No. What is with this forum's obsession with West Virginia? It's an ultra safe Republican state at the the Presidential level and will be for the next several decades at least.
It's not as ultra safe Republican as Vermont was before 1964, having never voted Democrat for President or US Senator.
So was much of Texas and the Deep South, but you don't see people talking about them as much as WV.
Slight tangent here, but whenever you have near one party rule in a region (e.g., the Democrats in the South or Republicans in Vermont), you are going to - almost by necessity - have a wide range of ideologies represented in that party. Despite my distaste for the incredibly lazy historical narrative that the old Southern Democrats were "conservatives" (it amazes me that an intelligent Atlas poster can make that simplistic of a claim), there certainly were more conservative factions and a few very conservative Democrats in the Southern caucus. From my understanding of history, Texas' Democratic Party was much more conservative than other states', especially once the state started to grow in population, become less agrarian and attract transplants (the Democrats in power had to move to the right to stay in power the more Northern Republicans moved in, right?) ... that was never the case in West Virginia. Though its Democrats might seem culturally conservative to the Democratic Party of 2017, it simply wasn't a big deal to the DNC in the '70s, '80s and '90s, making WV right at home with the Democrats and as at home as any other blue state of the time. Despite whatever their views on the environment or gay rights, WV Dems were steadfast supporters of the party's economic agenda, and they were maybe the most liable of any state in the nation to send two Senators to DC who'd vote for Democratic leadership. The registration advantage Democrats enjoy there is still staggering. And, while electing Trump with almost 70% of the vote, WV put a Democrat in the governor's office ... that is why it gets more attention than other Southern states: because WV isn't some state that was ancestrally Democratic and had enough Dixiecrats die off to finally swing to the GOP ... it was a solidly Democratic state as late as the late '90s, and its transformation has been, frankly, astounding. Even if you think it will never, ever flip back, a state that could swing so wildly and so quickly one way could, in theory, do the same back eventually (and is at least much more likely to do so than a state like Alabama that made such a slow switch to the GOP and would likely require a very slow shift back).
This is true. Our Democrats were generally much more conservative than Democrats in most other states. Many of our most extreme Republican politicians are former Democrats, chief among which was Rick Perry. Yes, that Rick Perry supported Al Gore's initial 1988 presidential bid. John Connally defected from the Democratic party during the Nixon days, Phil Gramm became a Republican, our Democratic governor in the 1950s (Alan Shivers) delivered our electoral votes to Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Texas was also one of the first southern states to begin it's shift to the GOP. I'm not sure about the northern expats though. That seems to be a much more recent development. Most of our expats are Californians these days.. half of my own family included.
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