what I find interesting though is why eastern Tennessee hasn't swung dem. I know that sounds preposterous but here is my reasoning: East Tennessee is similar to Vermont in the sense that it is largely mountainous, overwhelmingly white, anti-slavery/pro-union, and opposed to the south. When the south started becoming republican by the 90s, Vermont swung to the dems. What separated an area like VT from East Tennessee, which has state republican?
Also, unlike Vermont, eastern Tennessee didn't experience a huge infusion of Jewish people from Brooklyn, NY (like Bernie Sanders, for instance).
I think of south-central Kentucky as not a particularly traditionally Republican area. For instance, Russellville and Bowling Green were, for a time, Confederate "capitals" of Kentucky. (By the way, Kentucky never had a vote on succession as the legislature was pro-Union and never authorized such a vote.) You have to go further east to Somerset and London to find yourself moving into always Republican southeastern Kentucky. Check out returns from Jackson County, KY; typically >90% GOP. It is true that the coal mining counties of southeast Kentucky did become Democratic in the early 1930s, like Hazard and Pikeville. But much of the area retain their voting patterns that go back to then end of the Civil War, like eastern Tennessee and isolated parts of western NC and western VA.
