Key coal country counties in West Virginia likely served as unheeded warnings about the crumbling blue wall from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania that allowed Donald Trump to circumvent the will of the majority and assume the presidency.
Ten counties* accounting for the majority of jobs and coal produced in West Virginia served as the red canary that should have alerted the Democratic Party that a susceptibility to toxic fumes from a reactionary economic populism were wafting through once reliably blue coal country.
These counties located in the Mountain State’s southern coal fields have long been unflinchingly Democrat blue. The fact they all flipped red in 2012, four years before key Rust Belt counties would do the same thing, has long been attributed to a combination of racism and reliance on the un-environmentally friendly coal industry for jobs.
But there is data that suggest otherwise.
A closer look at presidential general and primary election results in these coal producing counties reveals the flip from true blue to blood red was more complicated than surface level issues of race and fossil fuels alone.
Many of the mistakes and misguided assumptions made by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party that left them open to revolt from blue collar voters across the Midwest had already helped turn the only state south of Iowa to vote for Dukakis in ‘88 into a reliable red pickup.
2000
Al Gore of “Earth in the Balance” fame lost West Virginia in the 2000 election. The Mountain State’s five electoral votes would have made him president regardless of recounts and hanging chads in Florida. While the avowed environmentalist lost the state by 50,000 votes, he won in coal country.
While Gore edged George H. W. Bush in all of the state’s 27 coal producing counties by less than 500 votes, he won the ten counties accounting for 68 percent of the state’s coal jobs and production by almost 15,000 votes cast.
In fact, with electoral majorities in eight, those ten counties gave Gore more than a third of the total votes he received in Mountain State. Gore lost West Virginia and the presidency but it wasn’t because of coal field voters.
2004
Despite gowning concerns in coal country about Democratic trends toward green policies bad for coal, John Kerry won five of the top producing and employing coal counties and finished less than two points behind the incumbent president in two others. Bush finished ahead of Kerry in all ten by less than two percentage points.
2008 and Beyond
Enter Barack Obama. The red dye was now cast but even in 2008 a contingent of tried and true blue collar Democrats were willing to give the history-making president a chance.
Obama took two of the ten coal country counties winning one by more than 10 points. He was competitive in two others losing by less than one percent in one and by 3 points in another.
But while Kerry had failed to achieve 40 percent of the vote total in only one of the ten counties four years earlier, Obama missed the threshold in two more.
Yet four of the ten counties should have been winnable rolling into 2012.
In 2012, the red canary keels over and coal country is gone for good. This time the sitting Democratic president only achieves the 40 percent vote count threshold in one county and falls below 30 percent in three others.
What happened? Yes, myriad environmental regulations and rules are taking their toll. While the number of jobs in these 10 counties remains the same, coal production has dropped by 30 percent since 2012 and the writing is on the wall. Mines go idled and hours are being cut causing economic anxiety to set in.
Just as changes in the global economy portent the realities of worldwide supply chains and the permanent loss of manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt by 2016, in 2012 a similar set of realizations come to coal country.
Residents of southern West Virginia have as much in common with Mitt Romney as Thurston Howell the Third but the former got more than 60 percent of their votes. It was a protest. It was a cry for help from a segment of solid working class democrats who, despite the success of the Obama administration in rebuilding an economy left in shambles by the Bush 43 Administration, felt left behind.
Any serious attempt to provide the kind of help these once committed Democratic voters needed would have been a model for similar efforts for blue collar workers elsewhere.
Programs like those advocated by Sen. Bernie Sanders had wide appeal in coal country. In fact, Sanders’ call to get big money out of politics, provide universal health coverage and free college tuition likely resonated more than appreciated in a state where pictures of FDR and JFK can still be found hanging in living rooms.
In the May 10, 2016 presidential primary, Sanders received 73,601 votes in the ten coal counties to Trump’s 67,560 and Clinton’s 52,516. But the most telling number may be the tallies in the general election six months later.
Clinton’s vote count in the ten counties only increased by 1,000 votes from primary to general. So where did 72,000 of those Sander voters go? They likely went to Donald Trump who increased his primary showing by more than 60,000 votes.
A truly progressive economic agenda still sells in the heart of coal country. Democrats had their warning and they missed it. Sanders’ success serves as the blue canary in the coal mine for the right. And while the infection of red meat politics may have spread enough to prohibit bringing the Mountain State home anytime soon, it could model answers for bringing back the blue collar counties needed to win states elsewhere.
If the Democratic Party can turn its attention long enough from the donor class and corporate centrism it might have a chance of modeling a program that brings the American working class back into the blue fold.
*Boone, Fayette, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, McDowell, Mingo, Raleigh, Wayne and Wyoming.