Way back during the 2008 presidential race, a John McCain campaign surrogate (people tend to think the quote came from Sarah Palin, but it actually came from somebody named Nancy Pfotenhauer) raised a lot of hackles by saying that northern Virginia was a lost cause because of all the Democrats moving in from elsewhere, but that “real Virginia” would still be receptive to the Republican message. She meant the southern and western parts of the state, which indeed were more receptive to McCain. But in the end the fake parts of Virginia overpowered the rest of the state and it went Democratic for the first time in a presidential election in decades.
Here is some good, if belated, news for Ms. Pfotenhauer: The western-most part of Virginia (the pointy part that pokes like an arrow into the Appalachians) that makes up the 9th Congressional District is, it turns out, the most “American” part of not just Virginia, but the entire United States. And here’s the Census data to prove it!
Well … it's not really the most "American" in the sense of being the part of the country that's most patriotic, or flies the most flags, or hates the right people the most, or drives the most full-size pickup trucks. What that means is it has the highest percentage of people claiming “American ancestry,” at 25.7 percent of the population, according to the 2015 American Community Survey.
You’re most likely familiar with using Census data for simple population information, and maybe for race or economic information, but there’s a wealth of other information under “social characteristics” if you dig a little deeper: information on education, marriage, mobility, place of birth, and, interestingly, ancestry.
The other categories in “ancestry” aren’t that surprising. Some of the most commonly selected ones are German, Irish, English, and Italian, along with a variety of other less common options like Arab, Czech, Danish, or Lithuanian (and respondents can choose more than one). But for many decades, the Census has also allowed the possibility of simply choosing “American” as your ancestry.
You might think that, given how nebulous and malleable the category is, there’s no consistent regional pattern in who chooses "American ancestry." That’s not the case at all, though. “American ancestry” is heavily concentrated in the South, and more specifically, a few parts of the South: the most mountainous parts of the Appalachian ranges, and the rural lowlands of the Deep South in the mostly-white regions directly to the south of the Black Belt.
Some of the other congressional districts with the highest levels of American ancestry are Tennessee’s 3rd district (at 25.5 percent), Kentucky’s 5th district (in third place at 24.4 percent, and which was in the No. 1 slot according to the 2014 ACS), Tennessee’s 1st district (23.4 percent), and Kentucky’s 2nd district (24.4 percent). Further south in the lowlands are Alabama’s 2nd district (22.8 percent) and Georgia’s 8th district (22.5).
There are several theories from social scientists as to how people conceive of American ancestry and why people select it. One is that tends to be the choice of people who don’t think of their “Americanness” in terms of race or ethnicity, and instead think of it in terms of “citizenship and allegiance.” (That might explain why it's more prevalent in areas that tend to be so socially conservative.) The other is that it tends to be the choice of people whose ancestors have been in the country long enough that they’ve lost any sense of previous European ancestry; they might have a vague recollection of older family members speaking of some English or Irish roots a dozen generations back, but don’t think of themselves in that way that someone with ancestors who more recently immigrated might.
In fact, researchers think that’s the reason that “English” ancestry tends to get undercounted in the Census (instead, “German” ancestry is the most commonly picked category); a lot of people whose ancestors came over in colonial times from England but didn’t meticulously maintain genealogical records over the generations fall into the “American" category. (Interestingly, the two places where “English” ancestry is still prevalent are New England and Utah—places where you have two groups who, to generalize a bit, tend to be pretty gung-ho about genealogy: old-school WASPs and Mormons.)
Areas with a high prevalence of “American ancestry” also tend to have a prevalence of Scots-Irish ancestry, which was a large cohort of Protestant immigrants in the 1700s who arrived in the U.S. from northern Ireland and southern Scotland with few resources and wound up settling predominantly in the uplands, partly because the fertile lowlands were already occupied and partly because the emptiness of the hills was more amenable to their anti-establishment leanings. “American ancestry” may function something of a stand-in for having Scots-Irish or “borderer" ancestry.
Virginia’s 9th district, as mentioned above, is certainly characterized by the Appalachian range. While you don’t usually hear it referred to as a “panhandle” like some other states have, it’s the narrow part of the state that thrusts westward. It’s also the part of the state with the highest rate of poverty and lowest rates of education, though not to the extent of neighboring areas in West Virginia or Kentucky as the presence of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg boosts education and income levels. The 9th also includes, at its east end, parts of the Roanoke metro area but not Roanoke itself (which is in the 6th); further west, you have Bristol (part of the Tri-Cities metro area that’s mostly in Tennessee), and coal counties like Wise and Buchanan Counties that are steadily losing population.
It’s a socially conservative area even though it has (or had) a long labor tradition in the coal mining areas, and like some other Appalachian areas (like eastern Tennessee) it also has had some historically Republican rural pockets dating back to pro-Union sentiment during the Civil War among non-slaveholding small farmers in the mountains. Those competing currents kept it from being dominated by one party for much of the 20th century. In fact, the convention of calling a district the “Fighting xth” didn’t originate with Stephen Colbert, but may have originated here long ago in the often hotly-disputed “Fighting Ninth.”
It’s been pretty solidly red at the presidential level since the 1990s, though, and the current version of the 9th gave Hillary Clinton 27 percent of the vote and Donald Trump 69 percent in 2016, after a 36 Obama/64 Romney result in 2012. Bill Clinton did manage to eke out a 46-43 win in 1996 in the 1990s-era version of the 9th, in what was the Dems’ last presidential hurrah here.
However, at the House level, the 9th followed a similar pattern as a lot of other Appalachian districts: despite having turned away from the Dems at the presidential level much earlier, it reliably elected a Democrat to the House up until 2010, at which point it switched over to the Republicans and never looked back. In this case, the Dem was Rick Boucher, who served from 1982 to 2010, and the Republican who has held the 9th since then is Morgan Griffith, who was majority leader in the state House of Delegates prior to 2010.
Boucher was a rather interesting case, putting up a somewhat conservative record overall but not being a member of the Blue Dogs, and sticking with the party line in some rather surprising ways for his district (including voting for cap and trade). Boucher was (also unusually for such a rural district) most heavily interested in tech issues, and Blacksburg’s early-adopter status for municipal internet use in the ‘90s had a lot to do with Boucher. However, Boucher wasn’t able to overcome the broader cultural shifts in the non-Blacksburg parts of his district, and gave way to Griffith’s boilerplate conservatism. Griffith, for instance, is a House Freedom Caucus member, though perhaps one of its less loud members.
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.