Beginning next year, Eastern Kentucky will have no Democrats in Frankfort to represent a region the party once dominated.
Rep. Ashley Tackett Laferty of Martin, the last remaining state Democratic legislator in office from the eastern stretch of the state, did not seek reelection in the 95th House District.
Tuesday, a Republican, Tanner Hesterberg, won the seat with 59% of the vote.
Steve Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky, says it was a feat for a Democrat to hold the district for so long.
“It's not surprising that Ashley Tackett Laferty did not want to try to hold that extremely Republican district again,” he said. “It's not a surprise it went Republican.”
Tackett Laferty instead ran for a nonpartisan district judgeship. Tuesday, she lost that race to Tyler Green. She did not immediately respond to a WEKU request for comment on the election results.
Another Democrat from the region, Sen. Robin Webb of Grayson, switched parties last year.
Voss says Appalachian counties and districts in Kentucky and surrounding states shifted sharply Republican during the Obama era, and it’s not clear when or if they might shift back.
Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was able to make inroads in the region after catastrophic flooding in 2022, however, Voss noted.
“So it's a question mark of whether this heavily Republican feature of Appalachia is going to stick around as American politics focuses less on the culture war and more on economic issues,” he said.
Eastern Kentucky’s right shift happened in parallel with the collapse of the coal industry in the region. As recently as 2012, the coal industry had more than 10,000 direct jobs in the eastern coalfield.
By the end of June, according to the Energy and Environment Cabinet, Eastern Kentucky had fewer than 2,000 coal jobs left.
Pike County, once the leading producer in the state, now has more direct jobs in tourism than in coal mining, state data show.
Republican leaders, including President Donald Trump, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Hal Rogers, have said for years they were fighting a “war on coal.”
But they have been able to do very little to stop the erosion of coal’s dominance in electricity generation. It’s been more than a decade since natural gas surpassed coal, and this year for the first time, solar outpaced coal as of May.
The region is turning to data centers to replace the tax revenue coal once provided, if not the number of jobs.
