I thought back to how much I loved campaigning in West Virginia during the 2008 primary, when I won the state by 40 points. My favorite memory was celebrating Mother’s Day with my mom and daughter in the small town of Grafton, West Virginia, where the holiday was invented a hundred years earlier. It was one of the last Mother’s Days I ever had with my mom, and it was a great one.
We drove into Mingo County, arguably Ground Zero for the coal crisis. In 2011 there had been more than 1,400 miners in the county. By 2016, there were just 438. Our destination was the town of Williamson, home to a promising public-private partnership similar to Reconnecting McDowell that was trying desperately to marshal the resources and the political will needed to expand and diversify the local economy, as well as improve public health.
After about three hours, we arrived at the Williamson Health and Wellness Center. It was drizzling, but outside on the street was a crowd of several hundred angry protestors chanting “We want Trump!” and “Go home Hillary!” Many held up signs about the so-called war on coal. One woman explained to a reporter why she was supporting Trump: “We’re tired of all the darn handouts; nobody takes care of us.” Another had painted her hands red to look like blood and kept yelling about Benghazi. Standing with them was Don Blankenship, the multimillionaire former CEO of a large coal company who was convicted for conspiring to violate mine safety regulations after the Upper Big Branch mine explosion killed twenty-nine workers in 2010. He was due to report to prison just days later, but he made time to come protest me first.
I knew I wouldn’t get a warm welcome in West Virginia. That was the point of my visit, after all. But this level of anger took me aback. This wasn’t just about my comments in one town hall. This was something deeper.
Since the election, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I failed to connect with more working-class whites. Many commentators talk as if my poor showing with that group was a new problem that stemmed mostly from my own weaknesses and Trump’s unique populist appeal. They point to the white voters who switched from Obama to Trump as evidence. West Virginia, a heavily white working-class state, tells a different story. From Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 to Bill’s reelection in 1996, Democrats won fourteen out of seventeen presidential elections there. Since 2000, however, we’ve lost every time, by increasingly bigger margins. In 2012 Obama lost to Mitt Romney by nearly two to one. It’s hard to look at that trend and conclude that it is all about me or about Trump.
The most prominent explanation, though an insufficient one on its own, is the so-called war on coal. Democrats’ long-standing support for environmental regulations that protect clean air and water and seek to limit carbon emissions has been an easy scapegoat for the misfortunes of the coal industry and the communities that have depended on it. The backlash reached a fevered pitch during the Obama administration, despite strong evidence that government regulation is not the primary cause for the industry’s decline.
The Obama administration was slow to take on this false narrative. When it was getting ready to announce the sweeping new Clean Power Plan, which was seen as the most anti-coal policy yet, I thought the President should consider making the announcement in Coal Country and couple it with a big effort to help miners and their families by attracting new investments and jobs. That might have softened the blow a little.
In the end, President Obama announced the new regulations in the White House alongside his administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That was seen by many folks in West Virginia as another signal that Democrats didn’t care about them. Once that perception takes hold, it’s hard to dislodge.
That said, Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters started long before Obama and go far beyond coal.
After John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in 2004, the writer Thomas Frank popularized the theory that Republicans persuaded whites in places like West Virginia to vote against their economic interests by appealing to them on cultural issues—in other words, “gays, guns, and God.” There’s definitely merit in that explanation. Remember my earlier description of the man in Arkansas who said Democrats wanted to take his gun and force him to go to a gay wedding?
Then there’s race. For decades, Republicans have used coded racial appeals on issues such as school busing, crime, and welfare. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan launched his general election campaign in 1980 with a speech about “states’ rights” near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. In 2005 the chairman of the Republican National Committee formally apologized for what’s been called the southern strategy. But in 2016 it was back with a vengeance. Politics was reduced to its most tribal, “us” versus “them,” and “them” grew into a big list: blacks, Latinos, immigrants, liberals, city dwellers, you name it. Like so many demagogues before him, Trump encouraged a zero-sum view of life where if someone else is gaining, you must be losing. You can hear the resentment in the words of that protestor in Williamson: “We’re tired of all the darn handouts; nobody takes care of us.”
It’s hard to compete against demagoguery when the answers you can offer are all unsatisfying. And years of economic pain provided fertile ground for Republicans’ cultural and racial appeals. Union membership, once a bulwark for Democrats in states like West Virginia, declined. Being part of a union is an important part of someone’s personal identity. It helps shape the way you view the world and think about politics. When that’s gone, it means a lot of people stop identifying primarily as workers—and voting accordingly—and start identifying and voting more as white, male, rural, or all of the above.
Just look at Don Blankenship, the coal boss who joined the protest against me on his way to prison. In recent years, even as the coal industry has struggled and workers have been laid off, top executives like him have pocketed huge pay increases, with compensation rising 60 percent between 2004 and 2016. Blankenship endangered his workers, undermined their union, and polluted their rivers and streams, all while making big profits and contributing millions to Republican candidates. He should have been the least popular man in West Virginia even before he was convicted in the wake of the death of twenty-nine miners. Instead, he was welcomed by the pro-Trump protesters in Williamson. One of them told a reporter that he’d vote for Blankenship for President if he ran. Meanwhile, I pledged to strengthen the laws to protect workers and hold bosses like Blankenship accountable—the fact that he received a jail sentence of just one year was appalling—yet I was the one being protested.
Some on the left, including Bernie Sanders, argue that working-class whites have turned away from Democrats because the party became beholden to Wall Street donors and lost touch with its populist roots. It’s hard to believe that voters who embrace Don Blankenship are looking for progressive economics. After all, by nearly every measure, the Democratic Party has moved to the left over the past fifteen years, not to the right. Mitt Romney was certainly not more populist than Barack Obama when he demolished him in West Virginia. And Republicans are unabashedly allied with powerful corporate interests, including the coal companies trying to take away health care and pensions from retired miners. Yet they keep winning elections. During my visit, the Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, was blocking West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s legislation to protect coal miners’ pensions. Why? Senator Brown said it was “because he doesn’t like the United Mine Workers Union,” which endorsed his Democratic opponent in 2014. Yet there was virtually no anti-Republican backlash, and to date, no political consequences for one of the most callous displays of disregard for the needs of coal miners I can remember.