The conventional wisdom seems to be encapsulated in this post by Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo--Sen. Clinton does well in Appalachia, which is a white, poor, underdeveloped portion of the country, settled by Scots-Irish, that was strongly anti-slavery and anti-black in ante-bellum America and retains those beliefs today.
But there's a paradox--when you go to this site, of the U.S.Census, you get a long comparison of Scotch-Irish (apparently the Census' preferred term) with U.S. statistics. There you find that those people who identify themselves as Scotch-Irish are older and white (so far fitting the conventional wisdom for Appalachia) but they're also significantly better educated and wealthier than the average for the country. (Like 20 percent wealthier and 30 percent better educated and more managerial/professional and less agriculture and mining.)
I don't know how one explains the paradox, except by saying those of us who left Appalachia did very very well, those of us who stayed did very very poorly.
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