Janet Lynn Stumbo leaned on her cane and surveyed the two dozen or so voters who had convened in a small Appalachian town to meet with the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.
A former Kentucky Supreme Court justice, the 70-year-old Stumbo said the event was “the biggest Democratic gathering I have ever seen in Johnson County,” an enclave where Republican Donald Trump got 85% of the presidential vote last November.
Paintsville, the county seat, was the latest stop on the state party’s “Rural Listening Tour,” a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally.
“The gut check is we’d stopped having these conversations” in white rural America, said Colmon Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic chair. “Folks didn’t give up on the Democratic Party. We stopped doing the things that we knew we needed to do.”
It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts outright to win more elections. More realistically, it’s a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024 and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.
Do you ever think about how if the Incas like 500 years ago were able to turn the Andes Mountains into an agrarian paradise with terrace farming, that it should definitely be possible to do in the humble hills of Appalachia with a bunch of unemployed miners who have excavation experience and who literally know how to drive bulldozers?
Firstly: the soil is poor. Lots of issue with soil runoff, and it’s not viable to irrigate basically at all.
Secondly: they don’t want to.
I think people forget how much mining paid for a while, even if the cost was the miner’s lives. It’s like the oil workers in the Dakotas, they like that work for the pay.
The only way you could agriculturalize that region would be having a mid to large agribusiness come in and industrialize it, which makes no sense because it’s cheaper and easier everywhere else.
They’re orphaned by geography. The tunnels helped but nowhere near enough.
That, and the cost of labor.
Multiple ag-tech startups have been trying to get a foothold in Appalachia with things like automated greenhouses, but ultimately it’s still cheaper to bring in Central Americans on visas to do all the work than pay living wages to the locals.
The irony is terrace farming is in large part a strategy that is designed to literally improve the quality of soil and reduce erosion.
True, but it isn’t cheap, the effort costs more than you’d save in labor.
Couple that with the nightmarish logistics (lived there, it takes 4-6 hours to get in and out of the mountains over tiny roads not meant for trucks, that’s a lot of refrigeration), and the region just isn’t good for much economically.