Appalachia is Trump Country

From the Associated Press

******quote***
Democrats have lost support in Appalachia as the region has shed jobs in industries such as coal mining and as union membership has declined, said Democratic strategist Dave "Mudcat" Saunders. The leftward shift of the Democratic Party during the Obama administration on social issues, including gay marriage and gun control, hasn't helped. "In those areas, it has become culturally unacceptable for a white male to admit he's a Democrat," Saunders said.

On Sunday, Bill Clinton was booed at an event in Logan, West Virginia. Before he arrived, the town's mayor sent an email to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin's office, saying the couple wasn't welcome to use city fire department facilities for their political events.

Clinton's waning popularity in the region was further hurt by a remark she made in a March interview with CNN, when she said she would "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." She was responding to a question about how her policies would benefit poor white people in Southern states.
***endquote***

Goodness !
What policies a candidate advocates and what a candidate says still have an effect up heh' in Appalachia.

The very conservative Kevin Williamson writing in the very conservative National Review about Donald Trump's appeal to white trash:

"If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul."

DonDiego could name other, . . . umm, . . . neighborhoods from which an exit employing U-Hauls, . . . or just Greyhound busses would be the best alternative.
Some of them comprise Democrat residents.

Things is tough all over, . . . and likely to get tougher no matter who gets themself elected.

Oopsie !