Rasmussen Poll: Rand Paul Leads Jack Conway By 10 Points

A century and a half of poverty that hit, and never ended, when Generals Grant and Sherman's grand tours of points south made being the hub of North-South commerce stop being such a much. An educational system that's been chronically and intractably underfunded, politicized, and dysfunctional for decades. An anachronistic and poorly conceived state constitution from the 1890s that gives underpopulated counties far too much power and the state government too little. A deep-seated culture of anti-intellectualism that goes back to the days when agriculture was king. The curse of coal, which works a lot like the curse of oil in third world countries. The brain drain that all of the foregoing crap has fed for about a hundred and fifty years.

And then there's this streak of contrariness that makes people there reflexively do the exact opposite of anything people from outside the state say they should do that's deeply embedded in the culture of the whole damn state from Pikeville to Paducah.