Mining’s contribution to the recent U.S. presidential election was nicely captured in the interactions of the two leading candidates with coal miners in the Appalachians.
In March 2016, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton, in touting her support of Democrat-friendly alternative energy industries, memorably told a town hall meeting in the hard-hit coal-mining state of West Virginia that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
She later apologized for the comment. (Clinton ended up losing the state to Donald Trump, despite its substantial union presence, garnering only 26% of the vote compared to Trump’s 69%, and well off Barack Obama’s 36% tally in the 2012 presidential election.)
Trump, meanwhile, said he would “bring coal back 100%” and made the Appalachian coal miners part of his stump speech in the northeastern states, saying that “we’re going to get those miners back to work … we’re not going to be Hillary Clinton … talking about the miners as if they were just numbers. Believe me. You’re going to be proud again to be miners.”
Now that Trump has won the election, we can try to separate the campaign bluster and hyperbole from any achievable policy changes that could help the struggling miners of the Appalachians — i.e., the 60,000 miners still left in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Tennessee.
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