A.J. WADE, a lifelong Democrat and one of three elected commissioners who run Hardy County in West Virginia, fiddles with his bolo tie as he tries to explain the results of his party's presidential primary, back in May. “People here”, he says, “would have voted for Mickey Mouse if he'd been on the ballot.” The fictional rodent was not running, however, so they ended up supporting a much less appealing candidate: Keith Judd, a convict serving a 17-year sentence for extortion in a Texan jail. Mr Judd won 58% of the vote in Hardy County to Barack Obama's 42%.

Mr Judd's victory was not a freak result: Democrats in a further nine counties in West Virginia judged a resident of the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana a better standard-bearer for their party than the current occupant of the White House. Mr Obama did win the state overall, but not exactly resoundingly: Mr Judd took 41% of the vote, enough to secure at least one delegate to the party's national convention in September if any had registered on his behalf (none did).

Mr Obama suffered a similar rebuke in neighbouring Kentucky, where 41% of Democrats ticked a box labelled “uncommitted” rather than endorse the president's re-election bid. He has never had much of a following in Appalachia: Hillary Clinton thumped him in the primaries in the region in 2008. At the general election that year, even as the rest of the country swung to the left, a crescent of counties astride the Appalachian range, from south-western Pennsylvania to north-eastern Mississippi, moved in the opposite direction. Late last year Gallup put Mr Obama's approval rating in West Virginia, a state with almost twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans, at 33%. The president is so unpopular that the two most senior Democrats in the state on the ballot this year, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and Senator Joe Manchin, both refuse to say they will vote for him.

Asked what has got West Virginia's goat, Shelley Moore Capito, who represents Hardy County in Congress, mentions onerous regulation—a familiar refrain among her fellow Republicans. The county is a big poultry producer, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has accused several chicken and turkey farmers in the area of polluting water that will eventually find its way into Chesapeake Bay. In the rest of the state, coal is king and the EPA is seen as committing regicide. It has withheld permits for coal mines, tightened pollution controls for power plants that use coal, and is in the process of drafting regulations on greenhouse gases. To distance himself from such policies when running for the Senate in 2010, Mr Manchin produced an ad in which he took a rifle to a proposed climate-change bill.

But West Virginia's distaste for the president, Mrs Capito argues, is “more than just a policy disagreement—it's at the core of who we are.” The meddling bureaucracy of the EPA, she says, suggests a worrying disrespect for property rights, while Mr Obama's enthusiasm for issuing debt offends thrifty locals. Jim Webb, a senator from neighbouring Virginia, has noted that much of the population of Appalachia is of Scots-Irish descent. Such voters, he says, often feel snubbed by Democrats who set little store by their “guns and religion”, as Mr Obama once memorably put it. (This may help to explain the president's poor showing in primaries in Arkansas and Oklahoma, which also have big Scots-Irish populations.) Mr Obama's recent embrace of gay marriage, says Mr Wade, was reason enough in itself for many in West Virginia to sour on him.

Neil Gillies, chairman of the Democratic Party in Hardy County, agrees that bureaucratic interference and cultural affronts have sapped the president's popularity. But he sees Mr Obama chiefly as the victim of demographic trends of longer standing. West Virginia (like most of the rest of Appalachia) is older, whiter, less educated, more religious and more rural than most of America—attributes that correlate with voting Republican. As a result, the Democrats' grip on the state has gradually been slackening. West Virginia has voted Republican at the presidential level since 2000. Its congressional delegation is tending that way, too. And Democrats have survived in state government only by disavowing the national party, as Messrs Manchin and Tomblin have.

Then there is the question of race. West Virginia is 93% white—a full 30 points more than the national average. According to exit polls at the state's Democratic primary in 2008, race was an important factor for a fifth of white voters. Of those, 84% plumped for Mrs Clinton. It seems safe to assume that not everyone who felt that way confessed as much to the pollsters.

Mike Teets, the only Republican on the Hardy County Commission, denies that race has anything to do with local antipathy towards Mr Obama. But he is concerned that the president may be a Muslim, secretly in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, whose killing he could have faked. He also wonders whether the president might be gay. Wild accusations like these, Mr Obama's supporters maintain, stem from sublimated racism.

Beyond the fringe

Mr Obama is not going to win West Virginia in November, so debating the origins of his poor standing in the state may seem entirely academic. But voters with similar sensibilities inhabit the fringes of many states he hopes to carry, including North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Moreover, West Virginia is seen as a proving ground for candidates with white working-class voters. They were never very keen on Mr Obama in the first place, preferring John McCain by 13 points in 2008. Now, as the litany of complaints from West Virginia shows, they have many more reasons to reject the president. Or to look at it another way, if Mr Judd can bring almost half of these Democrats along, how many can Mitt Romney muster?

Economist.com/blogs/lexington