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Hillary Clinton may not be able to count on support in the mountain region in the same way Barack Obama and her husband did, writes the Guardian’s Dan Roberts.

Former president Bill Clinton makes a surprise stop at Franco’s on Dixie Highway. Photograph: Amy Harris/REX/Shutterstock

Bill Clinton returned to Appalachia this week with a familiar song ringing in his ears.

Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow) was a campaign anthem that helped the “Big Dog” win two presidential elections in the 1990s in this mountain region.



It played him off stage again in Kentucky on Thursday afternoon and by the time he arrived in the state’s hard-pressed eastern coalfields that evening, it was to serve as the theme of a speech designed to rally his wife’s campaign in 2016.



“The problem is that people think every tomorrow is going to be just like yesterday,” he told a group of miners in Prestonburg. “The question is, are we going to get back in the future business, and are you going along for the ride?”

The miners had booed when he walked on stage. These days the mountains appear instead to belong to a politician offering something more potent than hope.

Even among Republicans, Donald Trump divides opinion in many parts of the country. Not so in Appalachia, where his success in the party’s recently completed primary elections here was universal enough that it could serve as a new definition of the region’s rugged borders.

Of the 420 counties seen as sharing a culture that transcends state lines, Trump won all but 16 , including a sweep of western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and the western uplands of Virginia with potentially profound ramifications for the general election.