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And yet they didn't learn a goddamn thing
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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I was going to say as much. WV flipped hard in 2000. But it's simple to understand - WV has always been pretty socially conservative, but was Dem because of the unions. They flipped because the Dems decided to turn on the biggest union industries in the state. The coal miner's union isn't a good base for your power when you're overtly talking about actively working to destroy the coal mining industry. To be clear about how much WV cares about coal, it's the state rock and there's a coal miner on the state seal. The libertarian bent of a lot of GOP doesn't hurt either, Montani Semper Liberi and all.
Democrats didn't "turn on" coal, they recognized that it was a collapsing industry doing immeasurable damage to the environment and it would inevitably be phased out. The union failed to account for the future and threw a tantrum about it rather than negotiate re-training or any kind of transition plan.
Not only that but the government offered retraining programs for people who lost/were going to lose their jobs due to a decline in coal. From the outside the "my pa was a coal miner, I'm a coal miner, and my son will be a coal miner" attitude made a lot of those programs not as effective as they should have been.
While unfortunate, it's not like keeping coal is even remotely viable. So it was kinda inevitable.