The 10 counties that have ALWAYS voted Republican

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Eastern Kentucky proper was a major coal mining district (one of the most important in the entire United States. What's left of the industry in the area now is a tiny shadow of what used to be there). With the exception of a couple of extremely remote counties it swung over en masse to the Democratic Party during the great United Mineworkers organisation drives in the 1930s. Southeastern Kentucky had a mining element but it was smaller and more casualised; the economy was instead dominated by subsistence agriculture. Unionisation efforts were not successful in the area and its voting patterns remind as solidly Republican as before. I thought this was well known, but apparently not.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What on earth is going on in this thread.

Slavery had nothing to do with anything in the eastern fifth of Kentucky; you couldn't have found a less suitable place for plantation agriculture anywhere in the South (however defined) had you tried; the whole area is part of the Cumberland Plateau. Pre-New Deal voting differences were mostly to do with ancestry; i.e. you found Democrats wherever Virginians had settled and so on. Afterwards it became a matter of class consciousness. Are we clear now?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What on earth is going on in this thread.

Slavery had nothing to do with anything in the eastern fifth of Kentucky; you couldn't have found a less suitable place for plantation agriculture anywhere in the South (however defined) had you tried; the whole area is part of the Cumberland Plateau. Pre-New Deal voting differences were mostly to do with ancestry; i.e. you found Democrats wherever Virginians had settled and so on. Afterwards it became a matter of class consciousness. Are we clear now?

You are a king of simplistic generalizations my friend. And that's coming from me.

Rude.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Democratic regions of Eastern Kentucky are not where slavery was concentrated on that map!

Just imagine, for one moment, someone trying to run a plantation in that area... lol

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Actually the most Democratic areas (post New Deal/UMW) were well away from the Ohio River and up on the Plateau.