I’m of the belief that part of the reason West Virginia shifted so quickly from solid D to solid R is that old-school New Deal Democrats who remembered the Great Depression well and were brought into the Democratic fold thanks to FDR started dying off in large numbers. The same effect can reasonably be presumed to have occurred in other states to varying degrees, but West Virginia is an interesting case study because its demographics have remained so static yet its politics have shifted so dramatically. Indeed West Virginia is one of the only states where younger voters are more Republican than older voters, suggesting that this generational legacy was a substantial factor there for years.
I’m also of the belief that the country in general has declined sharply since the Greatest Generation (mostly) died out and the Baby Boomers took the reins, but that’s just my opinion.
Basically, the once politically-powerful United Mine Workers that could deliver miner votes to the Democrats has faded. Mines are often worked out, and the children of miners are lucky to get work in Wal*Mart.
The miners always had an adversarial relationship with the coal barons, but now the coal barons hold all the power in a declining industry. When getting a job becomes far more of a question matters far more than does getting more than starvation-level wages on it, political life tends to go to the Right.
Note well that West Virginia Democrats failed to invest in roads, education, environmental protection, and public health. West Virginia roads are so bad that the state legislature has contemplated putting tolls on the two-lane blacktops between towns... Mining paid well to those who had jobs in the mines, and miners needed little formal education. To get ahead in America one now needs more than a high-school diploma. Education at the K-12 level is bad, and West Virginia has no good colleges or universities. Public health? The state has lots of smokers... and a big opioid and meth problem.
West Virginia is not a strong agricultural state, and the only natural resource that I could imagine the state exploiting is forestry, which uses much the same sorts of workers as does mining.
Democrats get some of the blame for the current mess that West Virginia is in. The problem is that Republicans have solved nothing.
