re: #406 Joe Bacon 🌹

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Owsley County, Kentucky

According to the 2010 census reports, Owsley County has the second-highest level of child poverty of any county in the United States. In terms of income per household, the county is the poorest in the nation. Between 1980 and 2014, the rate of death from cancer in the county increased by 45.6 percent, the largest such increase of any county in the United States.

……..

In 2009, government benefits accounted for 53.07% of personal income.

That last extraordinary figure probably means that the rest comes from direct employment by the government, or from providing goods and services to benefits recipients. There is virtually no private economy at all.

The political history is unusual. Unlike most staunchly Republican counties in the south, Owsley was not part of the “great shift” that destroyed the Solid South in reaction to the Civil Rights movement. It has always been Republican.

Owing to its fierce Unionist sympathies, seen in the fact that the county saw a greater proportion of its population volunteer for the Union Army than any other county in Kentucky, and likely any other county in the country, Owsley County became, and has always remained, an overwhelmingly Republican county. Every Republican Presidential candidate has carried Owsley County since the party seriously contested the state for the first time in 1864. Since 1888, no Democratic candidate has received as much as forty percent of the county’s vote, and only twice (Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Bill Clinton in 1996) have the Democrats received so much as thirty percent.

It is a tragic irony that this heritage now aligns the county with neo-confederates like McConnell and Paul.