Loading ...Most anti-Obama county in America? That would be Magoffin County, Ky.
flockwoodHillary Clinton outpolled Barack Obama 2,714 to 146 in Magoffin County. She captured 93 percent of the vote. He claimed 5 percent. This is the lowest percentage of the vote that any county had given Obama up to this point. But plenty of other Kentucky counties gave Clinton tidal-wave landslides, to mix metaphors. She carried Owsley County 269 to 24 and Martin County 580 to 45 and Pike County 12,915 to 936.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Owsley County is the county from which my family came, though I grew up one county over. If you had told me in 1970 that Owsley County would ever (a) have almost 300 democrats in it, and (b) that 269 of them would vote for a woman considered by many a liberal, I’d have been amazed. My great great uncle, a loyal democrat from Owsley County, loved to tell the story that he was awakened at 5 am once on election day to go to the polls to be an election officer; they couldn’t find enough other democrats to serve.
This does make you wonder about how well Obama will do in swing states in the fall.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
And, I can sympathize with Obama in Magoffin County, too. I tried my first jury trial there many years ago, and I got beat too, though I must say not by as big a majority as he did.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:18 am
It is always difficult to extrapolate generally from primary election results. For instance, Obama winning a caucus in Idaho does not seriously suggest that Idaho will be “in play” in November if Obama is the Democratic nominee. Similarly, Kentucky is hardly a “swing state” this year–even with Clinton as the nominee. Polls show McCain beating both, and other states more realistically “in play” will keep Dems from any serious national presence here. I agree that a Clinton nomination would mean a marginally greater presence by national Democrats in Kentucky than the likely Obama nomination will.
It is simply more fertile ground for Obama to concentrate on states like Missouri, Iowa, North Carolina or even Missisippi. Kentucky is simply not a “bellweather” representative of “swing states.” We have a unique combination of a homogeneous population with marginally lower levels of education and a higher concentration of biblically fundamentalist voters. In short, a voting population not overtly racist or sexist but more susceptible to sloganist political appeals and less accustomed to making voting decisions based upon independent thought or educated inquiry. The same happens with suburban valley girls in California or poorly educated minority voters supporting a candidate who looks like them without understanding the issues or armed services members who think anyone who questions authority is anti-American. My point is merely that Kentucky’s unique characteristics give me pause in generalizing our poll results to other rural states.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Wonder what would happen there if they played “War of the Worlds” on the radio.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Well, perplexed, I can only say that when Orson Welles did War of the Worlds the first time, plenty of people in the mountains had radios, and I’ve never heard of any of them panicking or going out in search of aliens as some of their better educated brethren did.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:31 am
No offense meant Caleb.