Why have Dems won Owsley County, KY (never Dem for President) in 5 of the last 12 KY-GOV races?
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  Why have Dems won Owsley County, KY (never Dem for President) in 5 of the last 12 KY-GOV races?
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Author Topic: Why have Dems won Owsley County, KY (never Dem for President) in 5 of the last 12 KY-GOV races?  (Read 659 times)
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« on: February 02, 2023, 05:37:33 AM »


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« Reply #1 on: February 02, 2023, 01:06:47 PM »

Democrats have won a lot of Kentucky gubernatorial elections in landslides, so every county in the state has voted Democratic a number of times in the last half-century regardless of how it votes at the presidential level. Four of the elections referenced in the title of this thread were Democratic landslides, and in two of the landslides the Democrat won Owsley County by fewer than ten votes. The only remotely close election where the county voted Democratic was 1995.
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« Reply #2 on: February 02, 2023, 01:30:01 PM »

Democrats have won a lot of Kentucky gubernatorial elections in landslides, so every county in the state has voted Democratic a number of times in the last half-century regardless of how it votes at the presidential level.

It seems like the only county that has voted GOP in every Kentucky gubernatorial race in that timeframe (and indeed, since the Civil War) is Jackson County, perhaps the most rock-ribbed Unionist county of them all. As far as I can tell, the only time it has ever voted Dem in a contested statewide race was when Wendell Ford swept every county in the 1986 Senate race.
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Alben Barkley
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« Reply #3 on: February 03, 2023, 01:10:10 AM »

In Kentucky perhaps more than most states, state elections do not equal federal elections. At all.

You see this also in Maryland, Massachusetts, even Vermont. Literally the three most Democratic states on the presidential level in 2020, all of which have overwhelmingly popular Republican governors. (And Kentucky has the most popular Democratic governor in the country!)

You really can't just single out a random Kentucky county and say "Hey, it's staunchly Republican in presidential races, yet it voted for Democrats in a handful of gubernatorial races where the issues, coalitions, candidates, implications, etc. were all wildly different! How curious!" This state has a long history of many people crossing party lines to vote differently in state vs. federal elections, and that legacy lives on even today. Beshear couldn't have won without the votes of some Eastern Kentucky coal counties which gave Trump huge margins and most of which long ago switched to voting Republican on the federal/presidential level. Yet while he lost Owsley County, it actually voted slightly left of Harlan County, which used to be a staunchly Democratic county which not only voted for Beshear's dad, but even voted for Walter Mondale in 1984!

Point is things have changed, and not uniformly, and they NEVER have corresponded that well between presidential and gubernatorial elections anyway. Owsley County no doubt voted for Paul Patton, for example, thinking he was the better candidate for local issues... even as Harlan County voted Republican in Patton's 1999 landslide at the same time, only to turn around and vote for Al Gore the next year while he was blown out in Owsley County!

Maybe Kentucky's a weird state in this way, but I don't really think so. I think it just goes to show that you can't treat people as monoliths who can be calculated to definitely vote a certain way based on just any single factor. (As much as certain Montana residents, formerly of Indiana, might like to believe so.) You have to take into account all the factors. Not just a county's presidential voting history or the "partisan lean" crudely determined from that. People turn out to vote for different reasons in different races, and sometimes even split their tickets dramatically between races even in the same election year, as we saw for example happen last year in Georgia of all places, a supposedly "inelastic" state more racially polarized than Kentucky!

Again, to the great inconvenience and annoyance of certain Hoosiers-turned-Montanans, ticket splitting and cross-party voting is alive and well despite all the polarization in the nation, and you can't just presume that how a state or county votes at the presidential level will in any way reflect how it will vote in other races without looking at the whole picture. Maybe if certain people had known this all along, or just listened to me when I said it back in 2019, they wouldn't have made complete asses of themselves repeatedly that year and then again, over and over, for the next four years and are doing it again now. But that would require a shred of humility and capacity for introspection, which is sadly lacking in some people.
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