What explains the sharp partisan divide between SE KY and S WV?

Question

Southeast Kentucky (the portion of the U.S. state) is always deep Republican and Southern West Virginia (the adjacent portion of a different U.S. state) is deep Democratic (at least until recently) with very little of a transition. What about the historical or social circumstances explains this?

Answer 1

Why Did West Virginia Remain Democratic Leaning Longer?

West Virginia together with Wyoming are the two states in which the coal mining industry has historically been the most dominant part of the state's economy.

West Virginia's Democratic affiliation, prior to the comparatively recent realignment of the Democratic and Republican parties, was attributable to the fact that the state was dominated by coal mining which was heavily unionized. A large share of the people in Southern West Virginia were unionized coal miners until quite recently.

Historically, union members, especially blue collar industrial and mining union members, tended to favor the Democratic Party and were one of the Democratic Party's core constituencies, although blue collar union members had started to become swing voters as far back as the "Reagan Democrats" in the 1980s (a swing that was partially facilitated by the fact that President Reagan got started in politics as the president of an actor's union).

Most people in this region of West Virginia eventually realigned from the Democratic party to the Republican party. It was one of the most pro-Trump states in the nation in the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections. This transition happened when many unionized blue collar workers nationwide made this party switch.

At least since the Trump era, and probably earlier, both Kentucky and West Virginia have been strong "red" states that mostly support Republican candidates in national elections and the partisan divide has basically vanished. Any residual lag in voter registration is probably due to former Democratic blue collar miners who now vote a Republican party ticket not getting around to changing their voter registration forms.

The Democrats who rose to prominence in a different pre-realignment era, like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, moreover, were in the socially conservative but economically populist Southern Democratic wing of the Democratic party during the roughly decade long period in the 1970s and 1980s, partisan realignment got started in earnest. In that time frame, the U.S. Congress had a basically three party system of Republicans, Northern Democrats, and Southern Democrats. Party labels weren't very important in intrastate politics in West Virginia, and it took time for their local Democratic party political elite to align itself with the more liberal national Democratic Party or to switch parties to the GOP out of alienation with that liberal national Democratic Party.

The other key factor in this transition was that the coal industry more or less collapsed, because environmental regulations favored other energy sources over coal, dramatically reducing the number of unionized coal workers in the state. As one media source recounts in an October 30, 2023 article:

tens of thousands of coal miners . . . left the industry in the last decade amid declining profits and stricter regulations because of the industry’s major contribution to climate change.

And, in general, private sector unionization had hit rock bottom as a percentage of the private sector labor force, when this transition finally reached West Virginia.

Why Did Kentucky Become Republican Sooner?

Southeast Kentucky did not have a history of widespread union membership because its coal resources are very modest by comparison to West Virginia and it never really had much of a manufacturing or mining economy. For a long time, its economy was mostly based upon small scale subsistence farming supplemented by whiskey production and raising horses for racing. So, Kentucky's non-unionized blue collar work force transitioned to the Republican party sooner than West Virginia's initially heavily unionized blue collar work force did.

Deeper History

Leading up to and in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, back when the Republican party was a mostly Northern, more liberal, anti-slavery party, and the Democratic party was a mostly Souther, more conservative, pro-slavery party, West Virginia was the most Republican part of Virginia and broke away from Virginia during the U.S. Civil War as a result.

In contrast, Kentucky was a border state during the U.S. Civil War. Eastern Kentucky, in Appalachia where farming conditions did not support plantation style slavery based farming, leaned Republican, and Western and Northern Kentucky, which engaged with traders working their up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from the deep South, was Democratic leaning and was more pro-slavery.

As noted above, the emergence and unionization of the coal mining industry in the post-Civil War period was one factor that lead to Democratic Party strength there. In the Great Depression, the Democratic Party became dominant almost everywhere except among the affluent in big Northern cities, and that broad bread and butter politics oriented coalition held together into the start of World War II.

But, between the 1860s and the 1940s and 1950s, something else happened as well. In the 1860s Appalachia saw its fate aligned with the non-slave holding North.

But by the 1940s and 1950s, Appalachia had begun to shift culturally in the direction of the non-Appalachian rural South made up of fellow rural and small town people with a heavy farming component, and away from the urban cities of the WWII and post-WWII industrial boom in the United States, and the slavery issue had become irrelevant to them. Southern and Appalachian culture began to merge into a larger "Country Western" culture that included both and the rural West as well, which was united against the industrial, globalist, immigrant filled people of Northern cities. They found themselves united by shared cultures of honor (from independent sources), by their comparative lack of education, and by their rural, insular, immigrant free, primary resources oriented lifestyles and economies.

So, there was underlying convergence between Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia at a cultural level, that only fidelity to union principles in West Virginia was holding back, that eventually collapsed when the unions did.