Despite being centrally located between a number of major metropolitan areas, eastern Kentucky—the part of the state covered by the sprawling 5th congressional district—is, functionally, a pretty isolated part of the nation, without major cities, navigable rivers, and mostly without even interstate highways. It’s located in the Appalachian uplands, a plateau that’s nearly 500 million years old, thrust up by colliding plates and then scoured by glaciers as well as gradual erosion by streams. What’s left is a maze of ridgelines and valleys, usually running parallel to each other but often snaking around in squiggles or loops. The Appalachians were, in the country’s early years, a major barrier to east-west travel, and even today are more of a place that you go around, not through.
The lack of large, flat areas of farmable land and the lack of transportation infrastructure (which limited the development of heavy industry, which in turn discouraged the development of larger cities) meant there was never much of a population boom here. Some Eastern and Southern European immigrants did move to the parts of Appalachia where there were large coal-mining operations, but for the most part, the residents of Appalachia were the descendants of the original Scots-Irish settlers there during colonial times (who couldn’t afford to purchase enough land to farm successfully in the southern lowlands, and many of whom preferred the relative solitude of the hills anyway). And today, with the coal-mining sector having mostly dried up, and with not much else in the area’s small towns beyond service sector jobs, there isn’t much impetus left for migration there.
And that leaves Kentucky’s 5th as the congressional district with the highest percentage of people who were born in the United States: 99.1 percent. (0.7 percent of its population is foreign-born, and 0.2 percent was born in Puerto Rico, U.S. island areas, or abroad to American parents.) That also means that, without much in-migration, and with deaths outstripping births, Kentucky’s 5th is one of the few congressional districts in the country that lost population between 2010 and 2017 (losing nearly 27,000 residents).
Related to the high number of U.S.-born residents, and unsurprisingly, Kentucky’s 5th is also the district with the highest percentage of non-Hispanic white residents in the nation: It’s 96.1 percent white. It edges out not just its neighboring districts in West Virginia, but also all of the CDs in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont (northern Maine’s 2nd district ends up in second place nationwide, at 94 percent white).
One thing that Kentucky’s 5th district does have going for it is a remarkably low cost of living; it’s also distinguished by having the lowest median gross rent of any CD in the nation ($572 in 2017). And, not coincidentally, it has one other superlative: It’s the district that has the highest percentage of people who live in mobile homes, of any CD in the nation, at 28.3 percent of its residents.
The geographical isolation of Kentucky’s 5th district means, unfortunately, that it’s also pretty economically isolated (which, of course, is why the rent is so low there, given the lack of well-paying jobs). While it’s by no means the most impoverished district or the district with the lowest per capita income—both of those distinctions are held by New York’s 15th district, in the South Bronx—the 5th is the most economically distressed district in the country that has a white majority, with 29.1 percent of its residents living in poverty.
Interestingly, though, one of the towns in the 5th district is widely regarded as an economic success story today: the city of Pikeville (which has a population of around 7,000, though that makes it one of the largest incorporated places in the entire CD), near the state’s easternmost tip. That’s largely a factor of what Pikeville has: a small university that includes a medical school, and a large hospital that’s the main option for high-level medical care in that entire part of the state. Although it’s obviously much smaller than your average “superstar city,” it has the same type of “eds and meds” focus that lets it act as an economic anchor for its surrounding area as it, too, transitions toward a more knowledge-oriented economy.
Like most of the rest of Appalachia, Kentucky’s 5th district has evolved into a dark-red part of the country, politically; in fact, in the 2016 election, it was one of only six congressional districts where Hillary Clinton didn’t even break 20 percent of the vote (she lost 80-18). This was a dark-red district even in the 2000s, unlike, say, West Virginia. But it’s taken an even further right turn; Barack Obama managed to lose “only” 67-32 to John McCain here in 2008.
Interestingly, the 5th until recently had a very bifurcated political tradition: There were a number of counties in the western part of the district that were some of the most strongly “ancestral Republican” places in the nation, with some of them literally never voting for a Democrat (even in landslide elections) since the Civil War. Jackson County, for instance, may be the most extreme example, even refusing to vote for FDR at the peak of the Great Depression (he got 15.5 percent there in 1932). By contrast, Elliott County, only 60 miles further east, gave FDR 85 percent, and continued to vote Democratic in every presidential election until … 2016.
The difference is the local economies in the two parts of the district, though the eastern part of the 5th was in a now-defunct district, the 7th, until 1992. The eastern counties are the coal counties, and had a strong union presence to match. (One of the counties here is Harlan County, whose name you might recognize from the eponymous documentary about its labor struggles in the 1970s.) With miners’ unions no longer much of a factor here, and with cultural issues moving to the forefront instead, the eastern coal counties recently started behaving like the rest of Appalachia. The western counties, on the other hand, didn’t have coal; they didn’t have farmable land, either, or much of anything, other than a tradition of resenting the gentry of the southern lowlands, whose fixation on fighting to preserve slavery they didn’t share.
The 5th has been represented in the House since 1981 by Republican Hal Rogers. That’s nearly 40 years, and Rogers is a very likely retiree in coming years. That’s not just because of his advanced age (he’s 80), but also because he was, until 2017, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, which is considered by House insiders to be the most desirable slot imaginable (maybe even more so than the thankless job of Speaker!). He’s termed-out of his chairmanship, and now in the minority, so there’s probably not much left for him to do. Given the 5th’s presidential numbers (and also that the last time Rogers got less than two-thirds of the vote was in 1992, when his district got merged with the 7th), an open seat here is not likely to be fruitful for the Democrats.
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.