Janet Lynn Stumbo leaned on her cane and surveyed the two dozen or so voters who had convened in a small Appalachian town to meet with the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.
A former Kentucky Supreme Court justice, the 70-year-old Stumbo said the event was “the biggest Democratic gathering I have ever seen in Johnson County,” an enclave where Republican Donald Trump got 85% of the presidential vote last November.
Paintsville, the county seat, was the latest stop on the state party’s “Rural Listening Tour,” a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally.
“The gut check is we’d stopped having these conversations” in white rural America, said Colmon Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic chair. “Folks didn’t give up on the Democratic Party. We stopped doing the things that we knew we needed to do.”
It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts outright to win more elections. More realistically, it’s a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024 and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.
While I wish them luck, haven’t we already proven this a no-win situation? Appalachia is saddled with many disadvantages such there is no clear way out. There is no fast answer. There is no understandable solution. There is only time, whittling away in small bits where you can, and yes it includes a lot of social welfare.
To emphasize, it clearly doesn’t include coal. Even if there were a coal renaissance, it would create very few jobs, distribute very little wealth. There’s like a century long automation trend that made those jobs disappear long before coal use declined
But voters prove over and over they’re not willing to hear that, not willing to even try the hard answer, not vote for their own best interests. I empathize with the desperation that leads you to vote against your own best interests, the desperation opening you to manipulation, the desperation in voting for any one who confidently claim an easy answer. But they have been consistently making it worse for themselves. How can you help them see they’ve been digging their own graves? How can we help them turn it around to start building rather than continuing to sink?