Thread by @Nate_Cohn

I think this is a tough question, and I think the responses reflect it!
But I thought it'd be fun to weigh-in on the question that I'm more qualified to address, and that's whether West Virginia is Southern politically.
To me, the short answer is 'no'

One test is Civil War politics. For a century, post-civil war politics were defined by Civil War loyalties. WV is a state defined by its Civil War loyalty.
As a consequence WV was not part of the solid South. It voted GOP in all but one election from 1896-1928, for ex.

For fun, here's a map of the 1916 election (still some missing data on cleaning this up, but good enough).
WV even voted GOP in this election, the best Dem showing from the Civil War to 1932.
The contours of the Solid South are clear enough

As an aside, some people in my thread said that this was sufficient for WV not to be 'southern.' I don't think that's so obvious! As you can see, many parts of the South had union loyalties. They failed to breakaway, but if they did, I'd say an eastern TN would be Southern

West Virginia instead becomes a blue state in the New Deal, with political loyalties forged in the eras fights over industry, labor, etc.
Here's the swing from 16-44, where impoverished areas, urban north, TVA, and old economy resource extraction zones swing D

(I don't think swinging Dem during the New Deal makes WV politics non-Southern, btw; But I think *becoming* Dem during the New Deal is a story more like, say, western PA)

The next phase of Southern politics is most famous: the dissolution of the Democratic hold on the white South, beginning in 1948 and ending in 1968.
But WV really wasn't part of that swing, shown here in the swing from 48 to 68.
In fact, WV votes Humphrey *and* doesn't shift R

I should also note that WV was entirely unpersuaded by Wallace in 68 (Thurmond wasn't even on the ballot)

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/708768249148624896?s=20

West Virginia's Democratic allegiance lasts all the way through the end of the 20th century, and still leans blue all the way through the so-called GOP 'southern strategy' of Nixon and Reagan. It's the only plausibly Southern state voting for Dukakis in 88

When you put it all together, WV is the only plausibly Southern state--or even *area*, to add in eastern TN--that fits all of these things:
--votes GOP post-war
--leans Dem post-New Deal, and post-Civil Rights/southern strat
--doesn't even trend R post-48
--below avg for Wallace

Since 1996, West Virginia swings hard right. To me, that's mainly the urban-rural, college-noncollege, left progressive v. populist conservative dynamic we see basically everywhere in America, in or out of the South (swing from 96-20)

This is the era when West Virginia politics do start to seem more southern. Yes, much of this pattern is just that it's more rural--like dependence on the natural resource extraction, a large number of gun owners, low college grad rates, etc

But WV is of predominantly Southern ancestry (it was part of VA, after all!). Like the South, Evangelicals represent a big share of the electorate. In part as a consequence, Bush culture war did tend to yield somewhat larger gains in the rural South than North (here swing 96-04)

WV also reacted to Obama in a way that's much more like the white South. Here the swing from 12-04.
Of the sort of spots that swung Democratic during the New Deal era (go look at the 16-48 map again), the southern ones bolted at Obama but not so much northern

There's some room to wonder how much of this represents a continuation of longer term trends. But the clear regional split here is certainly consistent with the idea that white *southern* Democrats reacted adversely to Obama because of race

It should also be noted that the particularly severe D decline in WV is undoubtedly bc of Obama's coal policies, which not only forfeited but totally reversed the source of D strength in the state
But given the pattern, naive to think it was only coal and not race too

During the Trump era, white educational polarization basically reaches everywhere in the country, regardless of region. By the end of the Obama-Trump elections, almost every vestige of the New Deal coalition is gone

There's a rough if still fairly telling correlation between Dem gains between 1916-1948 and GOP gains between 2004-2020 in white, rural areas. Fairly remarkable given just how much has changed in between

And although I apparently didn't mention at the top of the thread, despite intending to, this is all in response to the question I posed a few days ago: is WV a Southern state?

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1401919996192755721