> Is it really? Hasn't the (always very poor) hill country voted
> heavily for the anti-poor party ever since the welfare state began?
> They're against central government. And Big Government party is
> always, by definition, the poor people party.
Didn't West Virginia vote Democrat religiously since the 1930's? And in the civil war era, these areas were strongly Republican, I believe, which was the party of centralizing government (though not, of course, of the welfare state). I can see how yokels might be "traditionally" suspicious of central government, but it seems like there's a common pattern in which at some point in history something changes to make these areas more modern - e.g., reactionary montagnard farmers become proletarianized, find work in mines, get swept up in militant miners' unions, and vote Left unto the generations.
SA