>> 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.
But West Virginia isn't the South!!! You're talking as if West Virginia were like Alabama, part of the Solid South. It wasn't. Compare the partisan allegiance of WV senators with the partisan allegiance of Virginia senators from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the New Deal (1877-1933, 45th-72nd Congresses):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_delegations_from_West_Virginia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_delegations_from_Virginia
You can see that West Virginia had a competitive alternating two-party system while Virginia had literally zero Republican senators from 1877 to 1973. From 1933 on, West Virginia tarted tilting heavily to the Democrats - because of the *New Deal*, not because it was part of the South (which it wasn't). Why did West Virginians like the New Deal? I'm no expert on WV politics, but my guess is: (1) the influence of the UMW; and (2) federal transfer payments to WV (i.e., the welfare state).
But Shag is dead on when she points out that Owsley county has voted Republican for decades. And looking at some of the other poor counties on the list, it seems that most of these counties did too. So it turns out that this region of Eastern Kentucky just happens to be very Republican by tradition (in addition to whatever extra conservative shift might have happened in recent decades.)
One interesting exception, though, is Harlan County. In the 1976 election (which I think is the best point of comparison because it was close and it precedes Reagan), Harlan gave Carter 61% of the two-party vote; in 2008 it gave McCain 72% of the vote. That's a huge swing. Knowing zilch about Harlan County other than its tradition of labor militancy among coal miners, I would guess the decline of the UMW would have a lot to do with it.
SA