Even bigger... I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and find a reason other than race that that happened.
Race is probably the wrong way of looking at it. A certain strange insular
Blue Remembered Hills-ish xenophobia is closer to the mark, I think. That, and the fact that no obvious reason (beyond ancestral loyalties) to prefer the Democratic candidate to the Republican this time round; class was not part of Obama's appeal at all. Take that out of the picture, and all you have are cultural factors.
It's the
combination of those two things that produced results like this. And facts like the following;
Turnout of registered voters in Floyd was just 50%. In some Eastern Kentucky counties it fell below (sometimes well below) that.
