Deer Lodge/Silver Bow counties, Montana

[FloridaRepublican]

Why are the two so Democratic/liberal? And why so consistently so? It fascinates me.

[LastVoter]

Miners unions.

[Alcon]

Fallen mining towns (Anaconda and Butte, respectively.)  Catholic working-class roots.  Not particularly culturally conservative or religious considering their demographics.  Doesn't really have enough resource extraction work left over to have a particularly strong anti-environmentalist streak, especially by Montana standards.  Ancestral Democraticness has obviously eroded almost everywhere among working-class, non-urban whites, but the erosion in Butte has been pretty moderate because there hasn't been much reason for it not to be.

[minionofmidas]

Doesn't really have enough resource extraction work left over to have a particularly strong anti-environmentalist streak, especially by Montana standards. 

And as to the matter of the local environment and what the now largely defunct mining industry has done to it...