Appalachia May Decide the Election

To supplement what my partner wrote in the Irony: Tea Partiers have become COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS post let me just make a few insights. In 2004 based on polling data from the Cleveland and Toledo areas Ohio was though to be going to John Kerry. When Bush carried Ohio incredulous Democrats screamed foul. How could this happen? Voter fraud! Bush stole the election! Tom Wolfe, the funny little guy in the white suits who wrote for the New Yorker had a more plausible explanation. The Kerry-Edwards campaign crashed into the red neck firewall. Wolfe didn't use the term red neck firewall but his explanation centers around the same people who turned out to hear Romney in Bealsville, Ohio last week. Aside from being coal miners these men are also of Scots-Irish decent. Yes, the same Scots-Irish who produced warriors Sergeant Alvin York and Audie Murphy. This same ethnic group continues to dominate all of the elite military units in the armed forces today and dominated NASCAR when it was still a pretty risky sport. Why? Because they posses a bravery that has gone out of vogue in the rest of the country a century ago. In 2004 the when the Democrats came out in favor of gun control, the Scots-Irish interpreted this as not merely an attack on the proliferation of weaponry in American life but as a denunciation, a besmirching, of their entire way of life.
To understand Ohio, and Indiana to some extent, think of everything south of Interstate 70 as a southern state. Culturally southern Ohio is more like Wheeling, West Virginia than Toledo. Country singer Bobby Bare was Ironton, Ohio. The Osborne Brothers of Rocky Top fame were raised near Dayton. Connie Smith was raised in Dungannon, Ohio in Columbiana County and the king of cowboys Leonard Franklin Slye aka Roy Rogers was born in Cincinnati. Do not underestimate the value of having a deer hunting fellow named Ryan on the R squared ticket.
The red neck firewall runs the length of the Appalachian range. Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are safely Republican red. Western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and southern and eastern Ohio are true battlegrounds. The coming election may well be decided in Appalachia.