The last remaining Democratic state senator in rural Kentucky just announced she’s switching parties. Robin Webb’s partisan defection leaves the thirty-eight-member Kentucky State Senate with only six Democrats, all in the Lexington and Louisville areas. Explaining her decision on Fox News, Webb accused the Democratic Party of abandoning rural voters.
“I’ve tried to be the rural voice, but it’s just gone — not unheard, but certainly not acknowledged, and certainly not given the credence that I would think our people need,” Webb said.
Webb’s biography is the political history of Eastern Kentucky coal country in microcosm. She became a Democrat when she began working as a coal miner in the late 1970s. Back then, the coal-mining regions of Appalachia were Democratic Party strongholds, thanks to the saturation of membership in party-aligned unions. In the coming decades, union coal jobs disappeared, and Democrats courted new constituencies elsewhere. Now these same regions are firmly Republican.
Webb, a state legislator since 1999, represented a Republican-voting district as a Democrat for ten years before resolving the awkward discrepancy. The Kentucky Democrat is not entirely extinct — the state’s governor, Andy Beshear, is a Democrat, and there is still one more Democrat representing rural eastern Kentucky in the General Assembly, Ashley Tackett Laferty. Nevertheless, Webb’s announcement deals a major blow to the Democratic Party in Appalachia, concluding yet another chapter in the story of how the Democrats lost America’s rural working class.
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Auteur: Meagan Day
