PITTSBURGH — To date, Darrin Kelly, the president of the powerful Allegheny-Fayette Central Labor Council, says not one of the Democratic candidates running for president has reached out to him to ask or listen to what union families in western Pennsylvania are looking for in a nominee to challenge President Trump in November. “Not one,” he says abruptly.

That omission is obvious in just about every proclamation about the energy sector coming from the mouths of most of the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination, whether it is Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pledging to ban fracking or Joe Biden’s recent proclamation that workers in the fossil fuel industry need to learn how to program: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for god’s sake!”