What rural southern county has the most Democratic WWC? (user search)
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  What rural southern county has the most Democratic WWC? (search mode)
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Author Topic: What rural southern county has the most Democratic WWC?  (Read 1756 times)
Sol
Junior Chimp
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Posts: 8,242
Bosnia and Herzegovina


« on: September 13, 2023, 01:39:32 PM »

Really hard to say without a good source for county level white vote estimates but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was Radford, VA.
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Sol
Junior Chimp
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Posts: 8,242
Bosnia and Herzegovina


« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2023, 02:12:27 PM »
« Edited: September 13, 2023, 02:22:23 PM by Sol »

Wouldn't Asheville be a strong possibility? I know it's pretty educated and a college town, but it has a heavy tourism economy and that often attracts people who are WWC by the non-college educated definition but not in a Trumpy way, service industry workers in general are not especially ones who work as like a bartender at some hipster bar. Also college towns in general often have a bunch of dropouts still hanging around, or people like someone who isn't college educated who married someone who is who then moves there to go to grad school. Granted Asheville isn't rural...but you find people like that in the surrounding areas too, like see the area around Madison, WI.

Yeah Asheville has a decent number and there are some in the surrounding counties, though many have been priced out. The complicated thing here is determining what percentage of Democratic votes are "WWC;" in Asheville and a lot of the surrounding counties it's going be a bigger drop than in other parts of Western NC.

You have a similar issue in Watauga too though the drop off is going to be less steep, nevertheless it's my guess for the answer for NC at least. App State is the kind of place where a lot of the students are poor or lower middle class kids from Western NC -- it's not monied as a state flagship like UNC. You see this reflected in election results, where Watauga was Sanders' best county twice and where some precincts voted over 90% for him against Clinton.

Asheville is only sort of a college town fyi, even though it votes like one. UNC-Asheville is a tiny liberal arts college with a fairly light impact on the city; AVL's leftwing counterculture is more closely related to the area's rich cultural history.
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Sol
Junior Chimp
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Posts: 8,242
Bosnia and Herzegovina


« Reply #2 on: September 14, 2023, 08:09:34 AM »


For this county, are you only counting non-Hispanic whites, or are you including Hispanics who consider themselves white instead of people of color?
Tejanos are mostly white, yes. Their voting patterns are really less like CA/AZ Hispanics and more like a holdout of Southern Democratic machine politics of the kind that only really died out at a state level in 2010. For a similar demographic group that mostly held the line for Biden in 2020 and can correctly be seen as both Hispanic and "WWC", look to New Mexico's and Colorado's Hispanos.

Excluding them, it's probably North Carolina as earlier stated, both in the western part of the state and to a lesser extent in parts of the Outer Banks. Dare County, where the Wright Brothers first flew, is an interesting case--overwhelmingly white and fairly Republican overall, but was the only county outside the Research Triangle, Mecklenburg, Buncombe, and Watauga to not vote to ban same-sex marriage in 2012; its fickleness probably can be attributed to being entirely reliant on tourism.

Yeah but not sure if it's fair to characterize the Democratic vote in the Outer Banks as "WWC" though. Dare's the kind of place where the Democratic base is mostly wealthy beachdwellers.
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Sol
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 8,242
Bosnia and Herzegovina


« Reply #3 on: September 19, 2023, 05:24:28 PM »


Perhaps Transylvania County, NC. 87% non-Hispanic white and 41% Biden, not really a college county (unlike neighboring Jackson County) as Brevard College is tiny, and too far from Asheville to be in its halo.

FWIW Transylvania is also the kind of place which gets a fair amount of outside settlement and investment, even if it isn't perfectly within Asheville's sphere of influence. Democrats here are also probably disproportionately affluenter outside transplants.
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