In recent years, one question that has attracted me is whether
the Southwest and Appalachia are inherently opposed to one another and always move politically in opposite directions – like New England and the Deep South were said to do between the Civil War and the Bill Clinton Era.
It has always struck me that:
- Alf Landon, a moderate Appalachia/Ozark mountain Republican, in 1936 did terribly badly in southwestern states like California
- Barry Goldwater, a southwestern radical free-market Republican, was demolished like no other Republican in most of Appalachia
- Jimmy Carter, from the Georgia upcountry (secessionist edge of the Appalachian Regional Commission) was decimated in the Southwest because he did not understand their problems with water
- in recent elections, the Democrats have cemented their grip on California, which is not one of their strongest states, as the two most “Appalachian” states, Kentucky and West Virginia, that leaned Democratic in Carter’s elections become two of the most Republican in the nation
As I analyse US election history, I detect a pattern in all of this – that relative gains in the Southwest and Southern California (and perhaps some adjacent areas) always seem to correlate with relative losses in the Appalachian region.
I can see several reason why there might be an inherent opposition between the two regions. One is the contrast between the “big is beautiful” large-scale urban and water development of the Southwest with the small counties and historic “plain white” communities historically associated with Appalachia. Another is that whilst the Southwest has over the past century been on the American frontier and exposed to outside influences more than any other region, Appalachia has been more insulated from such than any other region of the nation.
