I may not have narrowed it down to Gore specifically, but at some point between, say…1985 and 2000…the Democratic party really seemed to just take unions and blue collar workers for granted…people who’d been a historic pillar of the party.
They backed away from unions and started putting more emphasis on identity over that period, but for WV it was Gore attacking the coal industry that triggered the switch over. WV was only Democrat because of the unions and the largest union industry was the coal miners. It doesn’t matter if you pay lip service to supporting unions if you’re also expressing a dedication to shutting down the biggest union industry in the region.
I always thought that WV was more about coal, but the union angle makes a ton of sense as well,
The two are fundamentally linked. What do you think the biggest union in WV was? There was never a solid Democrat support of coal, but so long as they were pro-union and didn’t actively attack coal they were going to keep WV. Instead they went increasingly
They backed away from unions and started putting more emphasis on identity over that period, but for WV it was Gore attacking the coal industry that triggered the switch over. WV was only Democrat because of the unions and the largest union industry was the coal miners. It doesn’t matter if you pay lip service to supporting unions if you’re also expressing a dedication to shutting down the biggest union industry in the region.
The two are fundamentally linked. What do you think the biggest union in WV was? There was never a solid Democrat support of coal, but so long as they were pro-union and didn’t actively attack coal they were going to keep WV. Instead they went increasingly