The really sad thing is that coal mining is a terrible job. Nobody who’s ever tried any other job would ever choose coal mining, even at the high pay. And yet, here are all of these people fighting hard against the opportunity to get better jobs, because they’ve been so lied to that they don’t even know that most jobs aren’t as bad as coal mining.
And yes, it was a mistake for Clinton to include that line in that speech. It’s easy to see that in retrospect. But it must be tough for a politician or speechwriter to consider how every single sentence could look, if it’s taken out of context, and they only need to screw up once.
That Politico article doesn’t indicate where it gets any numbers, just a quote from a coal industry lobbyist and CEO with no source.
Also, if we want to keep coal jobs, in spite of cheaper alternatives that power generation companies prefer to use, we’d have to spend far more to subsidize the industry than retraining the workers to a new one. We’d also have to outlaw the coal companies from automating processes, as that is the biggest driver of job loss.
Environmental policies trail far behind natural gas and automation as a reason for the decline in coal jobs.
Basically the tactic is to lie. To tell them that they will get their coal jobs back, even though there’s no way that’s going to happen. That’s what Trump did, and it worked. People prefer a comforting lie to the hard truth. If that’s what it takes to get elected, I don’t know if it’s worth it at the end of the day.
They were lied to, believed the lies, and suffered for it. My guess is that they haven’t learned their lesson, and will continue to go for the liar that makes false promises to them, rather than the person who tells the truth and offers them real help.
There is frankly no scenario where the Democratic Party is the left-of-center party in an ideologically-organized party system (which is how democracies generally work) and wins nationalized elections in a state like Kentucky. The old party system where the Democratic Party was a coalition of regional interests was not sustainable in a country where everyone can get national news beamed into their eyeballs (and local news from dying newspapers or nowhere at all), and white Appalachian voters are one of the regional interests who got ejected during the realignment as the American party system shifted into a lower state of entropy.
The Democratic Party in Kentucky is going to be consigned, if it is lucky, to situations like the present, where there is occasionally a Democratic governor to act as a check on the zeal of the dominant party. The reverse happens in states like Massachusetts and Maryland, where Republicans sometimes get elected as governors based on the idea that they’ll put on green eyeshades and keep watch over the Democratic legislature.
I have family in rural Arkansas and visit now and then. There has been an odd dichotomy for a while where the vast majority of voter were clearly Republican in national elections -but remained registered as Democrats, as the county Democratic Primary was often the decisive election, and that was the case until around 2020.
Apparently this election year, the situation finally flipped - everyone ran as a Republican, and there are literally no Democratic candidates in the general election in the county.
I am not sure if it is the fallout of January 6th, or a backlash to Biden, but being even nominally a Democrat for purposes of voting for county coroner or town clerk just became intolerable for some of these mostly white, rural voters. I wonder if that carries through to a broader area.