In Appalachia, the shift to the Republican Party gets local; coal and social issues are key factors; media may be too

Harlan County Judge-Executive Dan Mosley announced he was becoming a Republican.

For many years in Eastern Kentucky, voters trended Republican while remaining registered as Democrats, partly because switching parties on or after Jan. 1 disqualifies you from your new party's primary in that year. But "The politics of coal, culminating in Donald Trump’s 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, and a Democratic Party often seen as out of touch helped spur the trend" to Republican registration, not just GOP voting, reports Austin Horn of the Lexington Herald-Leader. "It’s also nationwide and statewide. Democrats are losing ground all over rural America."

Horn starts with the 2021 video from Harlan County Judge-Executive Dan Mosley, in which he "listed all the qualms he had with perceived shortcomings of Democrats being discussed nationally and in coal country hubs like Harlan" and announced he was switching from Democrat to Republican. "Every single partisan elected official followed suit," and "A raft of citizens followed suit. In February when Mosley switched, Democrats in Harlan County outnumbered Republicans by 3,000. In less than a year and a half, Republicans flipped it, and now outpace Democrats by 2,000. The Democrats didn’t field a challenger this fall for Mosley’s next four-year term, either."

The shift began with Barack Obama and coal, political commentator Al Cross told Horn: “There was always that feeling that Democrats looked out for the interests of working people, like coal miners. Well, then Obama came along and declared war on coal – and it really was a war on coal – and the Republicans completely turned that around. You had people who used to despise coal operators being on the same side as coal operators, defending their mutual interests.”

"Cross pointed to a poll conducted across two years – in 2007, just before the Great Recession and Obama’s first term, and 2011," Horn reports. "In 2007, only 17% of survey respondents in traditionally Democratic Harlan and Letcher Counties said they thought “conservation/environmental rules/zoning laws” were a bad thing for the community. In 2011, 33% responded affirmatively Only 37% of the same respondents in 2007 thought “resources should be used to create jobs rather than conserved.” 52% answered affirmatively in 2011."

Some say the shift was abetted by changes in the news media. Tom Sexton, a leftist podcaster, blamed "the decline of local media – a well-documented trend across America – so voters take their cues only from national sources constantly berating national Democrats or Republicans without speaking to the issues," Horn reports, Quoting Sexton: “The sort of death of local politics, and by extension local journalism, has created this atmosphere where nobody is paying attention to local policy or anything. It’s just like, ‘I’m going to take my rhetorical cues from what’s going on the national level,’ whereas before there was a lot more color to those local races. Who was going to do what for people in the community was a lot more pertinent.”

Horn reports, "Tres Watson, a seasoned conservative political operative who previously served as spokesman for the Republican Party of Kentucky, agreed that 'as local media fades away,' voters are more often bombarded with messages about how radical prominent national members of either party are."