“While gerrymandering is a factor that receives an abundance of attention, experts say that the grand political realignment of working-class rural voters abandoning the Democratic Party is a much more salient cause, particularly throughout Appalachia and into the South,” reports David Catanese of McClatchy Newspapers.
Catanese’s object example is Central Kentucky’s 6th District, a once-competitive district that was already trending Republican before the state legislature made it even more so in this year’s redistricting. It was held from 2004 to 2012 by Democrat Ben Chandler. He told Catanese that he had to practice the “politics of confusion” in order to survive in a district where most voters identified as conservative.
“I had to confuse my constituents so they couldn’t tell whether I was a liberal or a conservative or a moderate,” Chandler said.
That became harder “as data showed him that an increasing amount of his constituents were primarily depending on conservative media outlets like Fox News, which blared narratives that tarred his entire party with the same broad brush,” Catanese reports. “More frequently, media of all stripes increasingly seek representatives’ reactions to the latest national controversy, rather than probe their proposed legislation or committee work.”
Chandler said, “All politics is national now, and it’s very simple. Everybody gets the same sort of news nationally and they don’t get nearly as much local news as they get national and international news. That’s been a big change. Because of the stances the national Democratic Party takes, it’s easy for the state Republican Party to brand all of the Democrats in the state with that national brand, which is very definitely an unpopular brand statewide and in most of the districts.”
Catanese offers another view: “Scott Jennings, a well-known and well-wired Republican operative, said the reason the seat isn’t competitive anymore is because Kentucky Democrats won’t nominate a Chandler-like moderate.” Jennings said, “It would take a Democrat who isn’t completely totally beholden to the progressive left. You’d have to be non-orthodox on abortion, guns, education, some economic issues…If you popped yourself out of the ditch and said, ‘I’m a pro-gun Democrat’, you’d immediately get a primary and parts of the party would swarm you.”
The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky.
