Republicans usually didn’t bother to field candidates. For decades, the Democratic primary winner in Ballard, Calloway, Carlisle, Fulton, Graves, Hickman, Marshall and McCracken County was a cinch in November. That’s nowhere more surprising than in the Purchase, the octet of trans-Tennessee River counties that comprise westernmost Kentucky. “Kentucky has followed suit with the rest of the South and is now a solidly Republican stronghold,” he said. The seismic political shift is likely permanent, or close to it, in the Purchase, elsewhere in western Kentucky and statewide, according to former Democratic state Rep. Republicans represent all eight Purchase counties in the state House and Senate. More than a century and a half later, the GOP rules the roost. Breckinridge purportedly proclaimed western Kentucky’s First Congressional District, especially the Purchase, “Solid as Gibraltar” for his party. For the first time ever, not a single Democrat is running for the state legislature from the Jackson Purchase, once Kentucky’s most devoutly Democratic district.Īfter he was elected vice president in 1856, Lexington Democrat John C.
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