Ex-con coal baron's bid for W.Va. Senate seat gains traction

Convicted misdemeanant at his campaign kickoff in January
(Associated Press photo by Steve Helber)

Don Blankenship's campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in West Virginia would have sounded like a pipe dream last year. After all, the former Massey Energy CEO just got out of prison for his role in 2010's Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that killed 29 men. But "opponents who once dismissed his candidacy now see him as a credible threat in the Trump era, positioned to appeal to many West Virginians’ resentment of elites of any kind," Trip Gabriel reports for The New York Times.

Blankenship' events have drawn protesters, but some in coal country support his claim that he is a former "political prisoner," unfairly targeted by federal prosecutors and safety inspectors. No evidence has been found to back up those claims, but Gabriel notes that Blankenship "is running for office in an era of nationwide voter credulity for conspiracy theories." That dovetails with many West Virginians' belief that the federal government, especially Barack Obama, is to blame for coal's decline, despite experts' belief that a larger factor was cheap, plentiful natural gas that stole coal's prime market, power generation.

West Virginia has a long history of miners vs. mine operators, but once non-union operators began paying union wages, the United Mine Workers union weakened, and when the miners and operators found a common foe in Obama's anti-coal policies, they became allies and operators were seen as job creators. R. Booth Goodwin II, who prosecuted Blankenship as U.S. attorney and then ran for governor unsuccessfully in 2016, told Gabriel: "I have heard people say, 'When Don was in charge, we always worked.' . . . The coal industry is still perpetuating a lie that coal mining is coming back, and it’s going to be just like it was before, when all objective evidence is to the contrary."