Describe Your County

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Franklin County, Massachusetts is a mostly rural county in the northwestern part of the Commonwealth, bordered by Berkshire County to the west, Hampshire County to the south, Worcester County to the east, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north, and bisected north to south by the Connecticut River and Interstate 91. It is hilly and forested in the east and west, with well-settled flatlands along the Connecticut and villages along the Deerfield and Millers Rivers, the Connecticut's main western and eastern tributaries in the area, respectively.

The shire town is Greenfield, on the west bank of the Connecticut just above the confluence with the Deerfield. Greenfield has a (quite good) community college, a Baystate hospital, a (small) symphony orchestra, and a primarily Federal and Victorian historic district downtown. Greenfield is home to about a quarter of the county's seventy-one thousand people, and has good road and...existent...bus links to the rest of the region.

Greenfield lies at the junction of the north-south arteries of Interstate 91 and US Route 5 and the east-west artery of Massachusetts Route 2. The part of Route 2 west of Greenfield, which is called the Mohawk Trail, passes through such villages as Shelburne Falls, Charlemont, and Zoar on its way up and over the Berkshire Hills, following the course of the Deerfield River until a major bend in the latter about fifteen miles west of Greenfield. This area is woodsy and a little artsy. The part of Route 2 east of Greenfield is called the French King Highway and passes through Erving and Orange on its way to Athol and the other struggling towns of north-central Massachusetts. This area is also woodsy, but also industrial (or postindustrial) and not so artsy. The towns immediately surrounding Greenfield and to its north and south in the river valley are for the most part farmland, although some of them are becoming exurbanized, especially in the south abutting Hampshire County, home as it is to Northampton and Amherst. The main agricultural products are dairy, fruit (especially apples), and formerly tobacco. The main industries are (or were) paper manufacturing and to some extent electrical generation. Currently the largest employer in the county is Yankee Candle, which is based in the town of Deerfield, south of Greenfield.

Franklin County is part of the Springfield Metropolitan Statistical Area and itself composes the Greenfield Micropolitan Statistical Area. It has lacked government functions since 1997, although the towns in the region are for the most part members of the Franklin Council of Governments, which has taken over some of the former county's functions. It has a (paltry) Regional Transit Authority. Almost every part of Franklin County is strongly Democratic, it having undergone the same political transformation in the late twentieth century as the rest of Western Massachusetts and Vermont. Demographically, Franklin County is 95% white. The dominant ancestries are British Isles, Polish, and French-Canadian. It’s more diverse than it used to be, but not by much. Even Greenfield is pretty overwhelmingly white.

Last but sadly not least, Interstate 91 between the Springfield area and Vermont forms the ‘Iron Pipeline’, whereby drugs are smuggled into Vermont and guns are smuggled into Massachusetts. It’s a serious, serious problem.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Almost every part of Franklin County is strongly Democratic, it having undergone the same political transformation in the late twentieth century as the rest of Western Massachusetts and Vermont.

The swing towards Democrats in this region is fascinating. Crazy to look at past election results (of both states) compared to now. I've seen that it was due to the in migration of liberals from New York? And does the extreme conservative nature of the Republicans play into that as well?

Yes and yes. First a more left-wing population base started migrating in from New York and Boston, then the original population base became more left-wing as well both because of social influence from their new neighbors and from how far right the Republicans moved.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Almost every part of Franklin County is strongly Democratic, it having undergone the same political transformation in the late twentieth century as the rest of Western Massachusetts and Vermont.

The swing towards Democrats in this region is fascinating. Crazy to look at past election results (of both states) compared to now. I've seen that it was due to the in migration of liberals from New York? And does the extreme conservative nature of the Republicans play into that as well?

Yes and yes. First a more left-wing population base started migrating in from New York and Boston, then the original population base became more left-wing as well both because of social influence from their new neighbors and from how far right the Republicans moved.

I was always under the impression that, while a lot of NY/Boston folks started vacationing in western MA/VT, the absolute number of people that moved there were actually pretty small, certainly too small to move the partisan needle like it's been moved.  Though the growth of that tourism certainly plays a part as well in terms of changing the attitudes and incentives of the locals.

The number of transplants since the sixties and seventies could, overall, be characterized as moderate, in that it's neither as large as people who like to credit the region's political transformation solely to their presence present it as nor as small as people who like to credit the region's political transformation solely to entirely local changes or the parties changing their platforms present it as. The idea that people moving from New York and Boston did and to an extent still do provide a left-leaning activist base but that the actual shift in voting patterns occurred primarily because of changing local attitudes in part engendered by increased tourism strikes me as closest to what's really happened in this part of the country over the past half-century. (Of course, once the politics of the area did change, it became even more attractive as a relocation or vacation destination for a lot of people.)

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That's certainly possible, but I'm less aware of it if so. If it happened or is happening, it's not talked about as much.