The basic makeup of Elliott County -- nearly 100% white, one-third in poverty and land-locked by deeply conservative counties -- belies a truly incredible fact: It has never once voted for a Republican for president. No county in America has a Democratic streak as long as this improbable one in eastern Kentucky, which started voting for Democrats back when being a Democrat was an entirely different thing.
Consider it: They voted for Barack Obama twice, for Bill Clinton twice, and a combined six times against George W. Bush, his father and Ronald Reagan.
It's not the kind of big county that will swing elections. There are just 4,581 registered Democrats in Elliott County. They far outnumber the 429 registered Republicans. They are either the greatest political anomaly in the country, or they value tradition so much that they resisted the countless generational and political shifts of the 147 years since the county's founding.
Never mind all of that — they voted for Donald Trump 70%-26%.
this is a place where tradition rules -- where folks inherit their family's politics along with the land.
"When my daddy took me to register to vote, he said, 'I'm not going to tell you how to vote,' but he said, 'Our family has always been Democratic,'" said Judy Pennington, 71, in the diner she and her husband opened here more than four decades ago. "I knew then: Vote Democrat."
And so it goes here in town. People can trace their Democratic roots back two generations to their fathers and grandfathers, many of whom had never received a paycheck until they were hired by Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration in the mid-1930s.
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It also helps that the top Democrat in the Statehouse is a hometown kid.
Rocky Adkins, now Minority Leader after Democrats lost 17 seats in the chamber,...
Despite Trump's 44-point victory in Elliott County, Adkins, the Democrat, won 85% of the vote
They don't love Trump, necessarily,...
Trump is an outsider, they say, who will shake things up in an inward-looking Washington that has forgotten about them.
"When Donald Trump said he was for the little people, I thought he was talking to me," Pennington said. "That's when he got my vote.
Gene Johnson, a retired carpenter... said that despite his lifelong affiliation as a Democrat, he couldn't bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton."I didn't particularly care for either one of them, but ... I thought Trump would make a better president," Johnson said. "I didn't think either one of them ... should be president. I didn't think either one was qualified enough. Hillary, some of the things that she stood for, especially abortion, our Second Amendment, I didn't -- I couldn't vote for her especially (because of) that."
"I want (Trump) to bring coal back so people have jobs and everything," said Dale Adkins, a lifelong Democrat. "Hillary want(ed) to do away with everything." "Bill Clinton was a pretty good president," Adkins added. "But I didn't think his wife was gonna amount to nothing so I didn't vote for her."
