After Andy Beshear’s upset win over Matt Bevin in my home state of Kentucky’s 2019 gubernatorial race (which I wrote about then in History News Network), some pundits were quick to dismiss his upset victory as little more than an aberration. Others attempted to explain it away as a natural consequence of an incompetent or unpopular incumbent, or as a columnist for Louisville’s Courier-Journal claimed, because Bevin was just a “jerk.”
Ouch, lol, but since when did being unlikable become a detriment within a political party where spitefulness and belligerence have come to be worn like badges of honor by so many?
At the same time, commentators with more liberal leanings saw in Beshear’s victory a sign of the GOP’s vulnerability heading into the 2020 election. The outcome of which, as a whole, despite what all those well-funded insurrectionists, proud boys, and dishonest election deniers still claim, what? ahem, yeah still...,reinforced the validity of that perspective.
Despite the successes Democrats enjoyed in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, America has only seemed to have sank deeper into the mire of a toxic political culture. This is potently reflected at the level of ideas and policy. With outrage in response to a series of Supreme Court decisions issued over the last three years not abating any time soon, social divisions have become more deeply entrenched along ideological lines on issues from abortion, religion and its influence on government affairs and the Second Amendment, to the status of Native tribal sovereignty and the protection of the environment.
Moreover, the atmosphere in which it has become commonplace to baselessly question the most basic facts, scientific data and truth, if not disregarding them altogether, seems to be spreading. While this way of (un)thinking has now seemed to have seeped into practically every corner of American social life, it is, perhaps, most palpable in the aforementioned anti-democratic election denialism being bandied about by a significant portion of the populace regarding the results of the 2020 Presidential election.
That Joe Biden so soundly defeated Donald Trump for the presidency in the 2020 election by a margin of 74 electoral votes and over 7 million popular votes, and the results can still be so obstinately rejected by so many, remains not just a source of endless bafflement but also cause for serious alarm.
These broader national issues aside, Beshear’s two gubernatorial victories in Kentucky appear as a reason for optimism within this discouraging context. For this positive development to be best appreciated, though, we need to move beyond the shallow surfaces of conventional wisdom and recognize that there may be good reason to reconsider the blunt dividing lines that have been drawn between rural and urban voters, along with those separated by regional boundaries, as well.
It bears reminding that Beshear’s stunning win over Bevin, the incumbent Republican Governor, hinged on a vote difference of less than one half of one percentage point. To emphasize the razor-thin margin this result represents, that’s a mere 5,136 votes out of a total of 1,443,077 votes cast.
Beshear’s improved performance this time around against Kentucky’s current Attorney General, Daniel Cameron who was touting a law and order agenda in a region many continue to see as hostile to Democratic candidates is even more remarkable. As of the time of writing, Beshear’s margin is more than 5 points, translating to an advantage of more than 67,000 votes, with 98% of the ballots counted.
The scope of Beshear’s latest victory, and the strategy deployed to get him there, has even prompted some to start considering him as a viable presidential candidate for the Democrats in 2028. Although 2028 is quite a ways off, even as the crow flies, Beshear possesses some natural advantages over others already in this discussion, such as California’s Gavin Newsome, in having a lower profile and by virtue of not being associated with a state that so many conservatives have been conditioned to see as anathema.
However one looks at it, his victory is an impressive outcome in Kentucky, which Donald Trump carried by 30 points in 2016, and again by 26 points in 2020. Such a result, especially given the significant financial support Cameron received from Kentucky Senators Mitch McConnel and Rand Paul, along with an endorsement from Trump, reinforce the premise that there is something far more complicated at play here than red state/blue state predispositions and the assumptions they imply.
The assertion I previously advanced, that the ostensibly deep-red regions of rural America made up of areas such as Eastern Kentucky may not be as “reliable for Republicans and unwinnable for Democrats as conventional wisdom suggests,” are bolstered by this week’s results. In fact, the tally for Beshear this election cycle provides additional encouragement as he secured wins in six rural counties in the heart of coal country, including Knott, Breathitt, Magoffin, and my home county of Floyd, with the addition of two other counties he had previously lost to Bevin in Letcher and Perry.
While some may dismiss the significance of Beshear’s support in such places due to their relatively small and disempowered populations—something those living in Appalachia have long dealt with—Tuesday’s results, nonetheless, run counter to the widely accepted narrative that people who live in such communities have closed themselves off to Democratic candidates and the policies they advocate.
This is precisely the notion JD Vance, using Eastern Kentucky as his prime example, deceptively advanced in his New York Times best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, which was also adapted into a film for Netflix by Ron Howard. Bolstered by sympathetic commentary and interviewers, along with an inexplicable number of largely positive reviews as seen here, here, here, appearing in some of America’s leading literary venues, as well as a myriad of invitations to lecture and give commencement speeches at universities across the country, Vance was successful in pushing a thesis predicated on white working class anger at failed Democratic policies as a means to shift the discussion away from the racial discord long promoted within the conservative movement as a strategy designed to drive a wedge between lower and working class voters. An effort that surged into overdrive with Barak Obama’s candidacy for the 2008 presidential election.
According to the story Vance conjured, the disenchantment of rural, working class people in Eastern Kentucky—which also applies across America more broadly—traces all the way back to the early seventies, as he claims, “it was Greater Appalachia’s political reorientation from Democrat to Republican that redefined American politics after Nixon.” This sweeping assertion is what forms the ideological thesis of Hillbilly Elegy.
A pseudo-memoir that asserts itself as an object lesson on the social realities of white lower and working class frustration and anger that ushered in a new political map, and which should have twice doomed Beshear’s chances in 2019 and 2023, if accurate. It wasn’t.
When I read Vance’s book as a person born and raised in Eastern Kentucky myself, something just didn’t seem right. From my experiences growing up in Floyd County, Kentucky, just seventy miles east of the town of Jackson where Vance’s family was from, many of the claims he made just didn’t mesh with the reality I’d known. So, I did what anyone who values critical thinking and truth should do, I went looking for facts. What I soon found, and with not all that much effort, was that Vance's central claim based on the stories he tells of Eastern Kentucky from which he derives his claim about the shift in the Appalachian electorate, was just plain wrong.
This judgement is born out in the presidential election results from the very place in which Vance bases his conclusions, Breathitt County, Kentucky, in which Jackson is located. Even a cursory review of the election results themselves, starting with the 1972 contest between Richard Nixon and George McGovern, and up through to the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, refute Vance’s claims.
In fact, the election data shows that in every presidential election from 1972 until, wait for it, 2008 and the candidacy of Barak Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate actually won Breathitt County by a margin ranging from a low for Walter Mondale of 9 points in 1984, to a high of 55 points for Jimmy Carter in 1976. That the actual shift in party allegiance from Democrat to Republican, which Vance attempts to rewrite, only happened in the first election in which an African American person stood as the Democratic candidate for president is suggestive of a correlation that is quite different from Vance’s.
This historical preference is emphasized by similarly wide margins of victory for Democratic presidential candidates across several Eastern Kentucky counties in 1980, 1992 and 2000. These results offer a much different take on Vance’s recollection of his Pawpaw’s “hatred” of “that son of a bitch Mondale.” Not as a reflection of the Eastern Kentucky hillbilly attitude he purports to celebrate, but that it was actually his grandfather who’d grown out of step from the place of his birth.
The successes Democrats enjoyed in Breathitt County are reinforced by the similarly large margins they scored in other Eastern Kentucky counties, including Floyd County. Here the margins were often wider, with Carter besting Reagan by 44 points in 1980, along with a pair of wins by Bill Clinton, who notched a 53-point margin over George H.W. Bush in 1992, followed by with a 45-point advantage over Bob Dole in 1996. In all these cases, the actual election data contradicts Vance’s claims of a great electoral shift dating back to Nixon. And speaking of Nixon, the results for Breathitt County also favored George McGovern—the winner of a paltry 17 total electoral votes—by an impressive 18%.
Photo by Joshua Michaels on Unsplash
As this data makes clear, the thesis Vance, who has since parlayed the celebrity status brought by the success of his book into being elected to the US Senate in Ohio, offered as an alternative to the inconvenient reality of the conservative exploitation of racial conflict amounted to nothing less than the rewriting of the political and social history of the region. If only people like Ron Howard or the editors at HarperCollins, and many others who praised and lifted Vance’s story, because, perhaps, they really wanted to believe him or at least connect and sympathize with working class people, would have been more diligent in confirming the facts at the time, then maybe they would not be feeling so surprised and appalled by what they have been hearing from Vance since.
But, then, again, what happens to the people of Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia hardly ever impacts those so well insulated and distant from life in the hollows, mines and welfare lines. And that, of course, is another part of the problem.
While refuting the ideologically driven and objectively false claims Vance put forth in his book, the relevant facts also challenge much conventional political wisdom that has led the people of Appalachia to being unfairly dismissed, and often derided, as a monolithic assemblage of ignorant, close-minded, conservative voters. This is an assumption that Beshear’s initial win in the Kentucky Governor’s race and re-election serves to dispel.
The results reported from Tuesday’s contest between Beshear and Cameron by election boards in many of these same counties across Eastern Kentucky, including Breathitt, Macgoffin, Floyd, Knott, and others in an area that has been most impacted by the coal mining industry, give promise to the possibility that a region that was among the most consistently reliable Democratic strongholds in America throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century may not be a lost cause for Democrats after all. And that, in reality, lower and working class peoples who live in rural communities across America, more broadly, might not be as rigidly fixed in the red column as the current political maps would have us think.
As these facts, as well as common sense, tell us though, viewpoints built on hasty assumptions that cede the loss of whole populations and regions only act to reinforce simplistic and deeply flawed ways of perceiving America’s social reality. The danger therein, of course, lies in the way that the resultant ideas and expectations, when left unchallenged, can quickly transform into self-fulfilling prophesies. This is especially true when the concerns of such people and the problems they face are not attended to while their loyalties are taken for granted.
Unfortunately, the acceptance and even tolerance of what has become a default means of evaluating America’s voting population will simply continue to feed gas to the fire of the negative political and social feedback loops that debase public discourse and lead to the neglect and marginalization of people from regions and states written off by some strategists as unwinnable. It’s a process that, at the same time, will continue to hinder the success of Democratic candidates, while bolstering the feelings of alienation, isolation, hopelessness and fear conservatives have proven so adept at seizing upon.
Despite how deep such dissent and division has been sown among people who share a myriad of personal, economic and social interests, however, as the results on voter initiatives to protect the constitutional right to abortion and decriminalize recreational marijuana in Ohio show, for those who have a real concern for freedom and justice, there is still much to be optimistic about.
Ultimately, when set against the bogus narrative Vance spun, the lessons of Beshear’s election victories, as well as favorable results for Democrats in Ohio and Virginia, offer a refreshing counter to the trends in Kentucky, and other states like North Carolina and Ohio, that commentators lament as turning more and more red on those ubiquitous election maps over the last few election cycles. How this plays out in the future will depend not just on how much we learn from these lessons but also in our willingness to see and respect the agency and humanity of others instead of merely counting them as numbers.
Billy J. Stratton is originally from Eastern Kentucky, the son of a coal miner. He earned a PhD in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and currently teaches contemporary Native American/American literature, film, and critical theory in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.
