Because it’s the simple answer to the question? There’s really no deep mystery here to explain - Kentuckians overall preferred Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
Please, take another look at the excellent series of posts starting with @engineer_comp_geek in Post #7.
Party registration simply isn’t a particularly good predictor of voting behavior in U.S. Presidential elections.
I know this doesn’t reflect reality, but assume everyone that voted registered to a party. And everyone that voted, voted based on their registration. (I guarantee you that those two things aren’t 100% true, but this is a hypothetical.)
Out of 1,578,612 registered Republicans, 1,326,646, or almost exactly 84% voted for Trump.
Since 1,670,574 voters registered as Democrats, if 84% of them voted as the Republicans did, then Biden would have received 1,403,930 votes (rounded up to the nearest integer).
That means that 631,456 people who registered as Democrats didn’t vote who would have voted if they had a proportionate turnout. That’s staggering.
I think, though, it’s far more plausible that rather than half of the Democrats staying home (after 4 years of Trump?!) the initial assumptions I presented just aren’t accurate. At all. People who register aren’t tied to that party’s votes, especially not in every race.
I think it might shed more light if you broaden this beyond the presidential race. See how the parties did in each race during that election, from the national election all the way down to the municipal level. Maybe it gets more blue as you get more local. Or maybe it gets more red.
(I won’t do it because I’m lazy.)
That’s not at all how I’m reading it. Let’s chop it up:
Registrations:
|1,578,612 registered Republicans (44.15%)
|1,670,574 registered Democrats (46.72%)
That adds up to 3,249,186 voters registered to these two parties.
Actual votes:
|1,326,646 for Trump/Pence (Republican; 62.09%)|
|772,474 for Biden/Harris (Democratic; 36.15%)|
That adds up to 2,099,120 actual votes cast.
3,249,186 is greater than 2,099,120. So there’s a lot of people who are registered as a particular party, who did not vote at all, on both sides. Hell, the actual vote totals for Trump are also less than the number of registered Republicans. There’s no serious excess of Republican votes that needs to be explained. If Trump had walked away with, say, 1.8 million votes, this might be a mystery, but as it is, it seems clear: more registered Republicans came out to vote for Trump than registered Democrats voted for Biden. There might be some few people who switched their votes around, but not over 700,000 of them.
There were about 1.3 million people who stayed home, and it’s most likely that they were disproportionately Democrats.
Yes, it is quite staggering, which is why I think that’s the discussion that you should be having. A lot of people just didn’t vote, and it seems clear that a majority of them were Democrats. The alternative is that, the number of registered Democrats who actually voted Republican is offset by a large portion of the registered Republicans staying home. Otherwise, Trump would have won by even more votes.
Why is it more plausible that a significant fraction of 631,456 registered Democrats switched votes, while an offsetting number of registered Republicans stayed home? Now you’ve got two massive anomalies to explain, not just one.
Because being registered to a party means nothing.
I’m not in Kentucky, I’m in Washington State, but I have never in my life registered to either party. In the past I mostly voted Republican, these days I am overwhelmingly voting Democrat (and the Republicans I vote for are usually special cases and always the more local elections). Registration means nothing to me. It probably means nothing to a lot of people.
And once you accept that very simple premise, it takes away the mystery. You don’t have two anomalies, you have no anomalies.
ETA: If there was ever a time I would have registered, it would probably have been as Republican a couple decades ago. And I likely wouldn’t bother to change that now, because who cares? It doesn’t matter; it has no impact on my ability to vote or how much my vote counts.
BS. It’s not a simple answer when the whole point of the thread is why votes don’t reflect registration. GTFO with that.
They did a lot of registration there. You pick a party (if you want) when you register to vote in Kentucky. And as long as you remain a registered voter, this party sticks with you even if you never vote in a primary. And it seems to be cumbersome to change parties (you have to re-register by the end of the prior calendar year, long before people who aren’t politics junkies are thinking about these things). So if you ticked the Democratic box in 1974 because that’s what everyone around you was, you eventually slid into mostly voting for Republicans, and you don’t vote in primaries, the state still thinks you’re a Democrat.
Republicans have been gaining ground in party registration since the mid-90s, according to the chart in this article. The state was just so lopsided for Democrats that there are still echoes of that in the registration figures today.
The 2012 presidential primaries in West Virginia and Oklahoma show just how useless party registration can be at determining current preferences. Obama was functionally unopposed for renomination that year, but in West Virginia, 40% of the vote went to Keith Judd, a random prison inmate. In Oklahoma, he got 57%, with the other 43% of the vote split between three vanity candidates, one of whom was Randall Terry, an anti-abortion extremist. These voters were people who were nominally registered as Democrats but who didn’t actually have any interest in voting for Democrats (and were probably peeved to be handed Democratic ballots when they expected to be voting for Romney or Huckabee or whoever).
Kim Davis is a good example of this.
She registered as a Democrat when she turned 18 in 1983 and even won elected office as a Democrat in 2014. She made national news in 2015 when she defied a court order and refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.
In 2016, several Republican presidential candidates voiced support for her and held a rally for her.
In 2020, Trump won Rowan County by > 20 points. There are lots of Kim Davises.
So, would you care to actually engage with the “whole point of the thread”? So far, you’ve made two posts. In one, you dismissed one poster as threadshitting and advanced two unsupported hypotheses while ignoring all of the posts discussing why party registration doesn’t necessarily reflect voting behavior. The other consists entirely of dismissing my post engaging with you as bullshit and telling me to get the fuck out of the thread. Which I won’t be doing.
Here’s some actual facts from the Kentucky State Board of Elections [PDF]:
Total turnout statewide by registered Democrats was 59.4%. Total turnout statewide by registered Republicans was 64.4%. Total turnout by voters with other party registrations was 45%.
So, Republicans had a turnout advantage, but not nearly enough of one to explain Trump’s margin. And pre-election polling consistently predicted a similar margin of victory to what Trump actually achieved, and entirely inconsistent with a model of voting behavior based solely on party registration. It is, of course, possible that some voters that consider themselves Republican register as Democrats to vote in that party’s primaries - see @DoctorJ’s post upthread. But given how red Kentucky is, even county by county, that doesn’t seem likely as an explanation to me. Again, as numerous posts in this thread have explained, party of registration is a lagging indicator that simply isn’t very useful in predicting actual voting behavior in a Presidential election.
Seems like a good explanation.
Democratic policies seen as hostile toward the coal industry have hurt the party at least as far back as Hillary Clinton’s seeming glee at eliminating coal jobs, and likely contributed to the lopsided 2020 margins for Trump in eastern Kentucky counties (though Trump did relatively little to attempt to revive coal). But as the electoral map shows, only two counties in the entire state (Fayette and Jefferson, containing Lexington and Louisville) went for Biden, so non-coal producing areas didn’t care much for him either.
"This year, Republican rhetoric about Obama-era environmental regulations and the GOP-dubbed “war on coal” was less prominent, as the industry continued to decline in the face of cheaper natural gas despite Trump’s rollback of some regulations.
“In recent interviews with voters across Kentucky, many Trump supporters said they didn’t blame the president for that or for rising coronavirus cases in the Bluegrass State. Many cited the issue of jobs, fear of new gun control measures and social issues such as abortion as their top concerns.”
“Still more said they were voting to oppose liberals, a reflection of an election dominated by the country’s increasingly pitched culture war.”
On the strength of posts from this topic and the linked topic, I am quite convinced a large number of Kentuckians registered as Democrats voted Republican. I wonder if exit polls capture this pattern?
Here is Edison Research’s exit poll, relied on by ABC, CBS, CNN (cite), NBC, The New York Times (cite), etc:
| Party ID | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| (n=1,656) | Democrat (30%) |
Republican (46%) |
Independent (24%) |
| Biden | 84% | 4% | 24% |
| Trump | 15% | 95% | 55% |
My read of this is that out of roughly 500 Democrats polled, 75 or so (15%) crossed over to vote for Trump. Contrast with roughly 760 Republicans polled, of which maybe 30 (4%) crossed over to vote for Biden.
If voter turnout was a uniform 60% and crossover votes nonexistent, we would expect to see around 1 million votes for Biden/Harris from registered Democrats alone. If we extrapolated the above exit polls with the actual turnout provided by gdave in post #30,
or even better, the absolute turnout by party affiliation (same source),
| Reg. Dem turnout | Reg. Rep turnout | Other turnout |
|---|---|---|
| 992,639 | 1,010,845 | 145,962 |
we would expect 904k votes for Biden/Harris (834k votes from registered Democrats, plus 40k from registered Republicans, plus 30k votes from other voters). But we actually see 772,474 votes total.
Exit polls are tough to rely on for 2020 due to the pandemic. I read somewhere that a majority of the votes in Kentucky were absentee. The elderly who might be described by earlier posters as having never switched their party affiliation would have been likely to vote absentee as there was no vaccine at the time. Nevertheless I think it is telling that polling showed a significant pattern of Democrats crossing over.
If I still had doubts about the numbers, I would look at 2016 data - Clinton lost Kentucky, too. But I think I’m well convinced for this topic.
~Max
Postscript: There are now more registered Republicans than Democrats in Kentucky (1,612,060 to 1,609,569 according to the June statistics).
I agree. Much more Democratic state in the past and maybe there are local races that are still competitive between the parties.
ETA: I see Republicans have taken a narrow lead in the state.
What HRC said:
Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.
So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.
What GOP voters heard:
we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business
And that’s because Fox News had that out of context soundbite on infinite repeat.
In terms of trying to distinguish actual party affiliation, just look at votes across different positions, not just the President. If you draw the spreads for every position like:
D <=============> R
-------|–|------------------------- President
----------|------|------------------ Governor
--------|-----|--------------------- Secretary of State
Etc.
If you take the smallest Democratic tally and the smallest Republican tally, those are going to be fairly good proxies for straight line voters. In the above example, you would take the Presidential tally for the Democratic affiliation and the Governor’s result for the Republican.
Everyone between is some shade of independent/3rd party, with some being little distinguishable from a straight ticket voter but it would be subjective to say where to cut between partisan and independent/3rd party.
Sure, but she was stupid to say it like that. She could have said something like, “The latest trends in energy generation are going to make it more challenging for coal companies to keep miners on the job.” That puts the blame on “trends” and the coal companies instead of making it sound like she personally is going to take away those jobs.
Wouldn’t have won her Kentucky, but still.
HRC did propose a $30 billion aid plan that was supposed to benefit coal miners, in part to retrain them for other jobs. The problem was, that even if such a plan had gotten approval, such jobs (if they could be found) were seen as paying far less than what coal miners were making.
"There was always that feeling that Democrats looked out for the interests of working people, like coal miners. Well, then Obama came along and declared war on coal – and it really was a war on coal – and the Republicans completely turned that around,” (director of Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues Al) Cross said. “You had people who used to despise coal operators being on the same side as coal operators, defending their mutual interests.”…Former coal miner Sen. Robin Webb, D-Grayson, said national Democrats “demonizing” coal led to a worse fate for members of her party in Eastern Kentucky. “The reason I registered as a Democrat was for working people. As a coal miner, I certainly recognize the benefit of unions, and worker protection,” Webb said “… I think (coal) certainly was a tipping point in elections, and some of the demonization of fossil fuels, which we’ve relied on here for so long. I think the resentment is high.”
https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article262732642.html#storylink=cpy
As that story indicates, there are numerous other reasons why the Democratic Party has gone from a powerhouse in eastern Kentucky (and elsewhere in the state) to playing catchup. It’s not a hopeless cause (we do have a Democratic governor after all) but the party needs to be smarter - which translates to more than “better messaging”.
Djdjfjf
Heck, couldn’t she have just pretty much said the same thing minus that one soundbite? Maybe like:
‘So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country.
‘And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget the people who labored in coal mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
‘Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.’