In West Virginia, coal is more than a natural resource. It is a cornerstone of the state’s identity, representing a long—and proud—history, good jobs, and the important and highly respected role coal miners played in a nation once dependent on their contributions. As the rest of the country steadfastly transitions away from coal as a source of energy, the Appalachian state has clung to it, with around 90% of its net energy generation coming from coal as late as in 2021. The decline of coal is a heavily politicized issue in the region and was a topic of significant import during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. An understanding of the economic, social, and political influence of coal in West Virginia is essential in order to make sense of the state’s resistance to adaptation in the face of climate change, new technologies, and market forces, as well as its twenty-first century transformation from a blue state to a Republican stronghold.
While its current status as a red state is beyond argument, with its Governor and both of its Senators and House Representatives all belonging to the same party, West Virginia turned out heavily in favor of Democratic presidential candidates from the 1930s up until the 2000 election, favoring their Republican rivals only three times during that entire period. Starting in 2000, however, the state has voted red in every single presidential election, and that by an ever-growing percentage that reached a record seventy percent in the 2024 election that secured Donald Trump his second term. While there are a number of factors driving this development, the shift is tied, inextricably, to the fate of coal.
In 2009, coal mining provided jobs for 30,000 people in West Virginia. This number comes nowhere close to the mid-20th century peak of over 125,000, a drop which resulted primarily from increased automation. The quantity of coal extracted annually remained fairly consistent over the same period, and coal represented one of the United States’ most important fuel sources. Several factors, however, combined to put pressure on the coal industry starting in the late 2000s. Beginning in 2007, shale gas surged in popularity and soon became both cheaper and more efficient than coal. Additionally, over the course of the 2010s, renewable energy started to become competitive, particularly wind and solar energy. Finally, in 2008, Barack Obama won the presidential election partly off of the promise to combat climate change.
Robert Byrd, a Democrat who served as senator of West Virginia for more than fifty years, exemplified his state’s sentimental ties to coal when saying that it “is as emblematic of our heritage and cultural identity as the black bear, the cardinal, and the rhododendron.” He championed his state’s coal industry throughout his entire half-century in Congress, opposing most efforts to advance bills on climate issues. In December of 2009, however, less than a year before his death, Byrd publicized a controversial op-ed acknowledging the reality of climate change and the necessity of policy to address it, advising West Virginians to adapt their coal industry to the incoming change rather than “resist and be overrun by it.” The statement, which also openly criticized many influential figures within the state’s coal sector, made waves in a political climate already rife with uncertainty about the future: in the first year of Obama’s first term, many of his opponents had begun to speak about an ongoing “war on coal.”
The war on coal became the prevailing narrative among key figures in the state as well as in Appalachia more broadly, obscuring or outright ignoring other key factors such as the growing competitiveness of other energy sources. The issue became more and more heavily politicized as the Democratic party honed in on environmental policy, and by the time Trump launched his campaign in 2015, the groundwork had been laid for a successful presidential run that made coal-mining jobs central to its messaging. In states where the decline of coal was a major cause of economic anxiety, he held rallies where he promised to revive the industry, becoming popular among people who had lost their mining jobs or were at risk of doing so. At one rally in West Virginia, he put on a hard-hat and play-acted at shoveling coal; a sign held up by an audience member behind him read “Trump digs coal.” That same week, also in West Virginia, Hillary Clinton was confronted by a laid-off coal miner over a statement she had made a couple of months prior about putting “a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” which was part of a broader statement that included a commitment to support blue-collar workers through the transition but nonetheless made for bad optics in coal country. Clinton lost to Trump in West Virginia by a 42-point margin in 2016, securing only 26.4 percent of the vote where Obama had taken home 43.2 percent during his first run eight years prior.
Trump’s administration slashed Obama’s Clean Power Plan and replaced it with a much less ambitious one of his own. He withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement—a withdrawal that only lasted for a few months toward the end of his first term before Biden resumed the country’s membership in 2021. Since taking office again, he has signed an executive order to once more withdraw from it. Possibly as a result, the number of coal mining jobs increased slightly over the first few years of Trump’s first term, but it had once again begun to decline toward the end of 2019. In the end, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a decline in the number of coal mining jobs nationwide from 50,400 in December of 2016, the month before the inauguration, down to 46,000 in February of 2020 at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which wiped out jobs across virtually all sectors. West Virginia’s annual coal output rose by 13.4% between 2016 and 2019, but still came nowhere close to the quantities produced in the 1990s and 2000s.
In 2022, West Virginia was among the nation’s top-five highest emitters of energy-related carbon dioxide per capita. This was a thirty-percent decrease from the beginning of the twenty-first century, but twenty other states made more significant progress on the metric within that period. Where it used to offer the cheapest electricity in the country, it had fallen to the twelfth cheapest by 2020. Attracting large companies to a state that lacks large cities and ranks poorly on infrastructure may prove even more difficult in a world where renewable energy access factors into firms’ relocation decisions and the future of the state’s electricity prices may look relatively unpromising. The state has also consequently failed to capitalize on the job opportunities created by a transition to clean energy.
West Virginia still runs on coal, even if the rest of the country is making the choice not to. Coal powers the electric grid and, to a significant extent, the state’s politics. In 2016, coal baron Jim Justice, West Virginia’s at-the-time only billionaire (the number is now zero), ran for the state’s gubernatorial seat as a Democrat in 2016. After a rally with Trump in 2017, he changed his party affiliation to Republican, and wrapped up his second term to join the U.S. Senate in January 2025. His replacement, Republican Patrick Morrisey, gave an inaugural address earlier this month where he promised that the state’s coal and natural gas industries will “win like never before in our new economy” through a partnership with the incumbent president. “If ever there was an honorary West Virginian,” he says, “it should be Donald Trump.”
By Sabina Rameke
January 31, 2025
