Kentucky in 2000 and 2004

[old timey villain]

I was just looking at those maps earlier and thought the same thing. I always figured that eastern Kentucky as a whole was pretty homogenous. The 2004 swing shows that Southeastern Kentucky and Northeastern Kentucky are different politically, due to opposite swings.

It looks like SE Kentucky is the biggest coal producing area in the state, so the swing centered around Harlan County could have just been a continuing trend towards the Republican party among coal producing areas. Interestingly enough, SE Kentucky swung heavily towards the Democratic nominee in the 2003 Governor's race a year earlier, compared to the 1999 race when it was the only region of the state that voted for the losing Republican candidate. So the region swung D at the state level but swung R at the presidential level in a period roughly from 2000 to 2004.

Northeast Kentucky doesn't seem to be quite as reliant on coal, so maybe the voters there were worried about different issues? Also, it's close to Ohio so maybe there was some spillover from Kerry ads up there. The region also swung hard towards Bush in 2000 so perhaps it was a correction of sorts. Without coal as the primary factor, the region didn't have much of a reason to swing so hard to the Republicans in 2004. I mean, NE  Kentucky voted for Dukakis.  I've been researching this for half an hour and I really have no definite answer. Sorry.

Also, anybody know why south Central Kentucky is so Republican?