Sen. Webb’s defection hurts more than Kentucky politics these days | Opinion
Last week Robin Webb, the last Democratic senator from Eastern Kentucky, announced that she was switching parties. Often such moves occur in a closely divided legislative body. Not in Kentucky where Republicans already have a death grip on the legislature, especially in the state senate where they hold 32 of the 38 seats.[i] “I didn’t leave the party,” Webb insisted, “the party left me.”
She went on to note that the “Kentucky Democratic Party has increasingly alienated lifelong rural Democrats like myself by failing to support the issues that matter most to rural Kentuckians.”
And what would those issues be? Senator Webb does not elaborate. Far better to rely upon her constituents’ wont to limit “values” to those related to sex or the fossil-fuel industry. As the Herald-Leader, which broke the story, points out, Webb has been a consistent supporter of the Republican culture wars over abortion and the trans community. Being from the whitest area of the state, she may feel pressure to join the Republicans’ crusade against DEI in general. And with Democrats committed to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the GOP, with its persistent defense of coal despite the immense damage the industry has caused the people and the environment of the region, may make for a more comfortable home for Webb. And we need to remember that getting elected in Eastern Kentucky without funding from coal-friendly sources is becoming more and more problematic.
Senator Webb maintains that the Democratic Party is “counterproductive” to her constituents’ interests. The truth is that at both the state and federal levels Democrats are the party committed to heeding the Constitution’s mandate to “promote the general welfare” through their policies regarding healthcare, the environment, education, labor, gun control, and taxation. No state benefits more from federal assistance, in terms of the ratio between benefits received and taxes paid, than does Kentucky.
And yet, Kentucky is among the strongest supporters of a Trump administration doing everything it can to destroy the programs that so enrich the people of this state. The draconian cuts to Medicaid, for one, will have a devastating impact on the hospitals of Eastern Kentucky. Talk about political support that is “counterproductive.” Nowhere is that truer than in Kentucky.
Surely Senator Webb realizes that in switching parties she is joining a Republican Party absolutely controlled by a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a grifter who has leveraged the Oval Office to reap billions of dollars for himself and his family, and an election denier who incited an insurrection to remain in office. Now, after being reelected, he is doing all he can to destroy the progressive measures enacted by Democrats and Republicans alike, which, for more than a half century, made this a truly middle-class society in which successive generations could anticipate doing better than their predecessors.
Now, thanks to Project 2025 and DOGE, Trump has taken Elon Musk’s chainsaw to that government while setting out to ruin our economy with his whimsical tariffs and eliminating the checks and balances that ensure the integrity of our democracy. Not to mention the trampling of Constitution, previous administrations’ agreements, and the courts in order to score political points by the mass deportation of immigrants who are the lifeblood of the economy in many places, nowhere more so than in Kentucky.
One of the signposts of an authoritarian government is one-party rule. That is what sustains Putin in Russia and Orbon in Hungary. Senator Webb should know that by switching parties, she is bringing governance in Kentucky ever closer to such authoritarian rule. And that brings the nation that much closer to becoming Trump’s America. The stakes are higher than you think, Senator Webb.
Robert Emmett Curran is a professor of history emeritus at Georgetown University.