Coal isn’t what it used to be in West Virginia, but its grip on the state’s politics has lingered. Of the three major Republican candidates for the Senate, one blocked President Obama’s effort to shut down coal mining, another says coal is a “God-given resource” designed for human use, and the third is a coal baron who spent a year in prison for safety violations after a 2010 explosion in a mine he owned killed 29 miners.

A generation or two ago, West Virginia was a one-issue state—coal. That’s no longer true. There are a bit over 20,000 coal miners today, fewer than half the number there were in the early 1970s and a far cry from the peak of 125,000 miners in 1950. But coal is still on the state’s mind. When President Obama sought to kill off what was left of the industry on environmental grounds, and Hillary Clinton declared miners would be losing their jobs, the state rebelled.