On Sun, 29 Nov 2009, SA wrote:
> Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>> Is it really? Hasn't the (always very poor) hill country voted heavily
>> for the anti-poor party ever since the welfare state began?
> Didn't West Virginia vote Democrat religiously since the 1930's?
O come now, Seth. All Southern voting stats before 1964 are nonsense for such a comparison. Otherwise you'll be telling me the South was the most liberal place in the country in the 1950s since only they voted for Adlai Stevenson. Admittedly West Virginia has always been on the dividing line of the south precisely because it is pure hill country that was divided off from its corresponding lowlands. But that just makes the stats even more mixed up.
By welfare state, I mean post 1964, which is also when "great inversion" of the post-Reconstruction compromise was undone and presidential politics began after a century to have some correspondence to local preferences. I suspect this area has had many counties that were this heavily Republican in many presidential elections since then. I don't think it's a new phenomena. But maybe I'm wrong. You got the numbers. Is it only in recent years this is so? They didn't go this heavily for Reagan, whose anti-welfare diatribes were front and center? Or for Nixon, who was actually not bad for the poor, esp. the rural poor?
Michael