. But it's always been poor. And recently it's gotten a bit less poor. This obviously can't explain why it's changed from a reliably Democratic state up through 2000 into a state that gave Donald Trump 69% of its vote in 2020.
So if poverty and unemployment aren't the answer, what is? Have Republicans gotten more sympathetic toward the working poor? Hardly. Have Democrats given up on them? Obamacare, the EITC, and Biden's Child Tax Credit say no.
So I guess it's just the usual racial and culture war stuff. There's certainly no "left behind" factor that can explain the change.
I imagine it was always a deeply socially conservative state, but the power of key unions plus the lower salience of many culture war topics in party alignment in previous decades helped, along with the weaker presence of conservative media (which has done a lot to homogenize conservatives across the country and just generally turn socially conservative people into Republicans).
IMHO, explaining anything to do with the modern Republican party as "conservative" misses the current reality. Who are the conservatives? Donald Trump? Hardly. He has no policy views except what's good for him. The rest of the Crazy Caucus? Not conservative by any traditional understanding of the term. Who are the conservatives in the modern Republican party? Seems to me they've all been driven out or at least co-opted or silenced. The modern Republican party is as radical as the Weather Underground used to be. They have the temperament of a spoiled toddler. They want what they want, RIGHT NOW and often don't really quite know what it is that they want. Traditional conservatives of years ago would blanch at the carrying on of the modern Republicans.
So, basically, West Virginia is having a temper tantrum, because they want something, but even they don't understand what it is that they want. I think mainly they're just pissed off because they think someone else is getting more candy than they are.
This is correct. Add that the Democratic Party is the conservative party today and that there is no significant liberal party.
This is bullshit.
+1
Wankery.
Conservatism has never been opposed to reactionary, fascist, or racist politics.
And it's a mistake to think that was ever true.
The Republicans are not radical, they are reactionary. The main difference is that radicals are forward looking while reactionaries are backward looking; the radicals look forward to a better future while reactionaries seek to return to the usually imaginary "good old days".
They were isolated, but the interstate highway system which Robert Byrd got for them has improved their lot considerably. The young can leave, and transportation into the state helps too.
They've always been Conservative because their roots were anti-slavery and "leave me the Hell alone". Even their language is old and unchanged, to some extent, from the earliest settlers.
When they were Democrats because that was the Conservative party, they voted for the Klan member Robert Byrd. When the state went union and Democratic for FDR, they voted for the "moderate" Robert Byrd. What they haven't yet found is a way to adjust further and vote for any Liberals. There have been candidates in the 1990s and perhaps 2000s, but none have won. The Conservatism has remained and as the country shifted Left, they stayed Conservative and now Republican. There is no more Robert Byrd, and there is no new Democrat they trust after Joe Manchin.
The state, like America, has done better because of Democratic economic policies, but they don't recognize that since they lost coal, and they threw away unions by voting for Republicans like Reagan and Bush.
Obviously, on the question of the shift in voting, it is Kevin's favorite explanation: Fox News.
Accurate or not, Coal... Free-Trade ...
‘Free trade’ had less impact on West Virginia than other states, as manufacturing is a smaller part of its economy, and coal has always had world pricing. Tourism is a major economic activity.
Coal and Religion. Which are kind of the same in coal country.
Except that coal mining jobs were doomed, first by mechanization and now by modernization. We don't burn coal because it's filthy and other power sources are cheaper and renewable.
That's why the main power companies in my state are dropping coal, not because they're dirty fucking hippies.
All true enough, but let's think this through a little bit. Coal market's drying up, mines are scaling back and closing. Whether I'm a Blankenship type who can shift the capital around and dance out ahead, or a small mine operator who has to shut down, or a third party who wants to make some hay politically, what am I more likely to say-- "market's bad, other fuels are cheaper and cleaner to handle, can't stop progress and all that, them's the breaks, let's all go home and figure out something new"? Or "DFHs and DEI and EPA and effin' environmentalists stole all your jobs because they despise every one of us and we're all hurting here and we're all mad as hell and now let's have a good 20-year hate"?
The cynical bet is almost always the good bet if the gop is involved (but the depth of their cynicism is hard for most of us well-meaning liberals to grasp).
Coal can’t go away fast enough. West Virginia is a place of great natural beauty, which makes it a tourist destination. People can enjoy the mountain views, and they remain for the next generation. But once you blow the top off the mountain (see mountaintop removal), scrape the coal away, and dump the tailings into the valley, it doesn’t come back. Short-term gain, long-term pain.
Why is this a mystery? Why are you spending so much time wondering about something so obvious?
It's always been socially conservative.
I have land out there. Even the liberal oasis towns like Berkeley Springs are at best places of truce. Everywhere else there are tattered Trump 2024 signs.
There's a guy who parks his van next to the road out of town and into the mountains and sells Confederate paraphernalia and fanboi gear several days per week.
This really is not confusing.
West Virginia has always been a conservative state, but up until about 30 years ago it was reliably Democratic. For many of the deep South states, the switch to Republicans was a clear backlash to the civil rights changes, but WV has few blacks and this isn't really a big factor. This has nothing to do with being conservative.
How many articles and studies have you seen trying to understand these people and those like them who are powering the MAGA movement? None of them ever come to a definitive conclusion. I posit that the reason they can't come to a conclusion is that they're all looking in the wrong place. It's not really an economic or social issue. I think Lounsbury is onto something when he ascribes it to "senses of comparative personal loss". But WV has always been poor and they've always felt looked down upon by "elites", whoever they are. Trump has basically validated these feelings and turbocharged them. The anger and resentment was always there under the surface, but it's broken out into a rage. This is the standard demagogue playbook. Tap into existing frictions and supercharge it by blaming all their problems on some "other" group.
Having 'others' doesn't make racism happen. The 'others' can be reliably demonized even better where they don't ecist.
Racism is a bigger factor than you think; remember Robert Byrd and the Klan. Just as anti-immigration sentiment runs high in places with little immigration ( https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/22/politics/immigration-trump-arizona/index.html ), bigotry can flourish even where the objects of it are sparse.
Selling Confederate paraphernalia? In the state that deliberately split from Virginia during the Civil War in order to be on the Northern side? Long, strange trip indeed.
It's true. Same here in double blue Santa Cruz.
The guy who was flying the Confederate flag on Hwy 9 had his house burn down for the last time, tho - he died in the most recent fire in his meth lab.
Ugh, there's no logic in hatred. It's a gut feeling that people don't want to look at too closely. They live for their hate. How do you get through to them? Mostly you don't.
Yeah. I kinda wish I was joking about the meth lab and multiple fires.
Not so much deliberately split as was forcibly split from.
Back in the 80s, educators noted that W Va and Eastern Kentucky had considerable problems getting college graduates to come back home and work. Regardless of educational financial incentives, as soon as they could, most grads left and never came back.
Doesn't sound like much has changed : (
Wikipedia has the proportion of adults with bachelor’s degrees in West Virginia at 17.3%, lowest in the nation.
So does anywhere else rural. The conservative policies keep us from coming home.
I’ve given up trying to explain it. Why bother? There is no policy solution anyway.
How about this?
Between 2010 and 2020, West Virginia lost a higher percentage of its residents than any other state in the nation, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In that span, the state lost about 59,000 people, or 3.2 percent of its population. The decline now is mainly due to the state having more deaths than births. Between 2020 and 2023, the state recorded 89,419 deaths and 55,715 births.
"The decline now is mainly due to the state having more deaths than births. Between 2020 and 2023, the state recorded 89,419 deaths and 55,715 births."
I know how to fix that! Pass some legislation that will make OB-GYNs flee for their careers, and make pregnant people want to live somewhere else for nine months, in case something goes wrong. Easy peasy, that'll do it, right?
/s, just in case.
Drum's comment is deeply reductionist and frankly rather missing the behavioural economics learning that humans generally are not motivated by simple maths evaluations of absolute change, but on senses of comparative positional loss (which given we are really but over-clocked chimpanzees in over-sized chimpanzee bands becomes quite understandable, if not flattering).
West Virginia always being poor on GDP level abstraction metrics is useful analytics for economic policy. Not particularly useful for human sentiment where it is more than obvious that there is a broad sense across a swath of labouring class America of a loss of place, which is partially economic, partially culture.
It is quite notable the Krugman article reflects the Academic - professional class inflected Left of USA in treating this as a Poverty Programs issue (the extensive citing of poverty reduction programming) rather than a labour issue principally - which from a socio-cultural PoV has long been IDed (not merely in USA) as a socio-political problem as this charitable sentiment driven look is broadly resented amongst such populations (similar effects seen in other countries so hardly an American thing although America seems to have it more strongly).
The interest of the Democrats is rather continuing to sneer at MAGA (justified or not) given the large fraction of MAGA voters who were once solid Democratic voters, and given the geographic distribution and the Electoral College - Democrats have interest in seeing how to regain a percentage of this (and stop their bleeding). Pure political interest
Once democrats take your advice and, presumably, gain the political power you desire, what will they do? It seems to me they will once again alienate these MAGA voters and we’ll be right back here.
Many good points here and I think many commenters here should read Nick Kristof's piece of a few days ago in the Times and perhaps let it settle in before
dismissing it with the usual arguments. It is possible I suppose that we coastal elites are just morally superior but that's not usually a good lens for understanding our fellow citizens. In fairness to Krugman I think he does see this as more an issue of jobs and not just Poverty Programs. I think a good parallel to the sense of loss and purpose that particularly affects men in places where jobs have gone away is the work that Julius Wilson did regardijg urban blacks. In fact I think Wilson directly connected the poverty of the southside of Chicago with the poverty of Appalachia. It's the mirror image of what Charles Murray and I suppose JD Vance say, only I believe they have the causality backwards.
The moral superiority and even correctness of policy, are clearly not winning votes. One needs the votes in your geographically structured system to have insurance against reactionary backlash (else one could happily ignore them). I certainly have about zero cultural sympathy here (for the West Virgnians) however as this kind of demographic is the door for Trumpism unless mitigated, of concern (as Trumpism is a disaster for the world, frankly if you all were Canada I would simply shrug...)
In the end, the political need is to at least partially regain traction in this fraction (in the specific national electoral geographies) in order to have a risk barrier.
Else one is prisoner and will continue to be prisoner of knife-edge elections and af best defending what Drum rather correctly has pointed out are rather significant social and economic policy gains (rather 'misunderestimated' by the never-satisfied with less the total perfection results activists fractions).
The only ways to get better jobs in WV are either for the national government to subsidize private companies to put them there, or the national government to directly create new government jobs there. There is no job - not even in tourism - in WV that can’t be more cheaply done somewhere else* or raise more revenue being done somewhere else,** so private companies will have zero interest in creating lots of jobs in WV, unless they already have some kind of affinity for the place, eg the heir to a coal fortune loves his hometown so much he purposefully creates jobs there.
But of course WV leads the nation in voting for Republicans, whose entire party is pro gutting the national government’s ability to directly or indirectly create jobs in any way. And so WV sinks further into relative or absolute decline.
*Even at low wages, WV employees aren’t as productive as low wage workers elsewhere, because WV lacks high speed internet, plentiful roads, etc to get whatever those employees are doing to customers in other states.
**Even jobs in sectors that WV should excel at, like say whitewater rafting guides, a whitewater rafting guide will serve more customers in, say, rural NC than in WV bc NC has more potential customers within a reasonable road travel distance and has busy airports bringing even more tourists in.
I think many commenters here should read Nick Kristof's piece of a few days ago in the Times
No they shouldn't because the aforementioned Kristof article is a piece of garbage. I felt bad for him and thought Oregon Democrats railroaded him off the ballot for governor in 2022 due to technicalities but after reading it I realize that telling voters they're smug and elitist and look down on people wasn't exactly going to win their favor. He would have been lucky to finish third in the primary.
I mean who's being condescending here? The self-hating, well-educated liberal writer who sees Trump supporters as extras from the movie The Grapes of Wrath and liberals as straight out of the cast of Portlandia. I agree no one should be betlittled for their faith, even the faithless (of which there are a growing number in this country) show me those liberals who "mock" a person's and I will be happy to straighten them out. Just show me....still waiting. But I don't think it's wrong to ask why a faith tradition that feels compelled to use policy to structure the state to its beliefs feels compelled to support a candidate or candidates who hardly live out that faith to begin with, so why do they expect the rest of society to do so, hmm? That's not mocking, that's a serious question.
And as for economics, yes there are poor and working class Trump supporters who are anti-free trade but the reality is many of them own their own business and are often the establishment of the locations they come from. Some of them even went to J6 in DC on their lear jets(!) Go to a Trump rally sometime and find those who like following Trump from rally to rally across the country, it's quite a number. Then ask them how they can afford it. The Trump movement is not a revolt of the masses. What we have here is largely a middle class civil war.
I get so tired of these kinds of articles written by the same kind of writers as Kristof. They never ask Republicans or Trump supporters to be understanding to Democrats and or other liberals and Leftists. Never ask Republicans to somehow be more competitive in the nation's urban areas for voters. They only ask Democrats to do better in rural areas. In other words, they hold Democrats to higher political expectations than they do Republicans because they don't consider Republicans salvageable to expect more from them. That's a burden that's not sustainable, not in politics anyways. Call it the bigotry of low expectations and it has damaged the two party system profoundly by writers who should know better like Kristof.
So what are these relative losses you allude to?
Because it seems you're just lying. Their labor participation rose. Their incomes rose. What metric are they doing worse than before that's a Democratic failing?
What a bizarre comment, the Party Political Tribalist apparently can't read for understanidng.
Please do make an effort on joined up reading comprehension and you may profitably reflect on the total absence of any mention on my part of comparative loss relative to "Democratic failing"
As to "Their labor participation rose. Their incomes rose." you evidently lack an understanding of relative position loss - as a matter of behavioural perception. Labour participation and income rises (taking these for the argument as givens sans decomposition of the components) are not the subject, it is the perception of relative loss. Your response shows you rather did not understand that at all. Relative loss (or more precisely perceived relative loss, not the same thing as such).
Try laying aside your knee jerking and reflexive partisan tribalism and re-read for actual understanding.
The only Democratic failings evoked are (a) professional class myopia, (b) the US academe-infused Left lensing of such subjects via Poverty concepts which labouring socio-economic groups everywhere, international example (see UK, see Germany) react very poorly too - so a misframing (this is not a cause of their challenges but it does rather explain well why your responses are not given credit).
You're mother called. She wants you to come upstairs and help her move the couch.
Oh so it's the childish attempts at ad hominem when one sees a PoV one doesn't care for, putting you off your Tribe... who very adolescent.
ScentOfViolets just enjoys insulting people. You need to just ignore them.
Yeah, I don't care for a PoV which said the universe was created in 4004 B.C.; I also don't care for a PoV that says 2 + 2 = -5. But you don't do details, do you? Merely gratuitous (and very unintentionally funny) swipes at what you call 'the Left'. Yeah, you're a hypocrite, all right.
But you wanna know why I simply cannot abide you?
Your writing sucks.
You think George Will is a good writer (when in reality he's just a stupid person's idea of how a smart person writes), one you want to emulate ... and you can't even pull that off. Why, you're not even a Brit. Now go back downstairs; you're dismissed. That is all.
On Edit: I'll also point out out that Mr. Wannabe taken for a Smart Person doesn't know what 'ad hominem' means. But we already knew he had an impoverished vocabulary 😉
Long answer without facing the single point I made. What fucking loss?
And an entire paragraph devoted to insulting me. Asshole.
Scent of Violets had it right.
"perception of relative loss"
How do the Dems address a perception, which is based mainly on the fact that more diverse urban areas are thriving while their communities fade? Do they start screaming about immigrants taking their jobs or maybe how DEI is turning their kids gay?
Television makes them aware that others exist who are not living as they do, so they become acutely self-conscious of their relative destitution.
The increasing availability of tv over this same period seems to track exactly with this conservative appeal to a sense of loss.
I suggest using real median household income instead of average personal income.
Also, track the rate of black lung disease among miners.
But those would only show red areas getting worse...
West Virginia shares two attributes with a number of the other deepest red states: (1) it hasn't become as racially/ethnically diverse as rapidly as the nation (it's still nearly 90% white) and (2) it hasn't increased average education attainment as much as the nation (the country is increasingly bifurcated politically along education attainment lines).
You can have one of these things and still remain competitive for Democrats, but not both.
Well said. This is why Montana is still slightly competitive for the "right" Democrat. The western half of the state and Bozeman are attracting in-migration, most of which is from more liberal parts of the country, and they bring their priors.
Nobody moves to West Virginia except Boahs in the awl bidness, and they only briefly until the field is developed.
Why? Why are those required?
Why is a desire not to have black lung required to be a Democrat?
Are you saying we've sorted into the self-destructive and the self-preserving?
Huh?
What Jasper wrote makes sense to me: the Democratic Party wins elections based on how visible minorities participate/vote and how people with college degrees participate/vote. If your state has few to none of either group, as Jasper pointed out WV does not, then it’s almost preordained that your state will not be voting for many/any Democrats in the foreseeable future.
There’s nothing in what Jasper wrote about black lung or its desirability, or even about self destruction vs preservation. Nobody said college educated people and/or visible minorities want to have less black lung or less self destruction than white working class people do. But it’s pretty clear in the 21st Century that visible minorities and college educated people want very different things from government than the white working class does, because the two different parties those groups support or hate have very different agendas and governing styles.
Are there large numbers of Democrats getting elected in Santa Cruz solely or largely on the backs of white working class people? I would venture a guess no, since this isn’t happening in any of the 8 states I’ve lived in either.
Hawaii. Hawaiians don't vote Republican, despite whiteness and lower than average education.
No, you can't explain their Democratic votes on a conservative, Asian population.
You can not have this explanation of yours any way other than 'racism' and 'self destructiveness'.
Hawaii. Hawaiians don't vote Republican, despite whiteness and lower than average education.
Whiteness? Are you being ironic? Hawaii is literally the least white state of the fifty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_non-Hispanic_white_population
You might want to look at Vermont: it's the third whitest state, but is reliably Democratic. Why? Mostly because of a high rate of college education (usually top three, depending on whose numbers you cite). This isn't remotely controversial any more: we're seeing an increasingly stark bifurcation of partisan sorting along education attainment lines. And the trend most definitely isn't confined to the United States.
Why? Why do vets, cops, poor, undereducated and all the other groups that trump has insulted still vote for him?
There's a trenchant quote from LBJ that pretty much sums it up.
Without doubt as such voters from a mix of
(a) do not perceive Trump insulted them personally versus what Lefty Left sensibilities feel;
(b) do not have a principal identarian voting motivation, contra the fashionable vision of the academic-activist infused LEft
(c) see a set of interests they correctly or not are being served by Trump and not the Democrats.
In the end it is rather more politically useful to understand those factors than continue the bemoaning of false consciousness (now dressed up in new fashionable language but same fundamental) or snide comment on the stupidity of MAGA
b) A significant group of identarians are Trump’s and the GOP cult’s strongest supporters.
They don't, personally, feel insulted except when someone of the liberal tribe does it?
Gotcha, that's called being hypocritical.
The disgraced, twice-impeached, indicted and convicted former guy makes them feel like it's OK to disparage the people they want to disparage. He's made it OK to be racist and sexist. It's OK to blame others for your life being difficult. Gets you right in the feels, don' it?
The state is filled with ignorant, hateful bigots. How they got that way and why the state is filled with them are other questions. It didn't happen overnight and it isn't going to get any better any time soon.
West Virginia was once one of the nation's most heavily unionized states. Now, it's one of the least. That's the explanation right there.
The simple and obvious reason that low-income voters in the South switched from Democrat to Republican is racism. The deep South went for Goldwater when he opposed the Civil Rights Act, then it went for Wallace as a Democrat and Independent when he campaigned on "segregation", then swung over with Nixon and finally Reagan. The intensity and blatancy of the identification of Republicans with racism has continued to increase, and has been reinforced by religiosity. Remember that West Virginia separated from Virginia to keep out of the Confederacy, so it held out longer than other states.
Economics has nothing to do with the conversion of low-income whites from Democrat to Republican. They didn't switch because they started reading Wolfgang von Mises or believed in Voodoo economics (nobody ever really did). When tribal partisanship is aroused, reason goes by the board. Tribal solidarity has been more important that material well-being for low-income Republican voters. If they seem to believe in Trump's fake "populist" promises, it is not on grounds of material self-interest, it is because they are so partisan they believe everything Trump says, or say they do. His actual record of standard Republican economics actions is ignored.
It is still largely taboo for the media to discuss issues of racism frankly. Pundits are always trying for find alternate reasons for Trump's popularity, but their arguments on economic grounds belie the history of how voters switched and make no sense - if economics were paramount with low-income white voters they would just not vote Republican.
Well there is the fine Left Cultural social justice warrior path to winning elections, the racism scold card. Sure way to mitigate erosion in the voting blocks.
Aww, the asshole with the paragraph long insults and no fucking answers to what fucking economics they lost to answer for.
I've long thought the US should create a kind of internal refugee agency that would assist people in economically disadvantaged remote and insular areas to transition to living in other parts of the country that may feel to them like they've fallen onto another planet, through re-training and relocation assistance.
Why was New England not left behind? Multiple generations of agriculture and industry have moved south or west. The first fortunes made in Connecticut were from forest products. Once the best trees were gone, ironmaking flourished in Connecticut and Massachusetts (you can make charcoal from second-growth trees). When metallurgical-grade coal was found in Pennsylvania, ironmaking went there. Furniture and textiles went south before going overseas. Clockmaking followed. My town had hatmaking, spilled over from the adjacent city of Danbury; then John Kennedy doffed his topper to make his inaugural speech.
I believe education was a major factor in the region’s ability to re-invent itself multiple times. Not just Harvard, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, but high-quality primary and secondary education and smaller colleges and universities. And prosperity was if anything helped by a high rate of immigration.
Culture is a complicated thing. I think you're right about education in NE, but it both supported and expressed a culture that has valued education in a lot of ways and for a lot of purposes. In this context it matters that for New Englanders education was effective in helping people get ahead economically and socially, both there and in the rest of the country (and sometimes they ended up going back, and sometimes they sent money back, and both patterns perpetuated the cycle).
One of the reasons education helped people get ahead is reflected in the reputation New Englanders had in the rest of the country (going back to colonial days) as being "enterprising." That's the polite word; they were also called things like "a race of sharpers" always looking for the money-making angle, and other less flattering things. It's a good bet that old saw about needing to count your fingers after you shake hands with somebody was first said about a Yankee. A more generous view is that they were raised as tinkerers, looking to make more out of what they had.
All that strikes me as more of a cultural thing that's part of the milieu people grow up in. I don't think it's all that prevalent in WV, neither the education part nor the tinkering part. Not that people there don't work hard, God knows, and not that education wouldn't be a good thing, but it needs time to be a more organic part of the way of life there if it's to have a similar effect as in NE.
Slightly OT, but plugging into that attitude of not valuing education has been easy for trump and is one reason for his big appeal to non-college whites in places like WV, imo. He's the rich Ivy League guy who won't hesitate to tell everybody how smart he is, and yet every time he opens his mouth he very ostentatiously uses his diploma for figurative toilet paper, lining up alongside the people who don't think much of the Ivy types. Talk about confirming supporters' priors!
dems could increase WV's median income by 50% and all they'd get in return is a smaller texas
An insult to Texas. Texas is trending blue, although it's taking its time. Maybe, just maybe, Allred will beat Cruz this year. It's a long shot, but there have been longer. I will have a few dollars in the game for Allred to use.
Yeah, there's a big difference between Texas and West Virginia: the former is better educated and less white, and as a result it's a lot less loyal to the Republican Party. Sure, Democrats haven't gotten over the hump yet, but the trend is clear, and in 2020 Texas was one of Trump's closest wins (second closest quoting from memory).
Remember this is a state that went for Michael Dukakis and Mitt Romney as well, two of the most unlikely fellows to carry a state like West Virginia.
So what happened between 1988 and 2000 to where West Virginia shifted from reliably Blue to reliably Red? Certainly the decline of the mining industry over that and the decline of the United Mine Workers Union affected party affiliations. But there's something else, something Matty Ygelsias pointed out recently. If a party and its candidated are perceived to be hostile to a state's primary industry, even if that industry is in decline, then voters in that state aren't going to vote for that party or its candidates. Bill Clinton carried West Virginia twice but Al Gore did not. Why? Because voters' perceptions of Gore and his emphasis on the environment were perceived by West Virginia voters as being hostile to them. Hard to see you carrying West Virginia if you are anti-coal. Even if the mines are pretty much mostly shut down now, an industry like coal which defined the state for so many years still carries powerful cultural resonance, not just with former and retired miners but even with those voters who live in the state and have never have set foot in a mine. And there's still a lot of the energy industry in West Virginia that's not coal but natural gas and petro-chemicals along with coal reclamation which again, is going make it hard for a Democrat talking about climate change to get a hearing in the state.
It's interesting in that election of 2000 Gore also lost Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas, Missouri all states Clinton carried in '92 and '96. Why? Not only did Gore offend with his envrionmental stands but this was also the era of the tobacco company settlements which certainly didn't help the industry largely based in these states. Yet Gore often bragged about cutting tobacco on his daddy's farm in Tennessee. For a candidate often tagged as two-faced, this didn't exactly help his imgae. Joe Klein complained in his book Politics Lost Gore's handlers never let him open up and discuss his ideas about the environment which hurt and I believe that's true. But it's also true that they were reluctant to do so because they knew such talk would hurt him in those aforementioned states. As it turned out, not just mere words but also reputation and brand were just as important too in marking a candidate and party for the voters and that's still true today.
So what explains why West Virginia (and all these other states) went from Romney to Trump? Because when your state's main industry is in decline or dying and only one candidate speaks out or has an idea, even crazy ideas on how to fix things, you're buying into that candidate regardless.