‘No Christian could vote Democrat’: the mountain community backing Trump
High-speed internet, and with it the chance to work from home, has been transformational for Jackson County but some things never change, reports Andrew Buncombe
In parts of Appalachia, the pace of change can now be measured by the whizz of a high-speed internet connection. For many years, swathes of eastern Kentucky suffered many of the deprivations of being disconnected from the wider world – poor health, poverty and few opportunities. In the past few years, high-speed internet, and with it the chance to telecommute, has had a transformational impact
And yet in Jackson County, 60 miles southeast of Lexington, some things have not budged. This county of 13,000 people has voted Republican since the US Civil War, and it is hugely enamoured by the current Republican president, Donald Trump, and Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell. In 2016, Jackson County, which has just one small town, McKee, which is “wet” whereas the rest of the county is “dry”, went for Trump 88 per cent. Every indication is that it will do so again. “You won’t find many Democrats up here,” says Anthony Brody, 65, sitting in his truck outside a Walgreens pharmacy.
A woman seated alongside him, Connie Ray, says she too will be voting for Trump and McConnell. She says Democrats want to “kill little babies”.
Nearby, just about to leave the parking lot, Tricia Lewis and Bunny Tilley, are similarly adamant. They like Trump “because everyone else hates him” and think McConnell has done a lot to help miners in the area who lost their jobs as the industry declined.
Is it not time for a change, given he has already served six terms? What about his challenger, Amy McGrath?
“She should be at home looking after her children,” claims Tilley. When it is pointed out the 45-year-old McGrath has been a fighter pilot for the US marines and the first woman to fly a combat mission for the corps, she says: “That doesn’t matter.”
Some in Jackson County, located in the Daniel Boone National Forest (currently lit orange with the colours of autumn), say they are not opposed voting for a Democrat per se. But Mary Gabbard admits the last time she voted for a Democrat was for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and suggests it was because “Jimmy” also went to church.
“The Democrats are for everything the bible is against, and I don’t feel any Christian could vote Democrat,” says the 74-year-old. “They are for abortions, killing little babies, they are for the homosexual-gay rights. They’re just for everything that the bible is against.”
Her husband, 83-year-old Bobby Gabbard, a friendly man who is happy enough to pose for a photograph in front of the large Republican banner set in his lawn, says he has never voted for a Democrat.
When asked if they will be watching the vice presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, himself an outspoken conservative Christian, they say they will be going to church instead.
Ten miles away, in the community of Annville, Brian Bales says he used to be a Democrat and twice voted for Barack Obama. He says Obama campaigned as a “real statesman” though he thinks his presidency brought little meaningful change.
Now, he says, the Democratic Party no longer stands for the interests of working people. He voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and will do so again. “He’s a businessman. We need a businessman in charge,” he says. A number or organisations in the half-dozen states that include part of the Appalachians have worked to present a more complete and nuanced context of the mountains and their residents. Most of the time they appear in the news is it in stories associated with poverty, opioid addiction and black lung disease.
And those issues remain very real. A report published last year by USA Today suggested that 10 of the worst 25 counties to live in in the US in terms of life expectancy, the poverty rate and the number of people with a bachelors degree, were located in Kentucky. Among them was Jackson County, which has a poverty rate of 33 per cent, and where “Gabbard” is a common surname.
Carla Gabbard, 46, says she thinks that the mountains are changing, and gives credit to the high-speed internet connection, work on which started five years ago. She says she works for a non-profit organisation that has recruited and trained people in places such as Jackson County to work from home for national companies.
She says she believes that for many years, the people of Appalachia have suffered from a discriminatory view that sees them as lazy and backwards. “People here want to work,” she says. “But it has only been the last five or six years that they have had these opportunities”
She says she has not decided who she will be voting for this year and says she intends to watch the vice presidential debate to help make up her mind. Keith Gabbard, chief executive of the Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative, is no relation to Carla Gabbard though her non-profit makes use of the high-speed internet.
He says the cooperative started in 1950 when there was no telephone service in Jackson County. It worked to lay landlines, and later provided dial-up internet connections and cable television.
Five years ago, with the help of $50m in grants or loans it had started laying the optic fibres carrying the high-speed internet. Now, anyone in Jackson and Owsley counties, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second. There is a plan to upgrade the system to 10 gigabits.
Gabbard says he had gone away to college but wanted to live and work where he was born. He started working for the cooperative and 24 years ago became the chief executive. He says the impact of the service has been transformational. And after an article about the cooperative appeared in The New Yorker magazine, he was contacted by people in other states asking if he could replicate the service for them. A neighbouring third county has also been connected.
“In our two counties alone, there have been more than 1,000 jobs created with this work,” he says. “A lot of people working from Apple, they’re doing tech support for Apple. It’s pretty amazing what’s happening here. If you had a brick and mortar building that had 1,000 jobs, that’d be a huge story.”
Previously, he says, those people who did have jobs in the area were probably working for minimum wage. “These jobs are better than minimum wage, they’re probably twice as much. And they got benefits. And you can actually advance,” he says.
The point about connectivity being essential to create new jobs and to provide education to children was made earlier in the week by McGrath, who told an event in Nelson County that 30 per cent of children did not have access to the internet.
“When I was at school, the route to success was paper and a pen,” she said. “Now, it’s a computer and access to the internet.”
Can high-speed internet alone be enough change attitudes and political opinions, especially those which have been borne so long?
A 17-year-old woman, who asks not to be named, is not so sure. She says the county is very conservative and she denounces the way women are objectified. “A woman should not lose her job if she is pregnant,” she says.
She says that as a child when her family went out of the state on vacation she cried when they returned to Kentucky. Does she think things are changing?
“Recently they played a video that showed the whole town since 1980 until now and it seems the same,” she says.
She adds: “I think it is really hard to have change because parents teach the same stuff to their kids and it just gets passed on.”