Obama Democrats have left coal country

There are times when a party finally and completely loses faith with one of its rock-solid constituencies. This is one of them.

Republicans easily have held Kentucky’s U.S. Senate seat, winning big in the state’s traditionally Democratic eastern coal counties. They nearly — and completely unexpectedly — seized a Senate seat in Virginia, bolstered by Republican Ed Gillespie’s strong performance in the western coal-producing region of the state.

The GOP also defeated the Democrats’ only remaining incumbent congressman in West Virginia. Republicans will control all three of the state’s U.S. House seats — a sharp change from 1998, when the whole House and Senate delegation was Democratic. Mountain State Republicans also easily gained an open Senate seat today that had been in Democrats’ hands for decades, and seized control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates for the first time since the 1920s.

West Virginia is only now waking up from a history when the Democratic Party was still the party of the working class, and something less obviously inconsistent with working-class values. The Republican trend was slow to develop amid the Mountain State’s relative poverty — it went for Jimmy Carter twice and even Michael Dukakis. But the trend’s origin was the Democrats’ embrace of what, from the safety of anonymity, Democratic Sen. Thomas Eagleton once called the agenda of “amnesty, acid and abortion.” In today’s terms, this long-forgotten disparaging phrase translates to the progressive social values of the white urban liberal gentry, which were repudiated tonight in other states (most notably Texas and Colorado).

Add to that toxic mix the same urban gentry’s radical environmentalism, and you have the final ingredient for today’s result. West Virginians arguably know more than anyone the need for workplace safety and a clean environment, having suffered a recent chemical spill and many fatal mining disasters. But the Left’s obsession with eradicating coal has convinced the state’s voters that do-gooders in Washington will never let them live their lives or make a living.

President Obama’s “War on Coal” may have been overblown — in fact, low natural gas prices are also a major factor in killing off the fuel’s continued use. But Obama’s popularity in the state did not benefit from his own multiple anti-coal comments ranging as far back as 2007, nor from his environmental policies, nor from his senior EPA officials’ careless talk of wiping West Virginia towns off the map and “crucifying” their major employers to make a statement.

For decades, local Democrats survived their national party’s leftward lurch by convincing voters that Democrats there were different and could be trusted. But the era when this was possible may finally be ending.

In recent years, Democrats in the entire Appalachian region have had to go to greater and greater extremes to keep up appearances of remaining in touch with their constituents and not in the hip pockets of national party leaders. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the most conservative Democrat left in the Senate, drove his point home in 2010 by shooting up a copy of the cap-and-trade bill in one of his ads. Allison Lundergan Grimes also tried to show off her prowess with a gun and differentiate herself from Obama, but it just wasn’t enough this year. Her other mistakes aside, it was widely believed, with some justification, that she would be a vote for Obama the coal-killer whenever he needed her.

Manchin is now lonely as the last Democrat representing the Mountain State in Washington, D.C. He must at least be considering a change of party, as his state turns red and his fellow Senate Democratic moderates (especially Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark.) go down to defeat.

Either way, with so much talk of how the nation’s demographic changes are turning states blue, here is a good example of the opposite. West Virginia didn’t leave the Democrats — the Democrats left West Virginia.