ACCORDING TO THE Cook Political Report, which ranks every district in Congress by voters’ strength of support for one party or the other, Virginia’s eighth district is heading Democratic faster than any other in the country. This does not mean that it is changing from Republican to Democrat. Virginia 08 is Democratic already, just becoming even more so. The man charged with stopping this momentum for the benefit of the Republicans is Jim Presswood, head of the Arlington county Republican committee. Mr Presswood is an environmental activist who once worked for the Natural Resources Defence Council, an NGO. He has a pronounced interest in the sort of changes to farming championed by the farm-to-table movement. These are not typical preoccupations among Republican activists, but Mr Presswood voted for Mr Trump, mainly because he could not support a pro-choice candidate. In this district over 100,000 people work for the government, and Mr Trump lost it by miles. “Drain the swamp was a tough message for us,” muses Mr Presswood. “This is the swamp.”

Virginia 08 takes in Arlington, which includes the pretty 18th-century town that was already there when Washington, DC, was built just across the Potomac. The district’s Democratic congressman, Don Beyer, used to run a family car dealership (Volvo, naturally) and was appointed ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein after collecting money for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. This is the sort of CV that resonates with voters in northern Virginia, an area dotted with independent coffee shops serving customers who use words like “artisanal”. An impressive 30% of over-25s have postgraduate degrees, compared with 12% nationally. Across America, education levels have become much stronger predictors than income of how people will vote. Hillary Clinton did much better in America’s 50 most educated districts than Mr Obama did, and performed far worse than he did in the 50 least educated. People with postgraduate qualifications tend to buy houses next to others like them, just as those with less schooling tend to cluster together.

The district that is heading fastest in the opposite direction, according to Cook Political, is West Virginia’s third congressional district, in the south-east of the neighbouring state. Downtown Huntington, the district’s biggest town with a population of about 50,000, is almost as agreeable as Arlington on a bright spring day, the Ohio river lazing by and some ancient rolling stock converted into a yoga studio. Visitors with funny accents are quickly told that Huntington has been voted America’s best community. Sadly this is not the town’s only distinction. West Virginia also leads the nation in deaths from drug poisoning. An estimated one in ten babies born in the local hospital emerge addicted to opioids. West Virginia 03 is also a difficult place to be a Democrat. The party has “become toxic to the level where you don’t even want to talk about it”, says Bill Bissett, who heads Huntington’s chamber of commerce, slipping out of one of the town’s liberal enclaves (an espresso bar) to talk freely about West Virginia’s enthusiasm for Mr Trump. The district’s political leanings are related to its economic history (this is coal country), which is related to the drug abuse, though the connections are not as clear-cut as they seem at first sight. West Virginia has gone from reliably Democratic to safe territory for Republicans in presidential elections within a generation. The long prior attachment to the Democrats dates from the state’s role as a birthplace of organised labour in America. At the battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, 3,000 policemen faced off against 10,000 armed union members in what remains the biggest confrontation between workers and the state in America’s history. Union strength kept West Virginia mostly Democratic; between 1932 and 1996 the state voted Republican in only three presidential elections. West Virginia’s coal production peaked in 1997 and its political complexion changed soon afterwards. In 2000 the state backed George W. Bush, and has voted Republican in presidential elections ever since. Drug abuse spread around the same time: painkillers at first, then powdered white heroin and now fentanyl. As part of a Pulitzer-prizewinning series, the Charleston Gazette-Mail discovered that between 2007 and 2012 a single pharmacy in Kermit, a town of 400 people in West Virginia 03, ordered close to 9m hydrocodone pills. On the face of it, then, this is a straightforward story of economic misery leading voters to ditch one political party and embrace another. But the reality is more complicated. Since the “war on poverty” was launched by Lyndon Johnson just over 50 years ago with an eye on Appalachia, the income gap between that region and the rest of America has narrowed. In 1970, now remembered as some sort of golden age, 14% of households in Appalachia lacked indoor plumbing; now just 3% do. Coal production in West Virginia, though well short of its peak, is higher now than it was in the 1970s. The drugs story is also more convoluted than it seems at first sight: painkiller abuse took root when mining was still booming, and West Virginians took a lot of Valium before the opioids arrived.

Deaths of despair

Yet as the region has grown richer, it has also grown sicker, and more people are dying from suicide, heart disease and drug overdoses—the “deaths of despair” identified in recent studies by two economists, Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, that have brought down life expectancy in West Virginia 03. In McDowell county, in the south-eastern corner of West Virginia 03, male life expectancy is 12 years lower than the national average and 16.5 years lower than in Arlington. As in other poor white parts of America, the sickening has been accompanied by the decay in institutions that regulated private lives and perhaps made hardship more bearable. Both marriage and churchgoing have become much less common.

The decline of coalmining in West Virginia is mainly due to the fall in the coal price, the exhaustion of the most accessible coal seams and the development of more efficient, mechanised mines in Wyoming. But that is not how the change is understood in the district. Even those who have nothing to do with the mining business tend to perceive it as a deliberate choice made by an uncaring elite in places like Arlington that values the lives of children yet to be born more highly than those of present-day West Virginians (which, in fairness, it probably does). Evan Jenkins, the congressman for the third district, switched from Democratic to Republican, explaining that West Virginia was under attack from a Democratic Party “that our grandparents would no longer recognise”. He was rewarded by the biggest winning margin in the country in 2014, unseating Nick Rahall, a Democrat who had been in Congress for 38 years.

That sense of being part of a victimised group is powerful stuff in politics, more potent than well-meaning schemes to improve rural internet access or to expand health insurance. John Shelton Reed, a (white Southern) sociologist, describes the condition of a white Southerner as a perpetual sense of being unfairly treated and looked down on. West Virginia, which sided with the Union in the civil war, is not in the South, but a lot of its voters now think like Mr Reed’s Southerners.

Most people who live in northern Virginia will not in fact make sneering jokes about West Virginia, because educated liberals tend to see poverty as a product of circumstance and hence not funny. Urban prejudice against rural dwellers, such as it is, operates less consciously. People who include listening to country music among their pastimes are much less likely to get called for interview at elite white-collar firms than those who say they like sailing, according to an experiment conducted by Lauren Rivera at Kellogg business school. “It’s not just that poor whites are dying, it’s that they are dying and being told to check their privilege,” says Frank Buckley, a law professor at George Mason University who helped to write campaign speeches for Mr Trump.

However prevalent such attitudes may be in Arlington, rural Americans have amplified them, turning them into something defining. “Well if they had their way/They’d have thrown us away”, sings Chris Jansen in “White Trash”. In the song Mr Jansen—who led the Republican National Convention in a chorus of “Trump Yeah!”—gets the girl in the end, proving that white trash are no worse than anybody else, and maybe even a little better. The song is more euphoric than mournful; the indignant grievance it describes is enjoyable. A growing number of Americans are singing along to it. According to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, the share who describe themselves as lower-class has risen over the past decade.

If kicking back at people who think they are superior is so defining, then why do West Virginia’s voters favour a billionaire New Yorker promising tax cuts for the wealthy? This seems strange only to those who think voting is a branch of accountancy. Joan C. Williams, author of “White Working Class”, points out that its members tend to resent professionals with their collections of diplomas but admire the rich. “The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family and friendship patterns,” she writes; “the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable—just with more money.” The ideal is to own your own business so you no longer have to take orders from anyone, just like the president.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go

Arlington’s voters wonder how West Virginia’s could fall for a candidate who tells them that he will bring the coal jobs back, as if the spot price of coal can be set by executive order. Yet even those who suspect that coal is not about to make a comeback give the president points for taking their side against those uncaring city-dwellers. “We haven’t had a president say he wants to put coalminers back to work since Carter,” says Mr Bissett in Huntington. “People notice.” And there are even some signs that coalmining is picking up here: men in reflecting jackets are a common sight at McDonald’s again, and companies that sell supplies to the mines report increased sales. For that, the locals have China rather than Mr Trump to thank: since the government in Beijing instructed miners to limit their working days to 276 per year instead of 330, the price of metallurgical coal (the kind used for making steel rather than in power stations) has picked up. Even if this turns out to be a blip, those expecting voters to turn away from the president because he has not kept his promise could be waiting for a long time. They are more likely to blame the people in Arlington for thwarting him.

To be a Republican in West Virginia 03 is to be on the right side of a social divide that does not have a lot to do with policies. Some non-Republicans also manage it. The state’s Democrat governor, Jim Justice, is West Virginia’s wealthiest man, his family fortune made in coal and farming, and a newcomer to politics. When the Republican statehouse presented him with its budget in April, he called a press conference at which he lifted a silver lid to reveal a large pile of bull manure sitting on top of the budget. In May the governor invited Donald Trump junior to the state to fish and hunt. They did not get any wild turkeys but caught a few rainbow trout and posed together in hunting camouflage. Like the president, the governor owns a golf course and resort, the Greenbrier, which he rescued from flooding and financial difficulty. He sold his family’s mines and then bought them back a few years later for a tenth of what he had been paid for them. Being both of the people and extremely rich has allowed him to resist the tide that swept away so many other Democrats.

Virginia’s eighth and West Virginia’s third districts are the most extreme examples of what is happening, but more and more places in America are becoming like them. In 1992 just 39% of Americans lived in districts where a presidential candidate won more than 60% of the vote. By 2006 the figure had gone up to 61%. Bill Bishop’s book “The Big Sort”, published in 2008, which drew attention to the way Americans are clustering in like-minded communities, conjures up images of Republican or Democratic voters moving house to be with people who vote like them, but that is not usually how it works. Instead, people tend to adopt the attitudes of the groups they cluster in. Palm Beach and Arlington are both wealthy neighbourhoods, but the world view of Trump supporters in Palm Beach is closer to West Virginia 03 than to upscale Arlington.

If this divide were just over things like what kind of health care government should provide, it would be easier to cross. But the rift goes deeper than that. “It has become socially unacceptable not to be a partisan,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist at New America, a think-tank. The Pew Research Centre has found that a quarter of consistent conservatives and liberals would be unhappy if their children were to marry someone from the other side of the divide. Kathy Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed the same groups of voters in Wisconsin from 2007 to 2012 and wrote about her findings in “The Politics of Resentment”. This is how she describes the atmosphere during a heated recall referendum that was won by Governor Scott Walker: “People stole yard signs from each other. They stopped talking to one another. They spat on each other. They even tried to run each other over, even if they were married to one another. I am not kidding.” Liberals and conservatives can sometimes recognise each other just by their names. A study by researchers at the University of Chicago of half a million Californian baby names found that conservatives favoured harder-edged names. Kurt’s parents were probably conservative, Ashton’s liberal.

Such non-political things shape what people think about big political questions, like when to go to war or how much to tax. Political attitudes are not fixed. They can adapt to fit whatever the head of the tribe is saying. Mr Trump mixes many ideas that have not been offered before in the same package. And his shortcomings tend to be discounted as irrelevant, or put down to inexperience or a hostile press.