Opinion of Jackson County, Kentucky

[Rob]

A remote mountain backwater nestled among the Cumberlands of eastern Kentucky, Jackson counts 13,495 people, 99.2 percent white, 0.05 percent black, living in "hollers" or in not-so-picturesque little towns like Sand Gap and McKee. Per capita income is $10,711, and 30 percent of the total population is below the poverty line. The area is so miserably poor that President Clinton made a stop there during his late-90s "poverty tour," and the proud folk of Jackson responded by giving Al Gore 14 percent of the vote in 2000. (These rugged individualists don't mind getting their welfare checks, though.)

Which leads me to the reason I made this poll: Jackson County has been the most consistently Republican place in the nation since the Civil War, when it was bedrock Union territory. Every Republican presidential candidate since 1864 has won overwhelmingly, with the "doesn't count" exception of 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt won and Taft finished a strong second-place. 

One sample of historical GOP percentages will get the point across, I think...

1920: 94%
1924: 92%
1928: 97%
1932: 84%
1936: 88%
1940: 89%

Barack Obama got 13.7 percent of the vote in the primary and 14.2 percent in the general, which was not unexpected, given that a majority of Jackson folk actually voted to uphold school segregation in a 1990s referendum.

What is your opinion of this place?

[Franzl]

my opinion can't accurately be described under the FF/HP model (or positive or negative)

It's quite a bit more complicated than that.

[Boris]

given that a majority of Jackson folk actually voted to uphold school segregation in a 1990s referendum.

do we have a map of this referendum?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

given that a majority of Jackson folk actually voted to uphold school segregation in a 1990s referendum.

do we have a map of this referendum?

[Franzl]

although I will admit that's pretty embarrassing

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I like the existence of odd little places, even if I might not like them so much in other respects. FF.

given that a majority of Jackson folk actually voted to uphold school segregation in a 1990s referendum.

do we have a map of this referendum?

All the red counties are traditional remote-GOP enclaves.

[Torie]

I have been to Jackson County twice, once in 1970, and once about 10 years ago. In 1970 Jackson County was not yet a part of the market economy really, and almost literally the land of "Deliverance," with yes, young men hanging around with odd shaped faces and vacant eyes, that suggested to me a severe case of inbreeding. I stopped at the diner in the County seat (the only "restaurant" in the county).  The landscape along the road from Lexington into Jackson County took a dramatic and sudden turn when it hit the mountains and left the blue grass country. The road in the mountains was poorly graded, and twisty, with the forest deep and packed - it was spooky really - I almost feared that some mishap would occur as I was waylaid by some insane moonshiner or whatever.

The folks were very friendly. (Tourists were a rarity back then, so I was kind of a novelty (there, were among other things to go along with the bad roads and lack of a market economy,  no motels), which no doubt had something to do with the local's willingness, and indeed sometimes eagerness, to chat with me.) They knew that their county had voted the highest percentage in the United States for Nixon in 1960 over Kennedy, but did not know that their county had the lowest per capita income in the United States at the time. The main concern of the folks in the diner was the new Catholic Church that had recently been constructed. Satan has arrived to lure the denizens over to the dark side!  Their attitude about the Catholic Church I guess depressed Kennedy's percentage a few points lower than it might otherwise had been. In any event, the folks were very friendly with this particular Yankee with a funny accent, who had made a special trip to the county from Chicago for the precise reason of the irony of its poverty and Republicanism. I wanted to see the place for myself.

By  2000 or so, the time of my second visit,  it was all gone. Somewhere, had become just another everywhere and thus nowhere, with fast food franchises. The road in was now four lanes. The Deliverance kids were gone, or kept behind closed doors or something. The market economy had at last arrived.

It was a special experience for me visiting Jackson County in 1070. I am so glad that I did it. Being a hard core political junkie at a young age can have its advantages, no matter what your parents may say to the contrary.

And now you "know" more about Jackson County than you probably ever wanted to.

Addendum: By the way, the big political divide in the mountain counties in Eastern and Southeastern Kentucky (all of which were strongly pro Union in the Civil War), as you all probably know, is between those that had coal mining and those that didn't. Jackson County had no mines, so no miners union, and no, or almost no, Democrats.

Addendum Deux: Given my visit, I have a special fondness for the place, warts and all, and gave it a favorable vote for that reason. It's a sentimental journey for me.

[tmthforu94]

Positive (R)
It's not 100% cool that most are for segregation, but it's nice to see a place where conservative values are still popular. (And segregation is not a conservative value)

[Rob]

And now you "know" more about Jackson County than you probably ever wanted to.

Dude, if you wrote a full-length book about the place I would buy it. I would love to visit Jackson some day, although I'd probably be "worried" about lurking cannibal hillbillies.

re: attitudes toward Catholicism, the numbers show progress! The first Papist to run for the White House got less than 3 percent of the vote in 1928; the next one got less than 10 percent in 1960; and the last one polled an impressive 14 percent in 2004! Perhaps around 2040, a Catholic Democrat could take as much as 20 percent of the area's vote.

(Now I'm wondering what Phil thinks of the place)

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Jim Bunning, a Catholic, got over 70% in it both times he ran.

[Rob]

but he is a Republican (and ran against a limp-wristed Iraqi in 2004, to boot). I humbly submit that a better measure of local tolerance can be found in the percentages of those who belong to two detested minority organizations, the Roman Catholic Church and the Democratic Party.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Well my point is moreso that the latter of those has to more to do with the results than the former.

[Associate Justice PiT]

Jim Bunning, a Catholic, got over 70% in it both times he ran.

     If he were non-Catholic he probably would have polled almost 90%.

[Rob]

given that a majority of Jackson folk actually voted to uphold school segregation in a 1990s referendum.

... which brings to mind another interesting bit of data. Elliott County- a hellishly poor and isolated (and virtually all-white) mountainous area in eastern Kentucky- is not all that far from Jackson and is demographically quite similar. The anti-segregation vote did pass there, albeit with a not-too-impressive 56.5 percent. That's the setup. In 2008, this historically Democratic county went on to give Barack Obama his best victory in the state at 61 percent! And after he took a pathetic 7.1 percent in the primary.

In other words, a significant number of people in Elliott don't want their kids to go to school with black children but are perfectly fine with a black man as President. That's what I call partisanship. I think a black Republican presidential candidate would struggle to hit 15 percent there...

[memphis]

Two questions:
Why did they bother holding a referendum on segregation in the 1990s?
Why would people in an all-white county give two craps about segregation?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Two questions:
Why did they bother holding a referendum on segregation in the 1990s?
Why would people in an all-white county give two craps about segregation?

1-To clean up the state constitution basically. The referendum was to remove references to seperate schools for "white" and "colored" children. It also banned poll taxes which prior it was permitted to be levied by local governments. Of course both segregated schools and poll taxes had been long banned by federal law by then.

2-Beats me.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They probably don't care about it, much. But I think votes like that just show up a Hartlepool Monkey tendency.

[Rob]

Why would people in an all-white county give two craps about segregation?

Jackson was (and, essentially, still is) a "sundown county," one of hundreds scattered throughout the nation. No place remains 0.05 percent black by accident- even granted that slavery never really took hold in the mountain country, and the utter lack of opportunity that persists today, there "should" be more blacks than that.

James Loewen has suggested that the southern upcountry was "converted" to a kind of neo-Confederate ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; in other words, during the "nadir" of American race relations. Even many of those communities that had opposed secession and the Confederacy, and continued to vote Republican, expelled the few local blacks and became proud upholders of Dixie-style white supremacy.

That vote was just a reflection of this sad reality. Just another way to say "ns not welcome."

[minionofmidas]

Jim Bunning, a Catholic, got over 70% in it both times he ran.

     If he were non-Catholic he probably would have polled almost 90%.

Probably, yeah.

Anyways, I voted positive for much the same reasons as Al did.

Why would people in an all-white county give two craps about segregation?

They probably thought that abolishing segregation would lead to a black influx. And everybody knows that Blacks are communist papist Democrats.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Jim Bunning, a Catholic, got over 70% in it both times he ran.

     If he were non-Catholic he probably would have polled almost 90%.

Probably, yeah.

Well Ernie Fletcher never got near that, or Mitch McConnell either, even in 2002 when he landslided statewide, he still got "only" 83%, interestingly.

What I find really odd about 2002 is that while McConnell's joke opponent easily won that region that swung horribly against Obama (and got over 60% in Floyd and Knott), yet McConnell also won some Obama counties, and did better than McCain in Elliott. I'm not sure what that shows exactly, but interesting.

[minionofmidas]

Jim Bunning, a Catholic, got over 70% in it both times he ran.

     If he were non-Catholic he probably would have polled almost 90%.

Probably, yeah.

Well Ernie Fletcher never got near that, or Mitch McConnell either, even in 2002 when he landslided statewide, he still got "only" 83%, interestingly.

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It shows that Kentucky politics can be weird and prone to odd regional swings at times.

Which we knew already. But which probably shows something about the state.