Trump's Democrats. Stephanie Muravchik
sticks to them, it is now an easy and scenic trip from the Lexington airport through Daniel Boone National Forest. But some visitors make the mistake, as we did on our first trip, of approaching on steep and winding backroads. One such couple made a show of half-staggering in from the parking lot to the lobby of the Little Sandy Lodge. The wife laughingly swore she enjoyed gazing at the area’s lush foliage and dramatic cliffs, “as soon as I pulled my fingernails out of the dashboard!”
The lodge is located in Sandy Hook, the county’s only town. With about seven hundred residents, Sandy Hook is Elliott’s commercial center and county seat. Although retirees can remember spending time there in their youth—when it was home to a department store, movie theater, pool hall, and many other shops—it now boasts only a couple dozen businesses: a pharmacy, gas stations, a florist, a beauty salon, and fast food restaurants that cover hardly more than a few blocks. The sleek highways that ARC planners hoped would bring development to an Appalachian county like Elliott instead paved the way for shoppers to go elsewhere. Flanking the county courthouse at the center is a post office, library, and tiny town hall, where a single clerk sits. Outsiders in search of the mayor are directed to his retail furniture outlet near the Family Dollar Store nearby.
Residents take pride in the county’s beauty and cultural heritage. They dream of swelling the thin stream of tourists who visit for the music festivals and gospel concerts, hunting, folk art festivals, and kayaking and motorcycle touring. One talented local musician even insisted he saw no need to leave when he had a vacation, for everything he wanted to do he could do at home. Locals know their county is impoverished, but they resent it when visitors focus on the weather-beaten trailers that dot the countryside and wonder why outsiders seem to ignore the county’s many handsome brick houses and attractively maintained manufactured homes. Without the kind of zoning common in urban and suburban areas, the richer and the poorer are neighbors.
Another thing they share is politics. In Elliott County, the Democratic Party is like Protestantism, a de facto establishment that unites families and the community. Since it was established in 1869 and until 2016, it had been solidly Democratic. The party’s great leaders are venerated. Myra, whose family has long lived in the county, for example, grew up in a home decorated with JFK iconography, including his portrait, bookends shaped like his head, and a replica of his beloved rocking chair. Others explicitly connected the parties to their religious cosmology, one that sharply divides their world between the forces of good and evil. A Baptist minister recalled a man who declared that he would not vote for Jesus Christ if he ran on the Republican ticket. The editor of the Elliott County News, an eight-page weekly, quipped that her mother-in-law would “vote for Osama bin Laden if he ran on the Democratic ticket.” Still another citizen recalled a friend who said he would not go to someone’s funeral if they turned out to be a Republican. Such comments, of course, are supposed to be mostly understood as tongue-in-cheek. Nonetheless, they convey a deep truth about partisanship in Elliott. The Democrats are not just the better party, they represent the only respectable political community.
Citizens in Elliott County have traditionally embraced such a Manichean view of American parties because they regard the Democratic Party as the champion of the working class. As Owen explained, when we sat around a table laden with pancakes and coffee in one of Sandy Hook’s few diners, “the Republican Party is Only. For. The. Rich.” He went on to tell a strange and lurid account of how Republicans raise their children. He sees Republican parents as harsh taskmasters. They exploit their children by giving them endless chores, and one of them, we were told, even tried to cheat his grown son by selling him a truck at a higher price than it would fetch on the open market. “That’s the way they’ll do. That’s a staunch Republican for you. I’ve seen it happen. I know!” Owen was disgusted by his neighbors’ political apostasy in 2016.
The few Republicans in the county are intimately familiar with these grotesque caricatures. As one new Republican told us: “They think the Republicans are rich and taking their money, money they are working hard for, sweating and grinding [for].” Another convert—one who enjoys a comfortable income running a local coal company—told us that some fellow citizens in town see his new partisan allegiance as a marker of class betrayal. They reportedly say: “Yeah, you was a Democrat before you made it, but now you’re a Republican.” Another recalled coming out as a Republican to his grandfather: “It killed him. It killed him. He said, ‘Son, I can’t believe you’ve done that.’ ”
The only case locals can recall of a Republican ever winning a local office happened under unusual circumstances. Nearly a decade ago, David Blair was forced to resign as the county’s judge/executive11 after pleading guilty to vote buying. The scandal helped propel Republican candidate Carl Fannin into Blair’s former office, where he defeated his Democratic opponent by 197 votes in a special election.12 It was a startling achievement. Prior to Fannin’s victory, locals estimate that Republicans had not won a county office for seventy-four years.13 Fannin, however, was politically shrewd enough to not tempt fate twice. He ran for reelection as a Democrat. In fact, some locals believe that Fannin was never a Republican at heart—he simply ran as one to avoid a strong challenger in the Democratic primary.
Typically, local races are uncontested in the general election. Aside from Fannin, in fact, locals have no memory of a Republican ever running for county office. When we asked a well-informed citizen, who had served as the secretary for the county attorney for many decades, to direct us to any other Republican candidates who ran for local office, she replied, “I can’t remember anybody. No. Never. I can’t even remember anybody even filing.”
Party registration data underscores the near impossibility of winning local elective office as a Republican in Elliott County (table 1-1). As of 2019, fewer than six hundred citizens were registered as Republicans in Elliott. Even that number represents a high-water mark, since support for the Republican Party has increased considerably in recent years, thanks in large measure to Trump’s popularity. In 2014, there were only 266 registered Republicans in Elliott.14 Even so, there are about eight times as many Democrats as Republicans in the county. By that measure, Elliott is only slightly less Democratic than San Francisco!15
This margin has insulated Elliott from the occasional sharp downturns in the party’s popularity. The Tea Party election of 2010 is a good example. If one were stuck in Elliott during the fall of 2010, one might not even be aware of the major political storm gathering beyond the county’s borders. Elliott supported the Democratic candidate for Congress with nearly 60 percent of its vote, and its Democratic candidate for state assembly—the ever-popular Rocky Adkins—ran unopposed, as he normally does.
| TABLE 1-1. Number of Registered Democrats and Republicans, 2019 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Democrats | Republicans | |
| Johnston | 10,507 | 2,717 |
| Wapello | 8,020 | 5,388 |
| Elliott | 4,540 | 573 |
| SOURCE: Data from Elliott is from June 2019; data from Johnston is from July 2019; data from Wapello is from January 2019 (https://vote.sos.ri.gov/ovr/media/registeredvoters; https://elect.ky.gov/Resources/Documents/voterstatscounty-20190617-142404.pdf; https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/voterreg/county.html). | ||
Such cases should further caution us against the temptation to draw any direct connections between the Tea Party movement and Trump’s surprising success in 2016.16 In fact, when we broaden our analysis and include every Trump county that had faithfully voted for Democratic presidential candidates since the 1980s, we find that only 39 percent of them voted for a Republican representative in 2010 (see the table in the appendix). Thus cases like Johnston and Elliott are hardly strange anomalies. The majority of Trump’s Democratic counties do not seem to have been much influenced by the Tea Party movement.
Prior to 2016, presidential