Janet Lynn Stumbo leaned on her cane and surveyed the two dozen or so voters who had convened in a small Appalachian town to meet with the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.
A former Kentucky Supreme Court justice, the 70-year-old Stumbo said the event was “the biggest Democratic gathering I have ever seen in Johnson County,” an enclave where Republican Donald Trump got 85% of the presidential vote last November.
Paintsville, the county seat, was the latest stop on the state party’s “Rural Listening Tour,” a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally.
“The gut check is we’d stopped having these conversations” in white rural America, said Colmon Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic chair. “Folks didn’t give up on the Democratic Party. We stopped doing the things that we knew we needed to do.”
It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts outright to win more elections. More realistically, it’s a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024 and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.
So, you have excellent points.
Here si where so much of that falls down:
This is worse in the south, but Appalachia had it too: any federal or external program is seen by the ruling elite as a cash cow that they rightfully deserve, and often they genuinely believe that by taking the money they are protecting their community from being bribed into dependence on outsiders.
That’s an odd rationalization, but it’s what I’ve seen in many rural areas.
What you need is a true grassroots movement, and that article suggested as much, I’m just skeptical because you’re asking them to go against a decent chunk of what they consider heritage, as the Virginia lowlands were the rich tobacco farmers that originally mistreated the Appalachians and lead to their oppositional identity.