Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundergan Grimes are vying to be coal’s true champion. But are they merely perpetuating an industry’s mythology?
These days, Bobby Spare feels like the last man standing.
The 59-year-old engineer began working in eastern Kentucky’s coal fields 38 years ago, like his father and grandfather before him. With nothing more than a high school diploma, Spare landed a job with a local mining company and soon earned his engineer’s license. It was a fickle industry; bonuses one year, pink slips the next. But for nearly four decades, it provided a stable, middle-class living for Spare and his six children. Even during the tough years, Spare never lost faith that coal would keep the region’s economy afloat. Today, however, he isn’t so sure.
The headquarters of B&W Resources, the mining company Spare works for, is a one-story building in Clay County, a verdant slice of Kentucky carved out of the Appalachian foothills. Trucks carrying up to 42 tons of coal rumble past the office and dump their cargo into 100-foot-high piles. Inside the building, Spare fixes himself a cup of coffee and explains that he’s never seen the industry so defeated. Coal production in eastern Kentucky has plummeted to its lowest levels in a half-century, and nearly half of the region’s mining jobs have vanished since midyear 2011.
The collapse has been particularly painful here in Clay County, which, according to the New York Times, “just might be the hardest place to live in the United States,” on account of its high unemployment, meager household incomes, and short life expectancies. It’s one of the poorest counties in the nation.
For Spare, the root cause of the meltdown is obvious. “Federal regulations coming out of Washington,” he says. “They’re really making it tough to stay in business.” So he’s paying close attention to the upcoming Senate race, which, Spare believes, could be the last chance to save coal communities from extinction. “It’s an important election,” he says. “You might not be able to fix the business, but you can probably stop it from getting worse.”
Amid public dissatisfaction with President Obama and the direction of the country, the 2014 midterm elections have emerged as a high-stakes battle for control of the U.S. Congress. And while every inch of the electoral map remains precious, no campaign has garnered more attention than the showdown in the Bluegrass State. A victory for Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell is essential to the GOP’s plans to take over Congress and install the 72-year-old lawmaker as Senate majority leader.
But the race also offers Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a 35-year-old Democrat, the opportunity to knock off the five-term incumbent and leading obstacle to Obama’s agenda. Interest in the election has stretched far beyond coal country; individuals and outside groups are reportedly on track to pour more than $100 million into the campaign, which would make it the most expensive Senate race in American history.
“Having both Senate control and the majority leader position at stake has made the McConnell-Grimes race the highest-profile this year,” says Nathan Gonzales, of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report.
The election may very well hinge on a single question: Which candidate do voters trust will help coal workers like Bobby Spare? Both sides have prominently featured coal workers in televised ads and blasted Obama’s “war on coal,” as they muscle to position themselves as the industry’s true champion. Grimes’s campaign calls McConnell an out-of-touch creature of Washington who sat idly by as Kentucky’s coal mines atrophied. McConnell’s supporters argue that putting Grimes in the Senate would give President Obama another liberal ally for his anti-coal crusade.
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