The last remaining Democratic state representative in rural Kentucky just announced she’s switching parties. Robin Webb’s partisan defection leaves the thirty-eight-member Kentucky State Senate with only six Democrats, all in the Lexington and Louisville areas. Explaining her decision on Fox News, Webb accused the Democratic Party of abandoning rural voters.

“I’ve tried to be the rural voice, but it’s just gone — not unheard, but certainly not acknowledged, and certainly not given the credence that I would think our people need,” Webb said.

Webb’s biography is the political history of Eastern Kentucky coal country in microcosm. She became a Democrat when she began working as a coal miner in the late 1970s. Back then, the coal-mining regions of Appalachia were Democratic Party strongholds, thanks to the saturation of membership in party-aligned unions. In the coming decades, union coal jobs disappeared, and Democrats courted new constituencies elsewhere. Now these same regions are firmly Republican.

Webb, a state legislator since 1999, represented a Republican-voting district as a Democrat for ten years before resolving the awkward discrepancy. The Kentucky Democrat is not entirely extinct — the state’s governor, Andy Beshear, is a Democrat — but Webb’s party change means there are no more elected Democrats at the state level in Kentucky with an entirely rural constituency. Thus concludes another chapter in the story of how the Democrats lost America’s rural working class.

Kentucky Blue

Eastern Kentucky coal country is one of American history’s great crucibles of class struggle. The southernmost point of Robin Webb’s district is only seventy miles from Harlan County, home to the “Bloody Harlan” labor battles of the 1930s. A 1963 article in the Harvard Crimson captures, with a characteristic flourish of condescension, the drama of this unacknowledged civil war, which churned well into the latter half of the twentieth century:

They have a saying in eastern Kentucky — “Wait ’till the bushes grow green.” It is a password, an admonition, and a desperate expression of hope among coal miners fighting for a lost prosperity. For in summer, when the bushes are green, a man can hide with a rifle, and in the rolling hills of Kentucky, a rifle has often had a persuasive effect on coal operators.

Trapped by circumstances they only dimly understand, the miners take a very simple view of their situation. One grizzled old miner put it this way at a meeting of strikers: “I’ll tell you something boys, and I’m gonna tell you the truth now. There will be blood coming from the mines — not coal — unless we get a union contract. And if you try to get by my picket line you’re gonna smell copper and lead, copper and lead.”

In the 1930s, coal miners in Eastern Kentucky fighting for a union were subjected to a years-long “reign of terror” by the sheriff’s department and coal company thugs that included “dynamiting, shooting into homes, and homicides.” In September 1935, two months after Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) guaranteeing workers the right to organize, the beleaguered miners lined up for a vote. Earlier that same week, a union organizer had been blown to smithereens by a car bomb.

Thereafter union coal miners in Appalachia voted blue as a matter of course. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson launched his War on Poverty with a visit to the Eastern Kentucky coalfields, just south of Robin Webb’s district, where he was greeted warmly. While Kentucky was politically mixed, coal country was socially oriented around unions and remained reliably Democrat-dominated for decades after conservative Southern Democrats began to exit the coalition.

How did the Democrats lose a constituency so deeply intertwined with the party? Two co-occurring processes: declining union membership and Democrats’ turn away from working-class voters. After peaking in the 1950s and a promising uptick in the 1970s, coal employment — threatened by automation and global competition — began a steep and unending decline. As coal jobs diminished in the 1980s, so did union density, and the institutions that transmitted working-class political identity began to wither away.

The Democratic Party was undergoing a neoliberal transformation that left it enthralled to many of the very forces destroying coal miners’ livelihoods. Party leaders, distracted by the pursuit of urban and suburban middle-class professional voters, neglected to repair fraying connections. Democrats’ shifting class allegiances left industrial labor politically friendless, hastening its decline.

Amid these changes, politicians from both parties became chiefly interested in fostering a good “business climate,” which meant loosening pro-worker regulations. Meanwhile, neoliberal governance initiated the unwinding of the War on Poverty welfare programs, intensifying poverty in Eastern Kentucky throughout the 1980s. The institutions that had once made sense of such economic misery through the lens of class conflict had disappeared or lost relevance. In their absence, the consensus opinion promoted by both parties was that the coal companies needed pampering or else the misery would continue.

Kentucky Red

Into this new political climate, the Right deployed a devastatingly effective strategy. Where there had once been coal operators and coal miners, it proposed a different bifurcation: friends of coal and enemies of coal.

Democrats, by pursuing environmental regulations, were enemies of coal. Large mining companies waged an aggressive propaganda campaign to popularize this narrative. Having lost the ability to speak in the language of class conflict themselves, and with no remaining culturally embedded institutions, Democrats lacked a satisfying response to this attack.

Republicans used this framing to batter Democrats in the region — and it worked, even in places where coal wasn’t a primary employer. In their article “Seeing Red in the Bluegrass: How the Democratic Party Lost Kentucky’s Voters,” D. Stephen Voss, Corrine F. Elliott, and Sherelle Roberts observe:

Coal shapes Kentucky politics well beyond mining communities. Businesses in outlying counties supply the mines. Businesses outside of mining territory rely on the inexpensive energy coal provides. Many Kentuckians consider coal mining a central part of the state’s identity, as demonstrated by the many automobiles bearing license plates declaring the owner a “Friend of Coal” (of which the Commonwealth sold 50,000 in just the first three years after their release, at a time when the number of mining employees was less than half that). Andy Barr, now Republican incumbent in the 6th Congressional District, took down an incumbent Democrat in 2012 after they waged an advertising war about the coal industry — even though the 6th does not include coal-mining territory!

In the 2010s, the narrative that Barack Obama was destroying the coal industry through climate policy percolated alongside persistent realities of poverty, unemployment, and now a raging opioid epidemic. In the new framing, the latter bundle of problems owed to the former — despite the long history of poverty and ill health caused by coal companies, which working-class people fought against their employers to rectify. It didn’t matter that Obama was actually quite friendly to the heads of extractive industries; what mattered is that his administration and the Democratic Party failed to communicate to coal workers that they were on their side, that their communities’ well-being was important, that they had a plan to help people land on their feet.

In 2017, the new Donald Trump administration repealed Obama’s climate policy with a declaration: “The war on coal is over.” So too was any vestige of loyalty to Democrats in the Appalachian coal country.

Who Left Who?

Robin Webb has professed faith in the Republican Party to represent the interests of rural Kentuckians. She is wrong.

Republicans have no intention of expanding Medicaid to cover more uninsured rural residents, preserving the rural hospitals and health clinics that serve as lifelines for isolated communities, or maintaining robust funding for public education and postal services that rural residents depend on. They won’t fight for higher wages, stronger workplace safety protections, or a just transition program designed to replace dwindling fossil fuel jobs with even better green energy jobs.

The GOP’s vision of helping coal country extends little beyond rolling back environmental regulations — a symbolic gesture that will enrich increasingly international coal operators, harm the health of rural residents, spoil the planet for their children, and won’t bring back good union jobs or restore the economic foundations that once sustained these communities.

But Webb is right about one thing. “While it’s cliché, it’s true: I didn’t leave the party — the party left me,” she explained.

Taking a historical view, it’s clear that she has a point. The Democratic Party abandoned Kentucky coal country before coal country abandoned the Democrats. Webb’s defection marks not just the end of Democratic representation in rural Kentucky but the completion of a decades-long political realignment that began when the Democratic Party lost interest in the working class.