Why didn't the Willie Horton ad help Bush 41 in West Virginia?

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

I figured this question deserved its own thread.

Asking the experts of this state here.

[Keep cool-idge]

I figured this question deserved its own thread.

Asking the experts of this state here.

It did it’s just that in order to win West Virginia from 1932-2000 a republican had to win by 10+ points. Bush did better then most republicans there.

[America's Sweetheart ❤/𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖞 𝖂𝖆𝖗𝖗𝖎𝖔𝖗]

What if it did?

Dukakis's ~5% win certainly wasn't overwhelming, and many past Democrats did substantially better than this.

[Keep cool-idge]

What if it did?

Dukakis's ~5% win certainly wasn't overwhelming, and many past Democrats did substantially better than this.

[IceSpear]

What if it did?

Dukakis's ~5% win certainly wasn't overwhelming, and many past Democrats did substantially better than this.

[TDAS04]

What if it did?

Dukakis's ~5% win certainly wasn't overwhelming, and many past Democrats did substantially better than this.

Actually, Dukakis’s performance in West Virginia was pretty good.  It trended Democratic in 1988 and then it trended away from the Democrats when the candidate was that “Arkansas redneck”.

[Stranger in a strange land]

The politics of race and crime were different back then. In the 80s:

- Racial resentment of the type that the Willie Horton ad appealed to was more prevalent among suburban whites who had fled the urban neighborhoods they had grown up in as blacks moved in during the great migration, rather than among rural whites, many of whom had benefitted from this trend in the form of more jobs. This is a big part of the reason why NJ and CA were Republican states in that period, while many poor white rural areas continued to vote Dem.  
- Crime rates in urban areas were MUCH higher than they are now (it was near the height of the crack epidemic), and crime rates in rural areas were lower because they had yet to be hit by de-industrialization and the meth and opioid epidemics

Also, the usual caveats about WV being more structually Democratic back then due to the UMW, the mines still being open, and the New Deal Generation still being around obviously apply.

[darklordoftech]

There wasn't much crime in West Virginia.

[mianfei]

The politics of race and crime were different back then. In the 80s:

- Racial resentment of the type that the Willie Horton ad appealed to was more prevalent among suburban whites who had fled the urban neighborhoods they had grown up in as blacks moved in during the great migration, rather than among rural whites, many of whom had benefitted from this trend in the form of more jobs. This is a big part of the reason why NJ and CA were Republican states in that period, while many poor white rural areas continued to vote Dem.  
- Crime rates in urban areas were MUCH higher than they are now (it was near the height of the crack epidemic), and crime rates in rural areas were lower because they had yet to be hit by de-industrialization and the meth and opioid epidemics

Also, the usual caveats about WV being more structually Democratic back then due to the UMW, the mines still being open, and the New Deal Generation still being around obviously apply.

Excellent point – one that even surprises me!

My brother – who studied in Oklahoma during 2013 and 2014 – said that massive racial resentment is why the Southern Plains, richer than Appalachia proper but socially similarly ultraconservative, votes Republican by ten-, twenty- and increasingly thirty-to-one margins.

It’s entirely logical that if racial resentment exists among rich rural white southerners like those in the Texas Panhandle, it should be much stronger amongst poor ones. Thus, the failure of Hilary Clinton to reach thirty percent in any rural white southern county is unsurprising, although in the late twentieth century even badly beaten Democratic candidates carried hundreds of these counties, and almost whitewashed George McGovern still won sixteen of them.

To be added is that many of the hotbed social issues that have produced seemingly inviolable Republican loyalty amongst rural white southerners were absent then. Gun control, which was of no significance until the 1990s but has become a litmus test since, and to a lesser extent homosexuality, which was an issue but relatively minor rather than a litmus test, should be considered.

[OSR stands with Israel]

What if it did?

Dukakis's ~5% win certainly wasn't overwhelming, and many past Democrats did substantially better than this.

Actually, Dukakis’s performance in West Virginia was pretty good.  It trended Democratic in 1988 and then it trended away from the Democrats when the candidate was that “Arkansas redneck”.

Dukakis only won his home state by single digits too , and he won WV by a larger margin than NY.

[mianfei]

There wasn't much crime in West Virginia.

I had a look at on old almanac I bought as a child which dates almost exactly from the time of the 1988 election, and I found out that West Virginia had in 1987 from when the almanac’s data were compiled one of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation:

Rank	State	Violent crimes per 100,000 people
#48	West Virginia	137.3
#49	Vermont	136.5
#50	South Dakota	119.7
#51	North Dakota	56.8

Thus, it’s not surprising that West Virginia was not vulnerable to Republican advertisements regarding race and crime – they had no experience of the dangers of black crime. Two of three states with lower violent crime rates actually show similar Democratic trends. The 1988 election in Vermont was the transitional election from GOP past to Democratic future as Dukakis became only the second Democrat to win Addison and Windham Counties, and South Dakota, which has voted for fewer Democratic candidates than any other state, actually voted marginally more Democratic than the nation at-large (though this was due to a bad drought and farm crisis and had nothing to do with resistance to the Wiilie Horton advertisement).