Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes a pretty convincing argument that it’s not “working class white people” that Obama has trouble with; rather, it’s “Appalachian working class white people.” If you overlay a map of Appalachia with a map of counties in which Hillary Clinton has beaten Obama with a total of more than 65% of the vote, the parallels are pretty dramatic.
Let me offer a series of overlapping explanations. First, some basic demographics. It’s widely accepted that Hillary Clinton does better with older voters, less educated voters and white voters. These demographics perfectly match West Virginia — and, more loosely, the entire Appalachian region. A few key points from tonight’s exit polls demonstrate the point: 4 out of 10 voters were over 60 years of age. 7 out of 10 lacked a college degree — the highest proportion of any electorate in the country. And 95% of the electorate was white.
Basically you have a state that is made up almost exclusively of Clinton’s voters.
Marshall then goes on to discuss how Appalachia remains economically underdeveloped which has an associated consequence of less education for the population. That is coupled with a tradition of being both anti-slavery and anti-slave.
A couple of things – First, McCain isn’t Clinton, therefore, Obama could do better against him than he did against her in Appalachia and everywhere else; particularly as the Bush albatross hangs ever more heavily around McCain’s neck.
Second, unless something changes that offsets whatever dynamics have been going on in these special Congressional elections, McCain is going to have a tough time hanging on to even reliably Republican states.
As I have written before, I prefer Clinton to Obama…..
But do not think for ONE second that I would vote for McCain over Obama. I think that, in the heat of a campaign, it is easy for Clinton supporters to say that they would not vote for Obama….but when they enter the polling booth in November, I bet a large majority of them come home to the DEMOCRATIC candidate.
There was a pretty detailed post about this topic – using the same maps that TPM used – on DailyKos a fw days ago: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/12/134251/930
Thanks for that link. The maps are better and there are more of them.
(Somewhere, I’m wired funny — I *love* maps.)
I flipped the channel off MSNBC during one of the “What does Obama have to do?!?” segments, and by chance happened upon a movie on the Sundance Channel called Burning the Future: Coal in America, specifically about people living in the devastation from mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia.
Shit. I mean, seriously, it’s not pretty. The trailer is at http://www.burningthefuture.org
The “mountain state” is rapidly becoming the mountaintop blown off and dumped in the valley state. The people profiled have lived in the “hollers” for several generations, only to now find their faucets running black, their health adversely affected, and their environment devastated by mountaintop mines, valleys piled hundreds of feet high with mine waste, and massive black lakes held back by earthen dams. Not to mention increasing unemployment among miners because the more destructive method of mountaintop removal mining uses fewer workers.
The scenes that got me, though, were the various townhall meetings where people were finally speaking up about the conditions. There seemed to be an equal number of people in the same circumstances ready to shout them down, basically imploring them to not “stir up trouble”. What jobs are available are all linked to Big Coal, and complaining about conditions there gets you the enemy label.
Watching those scenes, I couldn’t imagine the difficulty in pursuing such an electorate where a check from the coal company can motivate people to defend practices which affect them so adversely.
Following up on T’s comment – and Doug’s love of maps.
I need to track down that map that shows the correlation of poverty rates in Appalachia with mountain-top removal coal mining areas.
Its awe-inspiring. And not the good awe.
Found it.
Ugh. Thanks for the link, T.
I just had a hallway converstation today about the price of gas:
“Well, the government will step in soon and stop this…”
Me:”How can they do anything?”
“They can go to the national reserve, like they did before. Gas went down when they did that!”
“And what do we do when it runs out?”
“They won’t let that happen”
“So, they’ll have to start buying again, but now they’ll be using our taxes to buy it at $130 a barrel instead of $50 or so when they put it in there…”
“Well, then they got to get on new technology. I heard they can start making gas from coal. If they did that, then we wouldn’t have a problem ANY MORE!”
That was the point I excused myself from the converstation. I’m tempted to forward him this link, but I’ve learned not to stir the pot (too much) at work…
I led a youth mission trip to West Virginia in 2000. It was sad and eye-opening. What T says is quite true. The next spring after we were in Keystone, the entire area flooded because the natural defenses in the mountains had been stripped away and the rain ran through the hollers. I remember the first day coming back to the abandoned school where we were staying to discover that my pillow was covered with black soot that came in through the open window. The rest of the trip I made sure my pillow was shoved down in my sleeping bag. The area was also highly segregated and poor, poor, poor. The town of Keystone had a black ghetto; where some of our kids ran a vacation Bible school. I went with one of our groups to Carswell Holler; where I helped repaint the house of a very nice widow. One evening we toured a coal mine in Virginia. We had a very senior lady speak to us in the museum portion before the tour. She spoke about the “good old days” that raped the land and will never return. The coal industry is still active in that state but due to technology, only means jobs for the few. I have a special place in my heart for the people of West Virginia. I also have a sense of despair for them, as I see no solutions for making their lives better.
On a lighter note-I am a map nut too. When I’m stopped by a train I will often pull out a map to pass the time!
BTW Carswell Hooler was 100% white and all the people there had worked for the abandoned mine down the road. I don’t kow what the unemployment rate was, but I’m sure it was well in the double digits. The one thing I’ll always remember from the woman we helped was that even though we brought our own lunches; on the last day she spent a pretty penny providing us with a “down home” lunch. She would not take no for an answer when I kept telling her that wasn’t necessary. We, in turn, did more than just paint her house. We also put in a small garden, cleaned up her yard, and put the first gutters on her house she’d ever had. And we planted a tree in her front yard for her to remember us by.
What to do about it?
Enforcing the previous Clean Water Act standards would be a start. It used to be that putting millions of tons of waste into a creek or river was considered a violation, prior to the Bush Administration gutting the regs.
The old methods of tunnelling worked well. They were much less polluting. Big Coal would never choose that method from an economic standpoint because it costs more to employ more people, takes longer, and doesn’t let them get all the coal. So it would take government mandates to make them do it the right way. There’s still plenty of money to be made all around, but the market dictates doing it the cheap way, in the absence of government leadership on the issue.
Finding an alternative to the current “clean coal” method of washing the coal with water and then leaving billions of gallons of toxic slurry behind dams is also important.
As Doug has discussed before, the “cheapness” of this method doesn’t take into account the legacy costs of dealing with flooding, irreversibly toxic groundwater, hundreds of massive sludge-filled slurry impoundment lakes behind earthen dams sitting on top of old mine workings. Imagine dealing with all of that in fifty or a hundred years when the coal’s gone and those dams fail or the old workings collapse like what happened in Kentucky in 2000 resulting in a 250 million gallon spill into local rivers.
It reminds me of all the tailing piles in the West, such as Leadville, CO, leaching heavy metals into the ground and water a hundred years after the silver was extracted. Back then it was expected that the extractive industries would rape and move on. We should not allow the same behavior today.
I spent ten days doing similiar work to Rev A.’s in the Appalachia area of Ohio a few years ago. We painted churches, knowing that the buildings were held together by paint, ate balogna sandwiches with new understanding and came to favor some outhouses over others. I wish that the international media had devoted more of their attention to this aspect of West Virginia.
WV, like Indiana, will not be so much as a faint blip on the radar of the candidates in November, and that saddens me. Those who need will be ignored because of the electoral college.
It occurred to me last night that West Virginia is like so many third world countries (think African diamond producers, South American oil states, etc). They are sitting on top of unimaginable quantities of a vital and valuable commodity, and yet their citizenry is on average poorer than almost any other state’s.
Interesting that we all talk of Appalachia as if it is on another planet. Those of you who are from Richmond know or may have known many Appalachian immigrants. I suspect that is true of many Hoosiers. A good number of the black population of Richmond came here from Appalachia. My mother is from Perry County, Kentucky.
People from her side of the family have very fond memories of the hard scrabble life they lived in Kentucky on the one hand. On the other hand, they are glad to have been able to move away from coal country.
Pila-My folks moved to Richmond in 1962. My dad still remembers the factories he was management in would close down for three day weekends called “hillbilly holidays.” It was an opportunity for the large Appalachian population in Richmond to return home to visit family.
Last night I relived some of my memories from that trip. The housing conditions were pretty scary. The woman whose house I worked on was one of the few that I saw that was in pretty decent shape. And she kept it neat and tidy. I remember having a neighborhood kid named Vinnie who would stop by and visit with our youth. He was about nine or ten. Someone asked where he lived. He said, “I’m in the house with all the crap on the front porch.” He wasn’t kidding!
T is right in saying that West Virginia is on a gold mine. But most of that money will never go back into that state. If you remember, when all those mining accidents happened a few years back, all the executives lived in other states.
We also have a large Appalachian population here in Lake county who sought better lives in the steel mills.
But Pila, to answer your statement, in some respects West Virginia is a world different. And that is sad that we allow such poverty to exist in our nation.
Rev AJB: I have no doubt that what you saw was heartbreaking. I’m also pretty sure that Appalachia has changed a lot since my mother’s family moved away back in the 1940’s. And yet, in some ways it probably hasn’t changed.
Lemming,
You said:
Actually, the opposite is true. They would get far less attention if it were not for the EC. The fact that even the smallest state gets 3 EC votes forces candidates to at least talk to some of the rual areas. Were it not for that, you could just hit the top 20 markets (New York, Chicago, LA, Denver, etc…) and get enough popular vote to win.
Do you think it would be a good thing for Indiana, WV and other states if only the people in population dense areas decided who is President? It would be very easy to cater to life in the city while ignoring the needs in the countryside…
Jason –
I think you misunderstood me, but I can understand why, based upon how I phrased my statement.
I am deeply frustrated by the Electoral College system and by the way that the primary election schedule spaces out our votes. Were it not for the Clinton-Obama competition, the races in Indiana and West Virginia would not have been so much as a blip on the national radar. We both have our elections so late in the system that we’re missed.
I’m not saing that the needs of Iowans and new Hampmshireites are unimportant. I am saying that the race for teh presidency would be different if the elections began in Appalachia.
Oh, yes. We’re on the same page there, but our problem is in the phased primary process more than the Electoral College. The EC is only used in the election this fall and has nothing to do with the primary process.
I do feel the best thing for primaries would be a single day vote, or at least a single month. That would compress the spending of money enough that even if someone is creamed in the first week, they might be able to hang on and see what happens in the following 30 days.