The American Cultural War and the Restructuring of Kentucky Politics

Abstract

The study is an integration of the last six decades’ local, state, and national history concerning the correlation of border state Kentucky’s partisan politics with the events and themes of the country’s long cultural war. Beginning in the 1960s, the two national parties gradually became far more distinct from one another concerning cultural values. The Democratic Party supported results-oriented affirmative action, a woman’s right to choose, gay marriage, and the need for a powerful, active federal government to protect and encourage all the above. The Republican Party took none of these positions. This led to a new political configuration along rearranged racial, demographic, geographic, and party lines. Where once Kentucky’s Democratic Party had near total control of state offices and Republicans had won federal offices now and then, the new configuration had Republicans threatening to control both federal and state offices.

In 1991, James Davison Hunter published Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Making Sense of the Battles Over the Family, Art, Education, Law and Politics. He described a war that had been going on for decades and that would probably go on for decades more. The war has been, and is, said Hunter, a clash of worldviews with each side seeking dominance and the power to define the American nation. It is a clash of orthodoxy and progressivism with traditionalists insisting on a commitment “to an external, definable, and transcendent authority” and progressives adamant that Truth is a process. “What is ultimately at issue,” wrote Hunter (1991), “are deeply rooted and fundamentally different understandings of being and purpose” causing Americans to line up in opposing religious/political camps feuding over a multitude of issues (pp. 42, 44, 131).

Before the onset of the cultural war, Democratic Kentucky had been, since the end of World War II, a mostly nonideological, two-party, split-level, purple state, neither blue (Democratic) nor red (Republican), its citizens voting for an oxymoron, more federal money and less government, keeping Democrats in near absolute power within state government and in control of incoming federal dollars, while voting increasingly for Republicans in national elections. The nation-wide cultural war that broke out in the 1960s and continued on into the 21st century greatly affected this particular balance of political power, dividing voters into traditional and nontraditional ideological camps with the former allied with the Republican Party and the latter with the Democratic Party.

The progression of the national cultural war correlated with changing voting patterns in Kentucky. The traditional-minded Republican camp became more competitive, chipping away at most voters’ ancient loyalties to the Democratic Party and achieving by the early 21st century more success in both federal and state elections than it had known in over a 100 years, thus relocating the fulcrum balancing the once purple state’s two-party, split-level power structure.

Throughout the cultural war, Kentuckians, like Americans elsewhere, had sharply differing understandings of fundamental values. Were liberty and equality to be understood in traditional, individualistic terms or in terms of group identity? There was a great gulf between those who saw gender roles as determined by nature and those who had a new understanding of such roles as creations of society and thus malleable and changeable. There was even profound disagreement over the basic nature of mankind. Was man, as biblically proclaimed, prone to evil doing or capable of unadulterated goodness and perfection?

Within the nation, one’s answer to that last question framed one’s understanding of the proper limits, if any, of governmental power. Urban dwellers—often having no identity with nonurban Anglo-America and its religious heritage that reminded people of their tragic nature and warned them against an innate, dangerous will to power—adopted a new, progressive ethos espousing a confident use of great governmental power to make American society fairer. Unsurprisingly, according to James Piereson (2015) in Shattered Consensus, progressive Americans have been dependent on political coalitions sustained by public spending, borrowing, and credit. This belief in and reliance on a powerful active government, especially the federal government, challenged the validity of traditionalists’ core belief that a limited government was necessary for liberty to flourish and thus became one of the great focal points in the cultural war nationally and in Kentucky.

Kentuckians, like other Americans described by Molly Michelmore, have not always been consistent in voting according to whatever political ideologies and understandings they professed. They shared with other Americans what Michelmore describes as a sensitivity to federal intervention in private and local affairs (Michelmore, 2012). Nevertheless, Kentuckians have prospered, thanks to federal money for highways and the jobs such money created, crop price supports, and 70,000 jobs paid for by the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA). After World War II, the benefits of the G.I. bill were readily apparent. Kentuckians did not fear or object to Big Government when it was their Big Government. Hence, the internal political contests up to the 1960s focused on control of state government and control of state/federal funds (Blakey, 1986; Klotter, 1996).

It was the state’s middle ground geographically and politically that had given Kentucky its post–World War II purple hue and its divided party allegiances. V. O. Key, Jr. (1984), in his seminal work Southern Politics in State and Nation, does not include Kentucky as part of the South. Kentucky, the citizens of which before the Civil War had owned and traded in slaves, unlike the deeper South described by Key, had a two-party system after the War with strong ties to national organizations, and it never disenfranchised African Americans with literacy tests, white primaries, and poll taxes. Court ordered desegregation of public schools in the 1950s went comparatively smoothly in Kentucky. From the end of the Civil War on, there always had been a sizable number of white voters, first Republicans then Democrats, who considered the black vote of great importance to their interests. Consequently, Kentucky never had to undergo a nationalization of its interior politics like the rest of the South. During the Great Depression and World War II, a Kentuckian, Alben Barkley, was majority leader of the United States Senate. After the war, he became Vice President. All this reinforced Kentucky’s identity as a borderland that was at times comfortable with federal power.

Professions of faithfulness to old political/religious dogma, however, such as the virtues of limited government, remained a home base to return to. That home base became from the 1960s on an increasingly important, partisan one as Democrats and Republicans found themselves on opposite sides of all the above referenced questions and a growing urban/rural cultural divide with new groups seeking governmental control and their own particular benefits.

Kentucky’s borderland purple hue had much to do with the state’ history of race relations. Unlike white voters in the deeper South before the second civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, Kentucky Democrats found in the 1930s and beyond that long-term, demographic trends in Kentucky made it easy for them to accept a white–black alliance. In 1860, blacks made up 20.4% of the state’s population. In 1900, the percentage was 13.3, and in 1950, it was 6.9 (Wright, 1990). In the first decade of the 21st century, all non-whites made up 10% of the state’s population (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). During the Great Depression and New Deal of the 1930s, President Roosevelt had used his wife and subordinates to make direct appeals to African Americans to vote Democratic. Kentucky had a relatively small number of blacks, most of whom lived in the state’s few and relatively small urban areas compared with the nation’s great metropolitan areas and understood that their collective well-being was tied to that of the Democratic Party, the Party of federal power. But their small numbers meant that white men, many with a rural, traditional orientation, could control the Democratic white–black/rural–urban alliance, not nominate African Americans to state offices, win elections, and thus be the dominant power within Kentucky’s state government and thus the manager of the increasing amount of federal funds flowing into the state and spent there.

After World War II, matters of race continued to affect politics and, in the 1960s, became inextricably intertwined with the aligning of forces in the cultural war. Republicans began to win elections again by supporting greater racial justice. Kentuckians elected John Sherman Cooper, who would become known for his advancement of civil rights for minorities, to three short U.S. Senate terms in 1946, 1952, and 1956 before electing him to his first full term in 1960. In 1956, they elected Republican Thruston Morton of Louisville to join Cooper in the Senate where he would with Cooper support national civil rights advancements.

In 1960, African American voters in Louisville, Kentucky’s one true urban center, many of whom had moved to that city to work in World War II defense plants, became very angry with Democratic leaders’ inattention to their concerns regarding equal access to public accommodations, and they revolted (Frederickson, 2001). Louisville’s black voters allied with a new group of Republicans, many of them northern, transplanted businessmen, and helped them take over the mayor’s office and that of county judge (Farrington, 2011). The state’s first black woman legislator, Republican State Representative Amelia Tucker of Louisville, in 1962 got passage by the state legislature of a law authorizing local governments to pass their own civil rights ordinances (Wallenstein, 2011). The Republican mayor of Louisville and the Republican Jefferson County judge supported passage in 1963 of the South’s first municipal public accommodation law, 3 years before passage of the state’s civil rights law, which also was the first in the South (Gerth, 2013).

After the rebellion in Louisville, Kentucky’s two Republican United States’ Senators—Morton had been reelected in 1962—voted for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act (“To Pass S. 1564, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” n.d.). The Republican mayor, William Cowger, won a congressional seat in 1966, giving Kentucky a Republican-dominated congressional delegation for the first time (Kleber, 1992). John Sherman Cooper, long-time, consistent supporter of civil rights initiatives, having won his first full Senate term in 1960, won reelection in 1966 by the up-to-that-time largest ever margin for a Senate race in Kentucky (Crass, 2013). Louisville’s Republican judge, Marlowe Cook, replaced Louisville’s Thruston Morton in the Senate in 1969. Later, still another Republican Jefferson County judge, Mitch McConnell, went to the Senate.

In 1968, Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who as Vice President had supported integration and the 1957 civil rights act, adopted a “southern strategy” of peeling off Democratic voters by going slow on racial integration and civil rights enforcement. But four years earlier, Kentucky, which had given only 1% of its vote to the segregationist Dixiecrat Party in 1948 (“1948 Presidential,” n.d.), and had had a mostly successful, peaceful integration of public schools in the 1950s (Carter, 1995), had preferred by a staggering 28% margin Democratic Presidential candidate Johnson over Republican Goldwater and Goldwater’s initial version of a southern strategy (“1964 Presidential,” n.d.).

Complicating matters for Nixon and the Republicans in 1968 segregationist George Wallace ran for President on the American Party ticket. Seemingly in contradiction to the state’s recent history of racial toleration and accommodation, Wallace’s appeal in Kentucky was widespread. The people of 82 Kentucky counties (of 120) gave 15% or more of their vote to the American Party candidate. Wallace peeled off both Democratic and Republican voters.

Still, of considerable significance for later political developments, across the nation Nixon and Wallace together received 57% of the vote in 1968 (Edsall & Edsall, 1991). The combined vote total was high also in Kentucky, 62% (“1968 Presidential,” n.d.). Kentuckians had voted strongly against their own majority party.

Wallace had zeroed in on a complaint/lament that would keep reappearing in various guises in national politics: that the federal government, with its various welfare policies, was practicing reverse discrimination on behalf of blacks (and later other constituencies) against those paying taxes to the government (Edsall & Edsall, 1991, p. 77). Furthermore, Walter D. Burnham (1982) states that the 1968 Wallace voters opposed the “tremendous increase of federal intervention in the social domains formerly the preserve of local governments or private arrangements” (p. 231). Molly Michelmore (2012) cites a 1969 Newsweek poll: “many white Americans even believed that African Americans had a better chance than they did to get ‘well-paying jobs,’ ‘a good education,’ for their children, ‘good housing,’ and ‘financial’ help from the government” (p. 72). In Kentucky, the actual provision of welfare checks had not been a much used issue in racial politics, as both parties wanted black votes. Government welfare checks was a catch-all phrase used to denounce what was considered big government’s destructive interference in people’s lives creating the Great Society’s mythical Happy Pappies of eastern Kentucky who preferred living on the dole to working.

While all this was happening in the 1960s in the nation and in Kentucky, many within the national Democratic Party began insisting that the nation adopt a new set of social, moral, and political values. Edsall and Edsall (1991), in Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, when referring to welfare and rights, included in the definition of benefits all those new rights or benefits to be secured by the federal government on behalf of those not part of the old order.

Nontraditional Democrats, as described by Edsall and Edsall (1991, p. 4), wanted American government to encourage (Huntington, 1994, p. 270) group identities (Al Gore’s reversal of “out of many one” to “out of one many”), and go beyond equal accommodation and voting to apportion (affirmative action and diversity policies) college acceptances, jobs, national wealth, and legislative representation (1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act to secure minority representatives in Congress) according to those identities. They desired a government furthering the restructuring of families and gender roles (to include a woman’s right to an abortion), to liberate women from the home, and to include gay spouses and parents while limiting traditionalists’ insistence that their religion inform public debate on such issues.

These new, national Democrats rejected the older, traditional understanding of humankind as being bound and limited by nature and history, unable to escape wrong doing and power’s corruptions. Rather, nature and history were not destiny; men and women were unbound and need not be afraid of asserting great power to build better selves and a better future. They saw governmental checks and balances as needlessly cumbersome and inefficient, a way for traditionalist whites to thwart the will of the people and obstruct justice and equality for all (Podhoretz, 2015; Praeger, 2015; Williams, 2015).

Across the country, racial divisions, after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, could not be distinguished or separated from other deepening cultural divisions. This helped underscore the latest differences Americans had over the role of government in their lives and then helped create and deepen the nation’s and Kentucky’s partisan clustering into ever more exclusive communities of voters.

The nation’s urban, black community might hear sermons on traditional family values, and individual men and women might hold to such values themselves, but their focus was on economic security for black people. Republican, religious traditionalists, lacking any strong sense of societal sins, could not see how democracy, capitalism, private property—as they understood such things—and ideals of individual responsibility could be harmful to the disadvantaged or dispossessed, those not part of accepted (white) society. Consequently, Republicans, as Andra Gillespie (2014) has observed, had difficulty framing appeals to minority voters in terms of group identity and group interests that could reduce the degree of racial and party polarization. On the other side of the cultural divide, secular Democrats, says Lisa McGirr (2001, p. 163), saw racism and white privilege underlying traditionalists’ pride in individualism and country and their anger over governmental intrusiveness and preferences.

After passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black voters in the nation became the most loyal interest group within the Democratic Party, regardless of particular cultural flashpoints. The 1968 Presidential election revealed a 62% difference nationally in black/white preferences, greater than the percentage divide due to class, party registration, or social value differences in voting (Aistrup, 1996; Bullock & Gaddie, 2009; Murphy & Gulliver, 1971). Despite the relatively high number of black voters in Louisville voting for Nixon that year, there would not be another instance in Kentucky like that in Louisville in the 1960s in which both parties competed for African American votes by paying attention to their concerns.

Ironically, the affirmative action regulations promulgated by the Republican Nixon administration in 1969 and 1970 deepened this loyalty to the Democratic Party (Colby, 2014). Such policies had an immediate effect on the number of African Americans employed in governmental offices. In the early 1970s, “57 percent of black male college graduates and 72 percent of black female college graduates were employed in governmental positions” (Cost, 2012, p. 152). Edsall and Edsall (1991) have noted that by 1990, one-half of all black managers worked for the government and black private jobs were covered by U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) regulations.

It was the 1960s civil rights movement and Nixon’s affirmative action policies focused on race that made the federal government responsible everywhere and at all times for some definition of a fair distribution by group identity of work and access to community resources and wealth. The struggle for racial equality set a pattern for other cultural war clashes.

In Getting Religion, long-time religion editor for Newsweek Kenneth L Woodward (2016) has written that for mainline Protestants and many Catholics, the pursuit of civil rights for African Americans, the women’s liberation movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War became their religion. This had a profound impact on the course of the cultural war. Far more women went to seminaries to become ministers who rejected biblical authority as it sanctioned all the sins of patriarchy. Fathers, whose piety was the biggest determining factor in a child remaining religious, had far less authority. Later the gay marriage movement rejected the biblical heterosexual marriage standard.

The 1971 McGovern-Fraser Commission Report called on the Democratic Party to apportion delegates to conventions among minority groups, young people, and women according to their percentage in the population (McGovern-Fraser Commission Report, 1971). Almost immediately, the federal Labor Department expanded its affirmative action contract policies affecting the nation’s businesses and public institutions to include women. Later, those campaigning for gay rights/marriage compared their cause with that of fighting for racial justice. Just as African American well-being was dependent on the federal government and on a Democratic Party supportive of a powerful central government and its employment and equal access diversity policies, so, too, was the well-being of all those seeking an identity and freedom outside traditional white society, traditional gender roles, and traditional institutions such as marriage.

Reflecting this increasingly partisan segregation centering on the unity of identity politics, federal power, and the Democratic Party, in 1970, Louisville elected a Democrat to replace the Republican Congressman who as mayor had done so much for Louisville blacks’ interests. In 1971, the state replaced with a Democrat the only Republican Governor elected after World War II in the 20th century. In 1972, Kentuckians replaced the retiring Cooper with a Democrat, and in 1974, they voted out the Republican United States Senator who, as Jefferson County Judge, had supported Louisville’s equal accommodation law.

The national cultural war had only just begun a serious sorting of Kentucky whites on either side of the fault line. In 1976, Wallace Democrats returned to their Party. Kentucky voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter for President with 66 of the counties giving Wallace a sizable vote in 1968 now voting for Carter (“1976 Presidential,” n.d.). The 1976 election in Kentucky did suggest that there was an anti-urban sentiment within the incipient cultural war that could powerfully affect election outcomes.

In 1980, voters in the old Wallace counties may have had a sense of cultural identity (beyond that defined by race) with southern, small town, Baptist Carter as opposed to Hollywood, California, more cosmopolitan Reagan. In that year, the voters of the 82 counties that had given substantial support to Wallace gave more support to Democrat Carter, 484,611, than Republican Reagan, 482,128. Fifty-four of the 82 counties voted Democratic that year. A 26,000 plus and an almost 30,000 Republican vote advantage in 1960 and 1968 had become a 2,000 plus advantage for the Democrats in a year when Republican Reagan carried the state, though barely, with 18,857 votes, a 1.46% margin (“1980 Presidential,” n.d.).

In 1980, Reagan won by garnering enough votes (a 22,879 margin) in the Golden Triangle urban centers of Louisville and Lexington, and suburban, northern Kentucky (part of metropolitan Cincinnati), especially the latter two, enough to overcome Carter’s advantage in the less urban parts of the state (“1980 Presidential,” n.d.). It appeared that the same disparate groups that had voted for Carter in his 1970 Georgia gubernatorial victory voted for him in Kentucky; angry, rural whites and urban Blacks joined devout, always loyal white Democrats in supporting Carter. As in the nation, according to Murphy and Gulliver (1971) in their book The Southern Strategy, Democrats for Wallace had returned to their Party. Kentucky Democrats had kept their rural white/urban black alliance intact.

But as Reagan’s win in Kentucky suggested, Carter’s victory 4 years earlier was a Democratic interlude in a religious struggle, as Andrew Hartman phrases it, between incompatible faiths. In 1972, Republican Nixon had carried 84% of the nation’s white evangelical vote. He won Kentucky with a 28.6% margin among all Kentuckians against a man most viewed as a man of the Left and the new world view. In 1980, Reagan won 75% of the nation’s white evangelical vote, having consciously identified himself with such voters. He won 49.07% of the vote in Kentucky (Hartman, 2015). In 1984, Reagan won by a 20.67% margin. Given the number of Southern Baptists (largest number of denominational adherents) and Catholics (second largest number) in Kentucky, it is reasonable to assume that in the cultural war, most Kentuckians hewed to an orthodoxy that, according to Hartman, pronounced male/female sex roles and gender differences sacred and accordingly saw progressives’ understanding of and demands for equality for women and gays as leading to a world devoid of meaning (Hartman, 2015).

In 1984, Reagan won an overwhelming reelection nationally and in Kentucky. He did so, in part, by appealing to the same sentiments that Wallace had in 1968, but stressing hope instead of anger. He appealed to those voters who “felt that public resources once securely within their own province were being rapidly diluted, stretched, and redirected—redistributed to people often unfamiliar, ‘different,’ and often sharply critical of or dissident from majority values” (emphasis added) (Edsall & Edsall, 1991). To these voters, he proclaimed morning in America and a springtime of hope.

In between Republican wins in the Presidential elections in 1984 and 1988, and despite Republican McConnell’s winning a Senate seat in 1984, in 1986, Democrat Wendell Ford, perhaps the most popular politician ever in the state, won his third Senate term carrying all of Kentucky’s 120 counties and nearly two thirds of the state-wide vote (Brammer, 2015b). He would win a fourth term in 1992 by the largest number of votes ever recorded in Kentucky (Senate Resolution 38, 2015). Republicans had not yet secured any semblance of guarantees of election victory or even long-term advantage in federal elections.

In 1980, neither party had yet become of one mind on increasingly divisive social issues, especially regarding that great cultural divide and flash point, abortion. This would change as more and more people aligned within two very distinctive, separate camps. At one time, civil rights leader and would-be federal legislator Jesse Jackson had referred to abortion as race genocide, and U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy had championed the Catholic Church’s teachings on right to life (Hendershott, 2009). As their Party became of one mind on the subject, they reversed themselves and became strong proponents of a woman’s right to choose, as did former right-to-lifers Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Nationally, Democrats and Republicans split apart over the very primacy of the traditional, nuclear family. Nontraditional Democrats saw emphasis on the traditional family as reducing career opportunities for women and thus restricting women’s freedom. Some Democrats, as noted by Joel Kotkin, began promoting an urbanism that included few families. Single women became a very important voting-block in the Democratic coalition (Kotkin, 2013; “Pew Finds Huge Regional Divide in Abortion Debate,” 2013).

In reaction, evangelical Christianity had a resurgence appealing to men and women with traditional understandings of religion, morality, and family structure. Forty years after the absorption of African Americans into the Democratic Party, evangelicals within Kentucky, like evangelicals nationally, moved away from historic Democratic attachments to the Republican Party, at least in national elections. Samuel Huntington (1994) in his book Who Are We? observed that in 1980 and 1984, Reagan won over evangelicals who “by 1988 . . . were solidly Republican” (Huntington, 1994, p. 342). Nationally, the Republican Party came to dominate less urban states and states with the most rapidly expanding number of traditional family households (Kotkin, 2013). It is in the midst of this national political restructuring that enough Kentucky Democrats in 1984 had swung to the Republican column to reelect Reagan and elect Republican Mitch McConnell to the United States Senate over a two-term Democratic incumbent.

By the 1990s, Americans within each camp saw themselves as righteous and just and those in the other camp as not righteous and not just. Writing at the end of the century Rabbi Daniel Lapin said that the rift was (and is) over the Judeo-Christian God (Lapin, 1999). Those traditionalists aligning with the Republican Party had deep roots in American evangelicalism. The Party, itself, had its origins in northern churches. It had led the North in the war to preserve the Union (McGirr, 2001). More than ever it was, as Glenn Feldman (2011) notes, the Party of God and Country. The Democratic Party, since the Great Depression of the 1930s, had been the Party of Government securing people’s freedom from want and the Party of those who understood as evil any national identity encompassing everyone as individuals within an Anglo framework that reminded everyone of the tragic nature of men and women and of the consequent need to be cautious regarding governmental power (D’Souza, 2007).

In The Empowered Self, Thomas Franck notes that by the late 20th century, a strong American ideology had emerged that directly challenged the most fundamental beliefs of traditionalists. Franck labeled people favoring this new ideology as individualists. Individualists redefined traditional beliefs of right and wrong and definitions of gender. Individualists wanted to live out their own subjective preferences, not “some imposed, inescapable mandate of god, nature, or history” (Franck, 1999, pp. 1, 3, 18, 279).

By 1990, white people regularly attending religious services had become mostly Republicans; those whites not attending, and thereby not bolstering the old order’s bulwark, had become Democrats (Huntington, 1994). In 1992, the Republican national convention played to its base presenting avowedly Christian speakers advocating traditional cultural values. President Bush pointed out that the 1992 Democratic platform made no mention of God. Eighty-four percent of church going, white evangelical Protestants voted for Republican Bush that year (Le Beau, n.d.).

From 1968-1988, Republican Presidential candidates took 34 states 5 times or more. Subsequently, from 1992 onward, only 19 states stayed loyal to Republicans, as big, urban states with large numbers of non-white voters became solidly Democratic (Rasmussen, 2014). Kentucky remained between worlds in the 1990s, a less urban, predominantly white, Democratic state more often than not voting Republican in national elections, but not in the 1992 and 1996 Presidential elections, as Bill Clinton won Kentucky in both those years.

The national geographic/racial/cultural divide and consequent polarization of parties manifested itself in Kentucky in the 1992 and 1996 Presidential elections (“1992 Presidential,” n.d.; “1996 Presidential,” n.d.) and in the 1995 gubernatorial election (“1995 Gubernatorial,” n.d.). As in the national vote totals, in neither of his elections did Clinton win a majority of Kentucky’s popular vote.

Ross Perot ran as a third-party candidate in both Presidential elections, taking 203,944 Kentuckians’ votes in 1992 (13.66%)—he had won 18.91% nationally—and 120,396 (8.67%) in 1996, very close to his national figure of 8.4%. In Kentucky, in 1992, at least 13% of the voters in 58 counties cast their votes for Perot. Voters in all but four of these counties had given Wallace at least 15% of their vote 24 years earlier, suggesting the existence of a fairly stable anti-establishment, anti-government voting-block in Kentucky (“1992 Presidential,” n.d.; “1996 Presidential,” n.d.).

This did not give either the Democratic or Republican Party any clear advantage. Republicans topped Democrats in 19 of the 58 counties, whereas Democrats topped Republicans in 39. Thanks to the voters in two of the three angles of the Golden Triangle, Lexington, and especially northern Kentucky (with its numerous Catholic constituents), more people in the 58 counties voted Republican than Democrat, 292,460 to 290,930, in a losing cause for the Republican candidate state-wide. Kentucky had kept its centrist position not moving decisively toward either Party (“1992 Presidential,” n.d.).

A change had occurred, however, that did signal the possibility of greater polarization in the future. The small 1992 Republican advantage in Wallace-Perot counties disappears if Jefferson County is counted. Jefferson County had given 35,561 (16.0%) votes to Wallace in 1968 (“1968 Presidential,” n.d.). It gave just less than 13% (12.9%) to Perot in 1992. But Democrats came out of Louisville that year with a 36,162 (152,728 to 116,566) vote advantage over Republicans (“1992 Presidential,” n.d.).

It was in 1992 that Jefferson County (Louisville) ceased being a Republican county in Presidential elections, having even voted for President Ford (as did Lexington) over Jimmy Carter in the 1976 aftermath of Watergate (“1976 Presidential,” n.d.). It has voted Democratic in all subsequent Presidential elections, though 2000 and 2004 were narrow victories (“1992 Presidential,” n.d.; “2000 Presidential,” n.d.; “2004 Presidential,” n.d.). The margins of Democratic advantage in the 2008 Presidential election (“2008 Presidential,” n.d.), the 2010 United States Senate race (“2010 Senatorial,” n.d.), and the 2012 Presidential election (“2012 Presidential,” n.d.), however, were 11.9%, 11.2%, and 11.1%, respectively.

This same trend was occurring all over the nation. Josh Kron (2012) in “Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America,” says almost every city of any size differs in political/social outlook from that of the less populous regions around it. People in the outlying areas live “in spread-out, open, low-density privacy,” those in the cities in “rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants.” Since 1984, America’s urban areas, even in red states, according to Kron, have become more and more blue.

Perot’s percentage of the votes in 1996 dropped to 8.67%, but 99 of Kentucky’s 120 counties gave him 8% or more of their votes. The dissatisfaction and deep sense of alienation he gave voice to were widespread and equally strong across the Commonwealth. In rural counties, that dissatisfaction would give citizens all the more reason for aligning themselves in opposition to Louisville, the state’s great urban center, and its recent support of the Democratic Party and federal power. Kentucky gave Perot 120,396 votes and Bill Clinton a plurality (45.84%) with an advantage over Republican Bob Dole of 13,331 (“1996 Presidential,” n.d.).

Bill Clinton won Kentucky by a plurality because he gave enough Kentucky Democrats a reason to believe that they could vote their party and for fiscal/social conservatism. While campaigning and then in office, Clinton stole Republican thunder with his overarching political strategy that came to be known as triangulation—taking ideas from both parties and playing to the middle. Clinton called for a “new covenant,” a term sure to resonate with the traditionally minded religious. He supported trade agreements like North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), despite his union allies’ opposition. He said the days of big government were over and he called for balanced budgets. He called for and got substantial welfare reform, supporting all the while, like FDR (FDR is commonly used to reference US Pres Franklin Delano Roosevelt) (Emery, 2018), the value of work as an anti-dote to welfare dependency and spiritual disintegration. He spoke for religious diversity and religion in public life as one of America’s greatest strengths; he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993 (Clinton, 1993). Ironically, it would be gay groups’ intense opposition to the RFRA as a protection for those making arguments against gay interests that by the end of Clinton’s second term greatly expanded the nation’s cultural chasm (“‘Religious Liberty’ and the Anti-LGBT-Right,” 2016).

Clinton’s triangulation meant he also leaned left. In office from 1993-2001, President Clinton defended affirmative action for minorities and women and abortion rights and advanced gay rights in federal civil service and in the military.

Kentucky continued swinging back and forth between the two major parties. Despite Democrat Clinton’s victories in 1992 and 1996, in 1994, Republicans won four of Kentucky’s six Congressional districts, taking a majority of the seats for only the second time in history.

Republican Larry Forgy would have won the 1995 gubernatorial race, except for an all-out effort by union members and black community organizers in the state’s largest and fastest growing urban area, Louisville, to defeat him. Forgy supported right-to-work laws and opposed collective bargaining for state employees. He defended what the news media considered to be traditional understandings of family, praising stay-at-home moms and the “natural order.” According to Kentucky’s state historian James C. Klotter, Forgy’s identification with what people saw as the Christian Right brought out in Jefferson County (Louisville) large numbers of African Americans, union members, governmental employees (teachers), and women’s rights advocates (Harrison & Klotter, 1997, p. 424).

Nearly 40% of the commonwealth’s African American citizens lived in Jefferson County, with many more in adjacent counties (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). More union members lived there than in any other place in the state. Across the nation and in Kentucky’s cities, there was a growing number of black, female, government-employed, union member (Kentucky teachers), urban Democrats. According to Joseph McCartin (2008), governmental union membership, including many blacks and women, had been growing 10 times faster (1955-1975) than the workforce.

Still, African Americans were pulled in two opposite directions. Black pastors, deeply concerned about congregants’ nuclear families, strongly opposed, as did most Republicans, abortion (as did a majority of the nation’s black Protestants) and gay marriage (Barron, 2013; Gryboski, 2013). But the political and social freedoms, won across the nation and in Louisville in the 1960s (“The American Folklore Center,” n.d.; Farrington, 2011), had not resulted in appreciable economic advancement for Louisville’s black residents. The national and local decline in manufacturing had moved Louisville’s black citizens into health professions and governmental work (including that of teachers) and unions (Bennet & Gatz, 2008).

The growth after 1970 in civil service jobs and the proportion of Black citizenry holding such jobs help explain the decline in urban Republicanism and the increasing strength of an urban Democracy. By the 21st century, four of the top 10 employers in Louisville were governmental entities: the public school system (the second largest employer); the University of Louisville; county government; and state government. Employees of these governmental entities made up one third of the work force of the top 10 employers. The federal government was the city’s 12th largest employer (“Louisville Metro Local Economic Information Fiscal Year 2013-2014,” 2012). In Lexington, the top three employers were governmental entities headed by the University of Kentucky; public employees were 57% of the combined workforces of the top 10 employers (Commerce Lexington, n.d.). Government, at all levels and in many places, had replaced private industry as the cities’ large-scale employer, and since the New Deal, the Democratic Party had been the Party of governmental initiative and activity.

Forgy lost the election to people who considered their urban worker identity primary with respect to any other identity they may have had. He lost the state by 21,378 votes. His Democratic opponent, Paul Patton, got his entire winning margin and more in Jefferson County, carrying it by 25,262 votes (“1995 Gubernatorial,” n.d.). Union members took pride in defeating the Republican and what they pointedly referred to as rural Kentucky (Matuzak, 1996). Still, indicative again of the continuation of two-party, split-level politics, in the following year, Republicans reclaimed Louisville’s congressional seat, having nominated a woman with strong ties to the politically influential Catholic community there.

The newly elected Democratic governor rewarded those who had helped him, paying attention to women, minorities, and gays in state hiring. In carrying out these policies, Governor Patton aligned Kentucky Democrats with the national party and its appeals to group identity (Kentucky Personnel) and group interests in opposition to traditionalists that prized individualism within a national (Anglo) collective. State government’s largest cabinet, the Cabinet for Families and Children (the social welfare cabinet), announced that in carrying out its affirmative action policies (Kentucky State Government, 1996), it would give preferences in hiring and promotion first to Black applicants and then women, setting a goal of having a 20% minority and 75% female work force. The Cabinet’s personnel office required office managers to interview all black applicants for a position and, if a black person was not hired, to put into writing an explanation as to why not. The Cabinet set up a separate management training program for black men and women. It upgraded over a 1,000 women’s positions and salaries. The governor (Kentucky Take Our Daughters to Work Day, 2003) replaced state workers’ “Take Your Child to Work Day” with “Take Your Daughter to Work Day.” In May of his last year (2003) in office, he issued an executive order banning any discrimination against gays in hiring or advancement. These actions rewarded Louisville’s Democratic Party which was made up of people who were more urban, far more diverse in ethnicity and race and religion (or no religion), and much more likely to be governmental employees (especially educators in public schools—one of the largest employers in the city—and the University of Louisville). ¹

But Kentuckians could only go so far with the new national order. Illustrating the distinctive nature of Kentucky’s partisan politics, Kentucky, the only southern state with a closed shop (i.e., all employees of a union represented work force paid dues), and its Democratic Party were not in accord with the national Party regarding public unions, which elsewhere had governmental recognition, contracts, and mandatory state-collected dues and which had called for the unionization of the military and repeal of the federal New Deal Hatch Act that prohibited political action by governmental employees (Kocher, 2015). When neither the Democratic legislature nor, after 2000, the Democratic House/Republican Senate legislature would countenance replacing the state’s civil service system with union contracts, Governor Patton encouraged the creation of several quasi-unions across state government with no legally recognized collective bargaining rights but from which he promised to seek advice (Memorandum, 2008). Given that organized labor’s great friend, Senator Ford, had retired in 1999 and that a later legislature would end the state’s closed shop, Patton’s actions probably marked the height of union power in Kentucky.

By the time of the 2000 Democratic convention at the end of Clinton’s Presidency, nearly all in the Party were of one mind regarding a woman’s right to choose. President Clinton had aligned with the Democratic Party those desiring a new social order and a new set of values regarding race and gender relations and governmental direction of society. Reflecting the now nearly fully realized political/religious polarization, those on the House Judiciary Committee voting to impeach President Clinton were almost all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), almost all from the South and all but one male. Catholics, Jews, Blacks, women, one gay, and one Wasp voted not to impeach (Huntington, 1994). After Clinton’s 8 years, George W. Bush in running for the Presidency carried traditional-minded, family-friendly states, those with the highest white fertility rates and the states where white women had been married longest (Kotkin, 2013).

Bill Bishop (2008), in his The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart), has written that by the end of the 20th century, Americans for quite a long time had been sorting themselves out not just politically but at every level of life and community, separating from one another nationally and locally into neighborhoods, churches, communities, states, and regions of like ideas and values. People in their homogeneous groups held the same thoughts on all the issues, with the newer ethos dominating the cities and the older ethos dominating that land outside the cities. This culminated in the 2000 Presidential election with two urban counties in the nation switching from voting Republican in 1996 to voting Democratic and 854 counties, almost all nonurban with small populations, switching from voting Democratic to voting Republican, the result of a massive move of rural, married women to the Republican column.

Jonathan Haidt (2012) in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion reiterates Bishop’s conclusions by asserting that American politics is “groupish.” People use reason to defend what they already have intuited about the group they identify with and people do seek groups to belong to so as “to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves” (Haidt, 2012, p. 255). Whether it is a shared world outlook or a common location (urban vs. rural), at its most elemental sometimes divisions boil down to, says, James Campbell (2016) in Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America, a “us v. them” understanding (p. 225).

In 1998, during this cultural restructuring and political realignment, 74-year-old Wendell Ford, U.S. Senate Democratic Whip, who had supported affirmative action policies and union interests but had taken no stand on abortion and had strongly opposed gay marriage, decided not to run for a fifth term (Wendell Ford on the Issues, n.d.); Kentucky voters replaced him with a social conservative Republican.

In Polarized, Campbell (2016) wrote that the years of the cultural war saw a staggered political realignment, that is, the intense polarization of the present was built on decades of change. From the end of World War II to the early 1960s, there was an absence of ideological divisions among voters and consequently a low level of polarization. In the late 1960s, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the feminist movement changed all that with people insisting on differing world outlooks that provided no middle ground.

Politicians responded. Democratic politicians, especially in New England, moved first adopting a progressive outlook reflected in an expansive, directing federal government. Republicans, said Campbell (2016), though appealing to southerners in Presidential elections, had to await a greater unity on ideals and issues until they could successfully appeal to southerners at the congressional and state legislature level. The 1994 Republican takeover of the House attested to the growing power of Republicans in the South and the nation’s increasing level of political polarization.

Kentucky’s history since World War II up to the 1990s strongly reflects this national political realignment pattern. Kentucky continued to do so throughout the 1990s and beyond as the state’s Republicans gained more congressional seats and more state legislative seats.

Helping this along, Kentucky’s rural counties, especially in the central Bluegrass Region, kept their ancient, separate identity as not-the-city by remaining rural or becoming more suburban. By remaining what they had always been, voters in these counties began to tilt the state’s two-party/split-level balance of political power in a direction opposite that of now Democratic Louisville.

Nearly a 100 years before, these long-time bastions of the Democracy had voted against the CITY as a place of (a) overbearing and liberty-threatening Republican big businessmen and bankers (such as the Alcohol Trust, the Tobacco Trust, the Oil Trust, and coal companies) who, aided by black voters, supported Republican national government; (b) Jockey Club members (wealthy horse farm and race track owners); and (c) sin (Louisville had 700 taverns and 100 brothels). Rural Democrats had seen the city as a place of great aggregates of threatening power and personal moral laxness (Klotter, 1996, p. 11). Burnham (1982) has noted that struggles between the metropole centers of decision-making and outlying regional/parochial areas have been a recurring theme in American history.

As the late 20th century’s cultural divide became more pronounced, these same counties began voting Republican as a way of continuing to vote against the CITY, its aggregates of power (though the particular aggregates of power had changed), and its alien (to the rural counties citizens) ethos. As far back as the 1967 gubernatorial election, there had been some indication of the shift coming in the state’s political demarcation lines; Republican Louie Nunn won while losing urban support and gaining ground in the rural Democratic Bluegrass Region campaigning against the national Democratic Party’s Great Society and the programs of the federal government (Phillips, 1969).

Between 1988 and 2012, years encompassing Democrat Patton’s (1995-2003) and Bill Clinton’s (1993-2001) administration, the central Kentucky counties of Jessamine, Madison, Mercer, Washington, and Woodford voted Republican in every Presidential election, except Madison in 1988 (1988-2012 Presidential). In 1998, Republicans won back central Kentucky’s Congressional seat, giving that Party control of all the state’s Congressional seats save the one in northern Kentucky (where the Republican incumbent had gone to the U.S. Senate) won by a well-liked, local politician closing out his public career as a blue dog (i.e., fiscally conservative) Democrat opposed to abortion and gay marriage (“Statistics of the Congressional Election of November 3, 1998,” n.d.).

In the last decade of the 20th century, this reversal of Party identity in Kentucky reached down to the state legislature. In 1990, Nelson, Marion and Washington counties and Mercer, Jessamine and Madison elected Republican state senators (Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, 2005). Altogether, Kentucky Republicans during the Clinton administration took nine senate seats away from the Democratic Party (Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, 2005; Senate Members by District, n.d.).

By 1999, the Republicans had won almost enough seats to control the Kentucky Senate. Taking note of how the Party had taken control of the Senate the only other time in history (1919-1920), the Party got two incumbent Democrats to switch allegiances giving the Republicans a two vote majority. In 2003, Kentuckians for the first time in 36 years elected a Republican Governor, Ernie Fletcher.

The Republican Party in Kentucky built upon its successes, especially in the Bluegrass Region. Shelby County in 1999 elected a Republican representative and then in 2003 elected him as a senator. In 2003, also, Scott, Kenton, Grant, and Owen elected a Republican senator. In 2005 Nelson, Bullitt, and Spencer elected a Republican representative (Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, 2005). By 2012, Democrats still controlled the House of Representatives, but had only 14 of 38 seats in the Senate, one of these from Lexington and five from Louisville (Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, 2005; Senate Members by District, n.d.).

Indicative of the convoluted nature of politics and race relations in Kentucky, several of the Bluegrass counties once Democratic but now voting Republican, Mercer, Shelby, Boyle, Madison, and Marion, created their own local Human Rights Commissions (“Local Human Rights Commissions in Kentucky,” n.d.). Bardstown in Nelson County as early as 1966 passed the state’s first local fair housing ordinance. In the 21st century, Bardstown also elected a black mayor. Residents of Springfield in Washington County established an African American Heritage Council that has held an annually occurring week-long celebration (“Arts & Entertainment-See Springfield Kentucky,” n.d.) and, in 2014, elected an African American woman as their mayor (Mattingly, 2015). According to state historian James Klotter, two national studies, 1986 and 1991, found Kentucky public schools to be “the most integrated in the nation.” (Harrison & Klotter, 1997, p. 391). In the early 21st century, black and white parents successfully sued before the U.S. Supreme Court the Jefferson County School Board to end its busing program (Quick & Damante, 2016). By the 21st century, ideology and geography divided white and black, rural and urban Kentuckians, Republicans and Democrats, more than visceral racism (assigning worth to people based on race).

None of this reduced ideological conflicts. Turn of the century polls revealed that outside the South majorities of Catholics and Protestants, African Americans, the nonreligious, and Democrats supported abortion rights and gay marriage, and the federal government’s promotion of same. Majorities of Republicans, Southerners (including many Democrats), and evangelicals, that is, Kentucky traditionalists, did not (“Fact Sheet, Gay and Lesbian Issues,” 2013; “Pew Finds Huge Regional Divide in Abortion Debate,” 2013).

At one time in Kentucky, Catholics and Protestants had divided over the parameters of governmental activism in pursuit of social justice. But the Protestant culture over time had assimilated the large number of Catholic immigrants, according to Huntington. Catholics shared the Protestant work ethic. They understood that Christianity and republicanism were inextricably intertwined, each supporting the other. Such people had become American Catholics. In the post war years in Louisville, the Catholic Knights of Columbus joined Protestant/Jewish Masonic Shriners in holding dinner dances (Huntington, 1994).

In recent decades, such people in Kentucky have shared the religious concerns of those on the right bank of the cultural divide insisting not on a more equitable sharing of wealth, but on what they understood to be proper personal and communal moral conduct. Catholics in Louisville helped give Republicans control of that city. As late as the first decade of the 21st century, Louisville had a Catholic Republican congresswoman. Northern Kentucky had a Catholic Republican Congress in the late 20th century who became U. S. Senator at the end of the century.

The Enlightenment, according to James Hunter (1991), had replaced the Reformation as America’s cultural fault line. The Senatorial District comprising Nelson, Washington, and Marion Counties with their numerous, rural/suburban Catholics and home to the first bishop’s seat west of the Appalachian Mountains was one of the first to break with a Democratic past—the area had dominated state Democratic politics in the early 20th century—and elect a Republican state senator (Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, 2005; Senate Members by District, n.d.).

In 2004, Kentuckians by a very large majority amended their state constitution to recognize only a man/woman marriage. Kentucky’s two largest universities could not abide this action and its effect on their employee benefits policies. American universities in general, according to James Piereson in Shattered Consensus, hold to a progressive world view that rejects the traditionalists’ or political right’s understanding of truths and absolutes (Piereson, 2015). The University of Kentucky (in Lexington) and the University of Louisville, which had recognized gay couples in providing employment benefits, on the advice of the former Speaker of the Kentucky House and then (2005) the state’s Democratic Attorney General, Greg Stumbo, changed their personnel policies to allow any employee living long-term with someone else to share with that person (as spouses do) employment benefits such as health insurance (Boehnke & Jester, 2007). In the next three state-wide federal elections, 2008 (“2008 Presidential,” n.d.), 2010 Senate race (“2010 Senatorial,” n.d.), and 2012 (“2012 Presidential,” n.d.), Louisville continued voting Democratic and Fayette County (Lexington) voted Democratic also, although by a slim margin.

The rest of the state voted differently. In 2010, Republican candidate Rand Paul, with strong backing from the state’s Tea Party, won the U.S. Senate election by an 11% margin. Lexington voted Democratic by 1.4%; Louisville voted Democratic by an 11% margin, the reverse of the state outcome (“2010 Senatorial,” n.d.).

Contrary, perhaps, to the libertarian Tea Party’s understanding of the state, newly elected Senator Paul had benefited from a now-decades long cultural war and most Kentuckians siding with traditionalists in that war. Tim Havrilek (Cheeves, 2013), consultant to state Democratic campaigns, stated the following after Paul’s victory in 2010:

. . . there has never been nor will there ever be a future for a progressive/liberal agenda in Kentucky. [Winning] Democrats . . . were all smart enough to champion Christian values, guns, agriculture and veterans. In short, you don’t get to hold office and talk about jobs and education until you get right with God and rural Kentucky.

In 2012, President Obama, when referring to his position on abortion and his position on gay marriage, reiterated his stated position of 2008 that one’s personal religion should not inform public debate or decisions (Mansfield, 2008). The delegates to the Democratic National Convention that year shouted down a proposal that would have made one reference in the Party’s platform to God. In early 2009, the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security had labeled one-issue Americans, such as state’s rights advocates and those opposed to abortion as possible threats to national security (“Homeland Security on Guard for ‘Right-Wing Extremists,’” 2014; Lake & Hudson, 2009). A September 2012 poll of Kentucky voters found that a large majority of those identifying themselves as evangelicals, or supporting pro-life positions, or favoring a limited/checked federal government intended to vote Republican in that November’s election (“Mitt Romney Has Large Lead in Kentucky Bluegrass, Poll Shows,” 2012).

Kentuckians’ votes in the Presidential elections of the 21st century gave further indication that the state might be moving toward a more profound political polarization, more like the rest of the country. Kentuckians for the first time voted Republican in four consecutive elections. In 2000 (“2000 Presidential,” n.d.), the winning Republican carried Kentucky by a 15% margin; in 2004, 20%; in 2008, 16%; and in 2012, 20%.

In central Kentucky’s Bluegrass Region, in 2012, Republicans took back the Congressional seat lost in 2004 to the grandson of two-time Governor and U.S. Senator, Happy Chandler. Albert Benjamin Chandler III, a very well-liked politician, had served two terms as Kentucky’s Attorney General before going to Congress. Winning candidate Andy Barr said he won because of “a consensus of shared values in the district.” Chandler said, “The Barr campaign did an excellent job in attaching me to the president” (Brammer, 2012). Barr carried 17 of the 19 counties, all but Franklin (and Frankfort, the state capital) and Fayette (Lexington). Even Lexington was divided geographically with the inner city (Black citizens and university professors) solidly Democratic and surrounding suburbia and farmland Republican.

Chandler had lost the Bluegrass counties surrounding Lexington, the land that had been ever loyal to his grandfather—when Lexington had not been—a power base that had been bequeathed to the elder Chandler by J. C. W. Beckham, Governor and U.S. Senator from Bardstown in Nelson County, who 100 years before had led the moral wing of the Democratic Party in opposition to liquor and gambling and coal companies’ power. These counties collectively had voted for Beckham in his 1927 attempted return to public office in the governor’s race and for Happy Chandler in his first, successful run for the governor’s chair in 1935 (Kentucky Directory, 1927, 1935). Although no coal mines existed in the district, people of central Kentucky in 2012, in a seeming reversal of a century before, were upset with what seemed to them a federal government of secular values arbitrarily regulating Big Coal out of business in Kentucky (Brammer, 2012). What had not changed in well over a 100 years was these people’s antipathy toward the city and the federal government. For these people, the federal government’s vast bureaucracy had replaced coal companies as the domineering power overwhelming the individual and the local community.

Between 2012 and 2015, the cultural issues of gay rights/marriage and abortion continued to call on Kentuckians to take sides. These issues caused no internal strains within the Republican Party—libertarians, who did not like any government dictating personal behavior, kept quiet. These issues sharply divided Democrats generally and Democrats in executive and legislative positions in Frankfort, with the Governor (“Beshear Making a Political Appeal,” 2014; Cheeves, 2014a; “Commonwealth of Kentucky Senate Roll Call”, 2014) initially siding with traditionalists, the Attorney General running for Governor standing for the newer visions of American society (Youngman, 2014a), and with most Democrats in the legislature voting with Republicans when such issues came before them. All those Democrats (including the state’s African American legislators) in the state’s General Assembly supporting gay marriage and abortion rights were representatives of the state’s cities (Brammer, 2014b; Cheeves, 2014b).

In 2014, the Democratic and Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate had taken opposite positions on gay marriage, abortion, and the proper role of the federal government (Kentucky Family Foundation). The incumbent Republican Senator Mitch McConnell had a high unfavorable rating in polls (Youngman, 2014c). The Secretary of State’s records showed that most Kentucky voters had registered as Democrats. But according to an October 2014 Gallup poll, most Kentuckians thought of themselves as aligned with the Republican Party (McCarthy, 2014). In November, Kentuckians, who had elected only two Republican Governors since World War II, reelected Republican McConnell to an unprecedented sixth term as an U.S. Senator with a 15% margin of victory, 57% to 42% (Youngman, 2014b).

When a U.S. Judge in Louisville found Kentuckians’ amendment to their own constitution limiting marriage to heterosexual couples to be in violation of the federal constitution, the state’s Democratic Governor, with the state’s Democratic Attorney General refusing to do so, had appealed that decision to the United States Supreme Court. In June 2015, the Court found in its Obergefell decision that states could not prohibit gay marriages.

Democratic Rowan County Clerk, Kim Davis, claimed under Kentucky’s religious freedom law a right to not have to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, insisting the state law compelled state government to accommodate her religious convictions by seeking a way to allow all to the get marriage licenses without her participation. The Governor insisted she resign (Brammer, 2015a). Another federal judge ordered a Deputy Clerk in Rowan County to issue licenses and ordered the Clerk not to interfere. National Republican politicians came to Rowan County in defense of the Clerk. She switched her party registration to Republican. A state-wide poll sponsored by the Louisville and Lexington newspapers found that 42% supported Davis’s position while 51% did not, with a majority of Republicans agreeing with Davis and a majority of Democrats not agreeing. The poll found a large rural/urban divide. According to the poll, most people in Davis’s rural, eastern Kentucky were supportive of the Clerk, while 66% of those living in Louisville said she should conform to the law or resign (Youngman, 2015c). Across the state, Democratic candidates for state-wide office in the fall of 2015, according to the Chairman of the University of Kentucky’s Political Science Department, were refusing to run as Democrats, running instead as if they were Republicans on “the same old fluff” about faith and family values (Brammer & Cheeves, 2015).

They campaigned that way because many Kentucky voters saw themselves and their communities as reflecting those values. A Lexington Herald Leader community columnist, Heather Johnson, of Mount Sterling (two counties east of Lexington) wrote, after the 2016 election, of Kentucky in very nearly the same way Josh Kron in Red State had about the nation at large. Johnson (2017) wrote that “it was clear that Jefferson County (home to Louisville, the largest city) and Fayette County (home to the second-largest city, Lexington) were a world apart from the rest of the state . . .” Johnson made her preference clear. She wrote that she treasured the traditional, nonurban society where there was little abortion, family and faith sustained communities, and people knew each other.

In the November 2015 election, Republicans won five of the seven state-wide executive offices. The Republican gubernatorial candidate, despite having run a bad campaign “raising questions about his temperament, his honesty, and his campaign strategy,” came on strong at the very end, supporting County Clerk Kim Davis and running advertisements declaring himself a Christian. The turnout of voters was low 30.7%, although larger than the immediately preceding gubernatorial election in which the popular, incumbent Democrat won reelection. Republican Bevin won by a 53% to 44% margin carrying 106 of the state’s 120 counties. Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington) were two of the 14 counties voting Democratic, underscoring the rural/urban divide as integral to the greater cultural divide (Youngman, 2015a; Kentucky election, 2015). The incumbent Democratic State Auditor defeated for reelection stated that “The degree to which the national Democratic party is out of step with mainstream Kentuckians has created an environment where it’s extraordinarily difficult for a Democrat to win statewide” (Barnes, 2015). One political analyst said the state was no longer purple but red. Not quite, but very quickly moving that way (Youngman, 2015b).

Figure 1.

The percentage of the popular vote in Kentucky won by Democratic and Republican candidates in post–World War II presidential elections (Leip, 2016).

By 2015, the realignment of the two parties in Kentucky was nearly complete. Wendell Ford’s Democratic Party, which had allied with Kentucky’s dominant industries, coal and tobacco, while seeking federal monetary benefits, had been replaced by Paul Patton’s Democratic Party and its greater emphasis on affirmative action/diversity, feminism/right to choose, gay rights, quasi-governmental unions, and a federal government strongly supportive of such causes. Urban, big corporation Republican centers had become Democratic, governmental employer domains. Big businesses still existed in the cities; they now strongly supported affirmative action programs (Blinder, 2018). The state’s great public universities had become very well known for their own diversity policies regarding employment and admissions (Conner, 2017; Foster, 2016). Louisville had become the heart of the state Democratic Party and its support of newer cultural values. Old, rural Democratic communities had started voting Republican.

Although the Democratic Party had never nominated a black man or woman to state-wide office, black Kentuckians staunchly defended their Party and its causes. They did so even though it is likely most black Kentuckians, like most African Americans elsewhere, did not support gay marriage. The pastor of Lexington’s oldest black church said it was offensive to compare gay marriage with the civil rights movement (Eblen, 2015). Still, it was black organized labor that helped defeat traditionalist Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Forgy in 1995. It was Lexington’s Human Rights Commission that ordered a local print company to print t-shirts with gay slogans (“Gay Rights Group Files Human Rights Complaint Against T-Shirt Company,” 2012). Black legislators from Louisville and Lexington voted against the Kentucky Freedom of Religion Act that perhaps allowed for religious exemptions to antidiscrimination ordinances regarding gay citizens (Brammer & Musgrave, 2013; Commonwealth, 2014). It was Lexington’s African American State Senator (“Senator Rightly Blasts Bill to Restrict Abortions,” 2014) who said a bill requiring a woman seeking an abortion to have a face-to-face consultation with her doctor was “a guilt trip that we want to impose on women. We want to engage in humiliation, embarrassment and shaming.” African American Bill Farmer of Lexington, President of the United Way of the Bluegrass, in 2013 cut off funding for the Boy Scouts in central Kentucky because the organization would not allow gay Scout Masters (Kocher, 2013). During Kentucky’s 2014 U.S. Senate race, Georgia Powers, the state’s first person of color in the state Senate and its first woman, called on all black Kentuckians to vote Democratic because the incumbent Republican wanted to take away their right to vote—a reference to Republicans supporting voter identification laws (Brammer, 2014a).

Of great significance as an historical first and as a portent of a possible decrease in black Democratic solidarity, Bevin’s Lieutenant Governor running mate—the candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor run as a team, there is one vote for both—was Jenean Hampton, the first black person to win a state-wide office in Kentucky (Youngman, 2015a). She won in the same week that African American Ben Carson had topped a national poll (NBC) of Republican voters’ preferences for President (Murray, 2015). A week later the traditionalist-minded “Kentucky Baptist Convention Elected Its First Black President” (2015). Only time will tell what significance, if any, these occurrences might have on the national and state cultural wars and political polarization.

In the next year, 2016, Kentucky, still a majority Democratic voter registration state, for the fifth time in a row voted for the Republican Presidential nominee, giving Trump a nearly 30% margin over Democrat Clinton. At 58.9%, the state’s voter turnout was two percentage points above the national average (Wilson, 2017). A large percentage of the counties with the biggest turnout were those with voters mostly registered as Democrats, the majority of which were voting for the Republican (Konik, 2016). Trump carried all of Kentucky’s 120 counties, save two, Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington), the two largest urban areas of the state, home to the state’s two largest universities, and home to many of the state’s minority voters. Maybe even more momentous was the Republican Party moving from minority status in Kentucky’s House of Representatives to super majority status (64-36), taking control for the first time since 1920 (Decision, 2016). Kentuckians had changed their state’s political complexion from a fading purple to red.

This election was not the aberration many thought it to be, but rather the latest example of Burnham’s metropole versus the outlying areas. Across the nation and in Kentucky, Trump had appealed to a particular set of voters by resurrecting Wallace supporters’ anger, Perot supporters’ alienation, and Reagan’s dawn-of-a-new-day hopefulness.

Forty years before the 2016 election, Burnham (1982), when referencing persistent low voter participation since the turn of the 20th century, noted that it was due to the degeneration of political parties, which in turn was due to a deep sense of alienation on the part of many eligible voters. Such people, wrote Burnham, assumed their thoughts and votes made no difference, that decisions were made by a small power elite.

Voters in Kentucky had never been able to identify with Harvard educated, erudite Obama. They saw the outgoing President as part of the national elite that discounted and ignored them. Obama had demeaned them with his talk of their bitterness and need for guns and bibles and his lack of empathy when bragging about bankrupting coal plants. As elsewhere, the Scots-Irish of Kentucky had once been loyal Democrats but had now become the core of Red America (Tilove, 2008).

Many Trump supporters in Red America felt not only culturally estranged, but socially repressed and depressed economically. People studying the election have found a high correlation between support for Trump and those areas of the country experiencing an opioid epidemic, with numerous people on Medicaid and large numbers of grandparents having custody of grandchildren (Long, 2017; “Study,” 2016; Wiltz, 2016). Shannon Monnat, assistant professor of rural sociology and demography at Penn State University, has stated that “In a lot of places, good-paying jobs and the dignity that goes along with those jobs has been replaced by suffering and hopelessness and the belief that people in power don’t really care about them or their communities” (“Study,” 2016, emphasis added). Monnat asserted that concern on the part of the one’s left to pick up the pieces for “community level well-being played an important role in this election” (“Study,” 2016; Wiltz, 2016). Like the nation, those parts of Kentucky hard hit by drug addiction and unemployment, dependent on Medicaid and grandparents caring for grandchildren gave strong support to Trump (Cheeves, 2015; Kentucky Grandfacts, n.d.; Long, 2017).

After World War II, Kentucky’s two-party, split-level, purple system had centered on which group of white people controlled the government and public funds. There was very little disagreement at all over definitions of reality, right and wrong, and freedom.

The national cultural war that began in the 1960s changed all that. Kentucky became, like the nation: morally, socially, racially, geographically, and politically polarized. As most Kentuckians, regardless of party registration, considered themselves to be traditionalists regarding such matters, this polarization and choosing of sides over time made the Republican Party the dominant political organization within the state.