Where Obama has no hope Humiliating primary results in Kentucky and Arkansas prove that, in some states, Obama-phobia still reigns 
 
 There’s a large swath of rural America, extending from somewhere in Oklahoma up into West Virginia, where Barack Obama never had a chance, and it really showed last night. 
 
 A majority of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against Obama in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for “uncommitted.” Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about. 
 
 In Arkansas, the other state to hold its primary yesterday, the results were only slightly less humbling to Obama, who defeated an actual human-being candidate -- a Tennessee lawyer named John Wolfe -- by a 58.4 to 41.6 percent spread, with more than a third of the state’s 75 counties siding with the challenger. Wolfe, if anyone asked him, was running against Obama from the left, on a progressive economic message. But to the average Arkansas voter, his name might just as well have been “not Obama”; he had no money, no campaign organization, and no name recognition, and he received scant media coverage. 
 
 Whether this qualifies as Obama’s most humbling primary night of 2012 is open to debate. Just two weeks ago, a federal inmate who somehow maneuvered his way onto the West Virginia ballot racked up nearly 41 percent against the president in that state’s primary and carried 10 counties. Back in March, Obama was held to 57 percent in Oklahoma, losing 15 counties to anti-abortion zealot Randall Terry and another gadfly candidate. Terry actually qualified for delegates in that contest, prompting national Democrats to invoke their “LaRouche rule” and deem him unqualified to actually receive delegates. 
 
 There were also problems for the president in pockets of Louisiana, where Wolfe cleared the 15 percent delegate eligibility threshold in several congressional districts. Democrats are refusing to actually allocate any delegates to him, though, on the grounds that he failed to file a comprehensive delegate selection plan – a rationale that is also being invoked in Arkansas. Wolfe is vowing to overturn the rulings in court. 
 
 In terms of deciding the Democratic nomination, obviously, none of this really matters. Obama has won most states by the massive margins that incumbent presidents typically rack up against fringe challengers and “uncommitted,” and he long ago surpassed the magic number of delegates needed for re-nomination. In most of America, this year’s Democratic primaries have been just as uneventful and unremarkable as they were in 1996, the last time a Democratic incumbent sought reelection. 
 
 But then there’s that sea of resistance in Appalachia and states like Arkansas and Oklahoma. A case can be made that Obama’s energy policies contributed to his West Virginia headache, but otherwise there’s no sense trying to pin this on anything he’s actually done as president because the resistance was just as apparent when he ran four years ago. 
 
 Back then, Obama was crushed by Hillary Clinton in West Virginia by 41 points – even though it was clear by primary day that he was on his way to being the nominee. In Kentucky, Clinton’s margin was 35 points. In Arkansas (where she served as first lady for more than a decade), it was 44. And in Oklahoma, it was 25. The same largely poor, rural and white areas that gave Clinton her best numbers in 2008 are now doing the same for John Wolfe, “uncommitted” and Randall Terry. The problem was just as apparent for Obama in the fall of 2008, when he improved on John Kerry’s 2004 performance in just about every corner of the country except the Oklahoma-to-West-Virginia swath. 
 
 Chalking this up only to race may be an oversimplification, although there was exit poll data in 2008 that indicated it was an explicit factor for a sizable chunk of voters. Perhaps Obama’s race is one of several markers (along with his name, his background, the never-ending Muslim rumors, and his status as the “liberal” candidate in 2008) that low-income white rural voters use to associate him with a national Democratic Party that they believe has been overrun by affluent liberals, feminists, minorities, secularists and gays – people and groups whose interests are being serviced at the expense of their own. 
 
 The good news for Obama is that this probably doesn’t say much about what will happen in November. The damage is limited to states he was already expecting to lose to Mitt Romney. Not that this will stop Republicans from playing up Kentucky and Arkansas as the latest proof of Obama’s shattered popularity. But that’s just spin. He could have a 60 percent approval rating, and he’d still be getting embarrassed in these states. ||||| The second phase we really see after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the movement of the Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the GOP. These states did not bail on the Democrats because the Republicans promised to go back to Jim Crow; rather, their only tie to the Democratic party was based on the old segregationist regime. Whites in these states were naturally quite conservative, and without the special deal the Democrats had given them on civil rights, they start moving Republican, really as early as 1964. 
 
 The first phase was in “New South” cities – places like Dallas and Tampa. This is what powered Dwight Eisenhower to a strong showing in Dixie in 1952 and 1956. It helps explain why the longest-running GOP states in the South have been places like Florida and Virginia. 
 
 That’s because only Obama and John Wolfe, a Tennessee lawyer, are on the Democratic presidential primary ballot in the Razorback State. (Wolfe took 12 percent — and nearly 18,000 votes — in a four-way fight in the Louisiana Democratic presidential primary in late March.) And a recent independent poll showed Obama running just seven points ahead of Wolfe in the southern Arkansas 4th district, which covers one-quarter of the state. 
 
 These voters form the core of the GOP coalition in the South up through the late 1980s. The Democrats still held their own outside the Deep South and the New South – specifically, in the Border South states that had relatively small populations of African Americans and few metropolitan areas. Bill Clinton carries all of the Border South states in 1992 and 1996 – West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. He also wins Louisiana. 
 
 But since the mid-1990s there has been a massive shift in the border South regions. It’s not just on the presidential level. We’re also seeing the GOP dominate congressional districts in the Border South as well as state legislatures. And now it seems that a Democratic president has to struggle to win a primary against an unknown challenger. 
 
 Many liberals would have you believe that this is about race. This is mostly partisan claptrap. Sure, the issue of race is unavodiable in the South (just like in the big Northern cities), but there is so much more to the story. Harold Ford nearly won the Tennessee Senate seat in 2006, which was only possible because of strong backing from white voters; and if Colin Powell had been the GOP nominee in 1996 he would have done quite well there (though he probably could not have bested Clinton in his home region). Plus, the dynamics of race are quite different in a state like Mississippi (where whites barely outnumber blacks) than in Tennessee or Arkansas (where whites comprise about 80 percent of the population). Finally, for three decades many of these voters were situated quite comfortably in multi-racial voting coalitions with African Americans in the Democratic party (from roughly the passage of the Voting Rights Act to the 1994 midterm). 
 
 The real reason these people have bolted their ancestral political home has to do with the evolving shape of the Democratic party. Historically, it was a working class coalition of urban workers and rural farmers. That identity anchored the party really up through the 1960s. But then it began to develop a decidedly “New Left” ethos – turning decidedly leftward not only from cultural conservatism but also on middle class, quality of life issues (feminism, environmentalism, consumer rights, etc) that are of much more concern to “enlightened” liberals in the big cities than rural voters in Arkansas. 
 
 Think of it this way: Your average Obama voter on the Upper West Side might think the “SmartCar” is great, but a plumber working in Hot Springs would just laugh his you-know-what off if he saw a coworker drive up in one of those absurd vehicles. That's a cultural/social/economic divide that our political parties mimic. ||||| It’s not exactly news: There’s a swath of the nation that can’t stand Barack Obama. 
 
 Voters there didn’t like him in 2008 and on Tuesday their disdain for the president resurfaced in Democratic primaries in Arkansas and Kentucky, where Obama won with less than 60 percent of the vote — an anemic performance for an incumbent. 
 
 The region in question is the Upland or Upper South: its borders range roughly from eastern Oklahoma to western North Carolina and northward to include Appalachia. It’s similar in many ways to the Deep South but still culturally, politically and economically distinct. 
 
 The heart of the Obama resistance is located in the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, places that first signaled their opposition to Obama in 2008 when they voted for Hillary Clinton in overwhelming numbers. Then, in the November general election, John McCain carried both states easily while getting shellacked elswehere. 
 
 Since no one expects those Kentucky or West Virginia — or Arkansas, Oklahoma or Tennessee, for that matter — to be competitive in the general election, Obama’s weak showing in the region is little more than a curiosity. The worst is behind him: All the states in the president's region of doom have now held their primaries and the remaining states that will vote over the next month will likely restore his luster. 
 
 Still, his rough ride through the Upper South is a reminder that in some ways Obama is still haunted by his 2008 remark about people who “cling to guns or religion.” While there are plenty of more important factors driving the Upland South hostility toward him — among them, race, culture and some specific administration policies — it’s hard not to notice his unpopularity in a region of the country where gun ownership and church worship rates are high. 
 
 Read more about: Barack Obama, 2012 Presidential Campaign, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas
– President Obama continued his lousy run last night in what Politico calls his "region of doom," a swath it defines as the "Upper South" that includes Appalachia. Obama's weak performances in Arkansas and Kentucky, of course, follow his close race against a felon in West Virginia. What gives? Two takes: Jay Cost, Weekly Standard: Liberals say it's racism, but that's "mostly partisan claptrap." The real reason has to do with how the Democratic Party has changed. It used to be "a working class coalition of urban workers and rural farmers" until it developed a "New Left ethos—turning decidedly leftward not only from cultural conservatism but also on middle class, quality of life issues (feminism, environmentalism, consumer rights, etc) that are of much more concern to 'enlightened' liberals in the big cities than rural voters in Arkansas."  Steve Kornacki, Salon: Chalking it up entirely to race "may be an oversimplification," although he notes that Obama fared miserably in the region in 2008 against Hillary Clinton. "Perhaps Obama’s race is one of several markers (along with his name, his background, and the never-ending Muslim rumors, his status as the 'liberal' candidate in 2008) that low-income white rural voters use to associate him with a national Democratic Party that they believe has been overrun by affluent liberals, feminists, minorities, secularists and gays—people and groups whose interests are being serviced at the expense of their own."