Coal Country Rebelled Against Trump’s Candidate Last Night. Here’s Why.

It wasn’t about bringing shuttered plants back to life.

Brian Cahn/ Zuma

A few days before Democratic candidate Conor Lamb eked out a narrow lead over Republican opponent Rick Saccone in Pennsylvania’s special election for the House, President Trump was on the campaign trail repeating a familiar tune to crowds of his supporters. “By the way folks, some of you who are in the coal world,” Trump said. “Your coal is coming back. Big, big, big, big.” 

In 2016, the fantasy of a revived coal industry worked, helping Trump carry the same district by nearly 20 points despite the fact that the local United Mine Workers Association did not endorse anyone for the presidential race. But in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election, it was Lamb who got a bump from the UMWA. The union’s support wasn’t about bringing shuttered plants back to life, but focused on an old policy debate over how to ensure nearly 90,000 ex-miners still get their pensions even when the coal industry is going bankrupt around them. Congress may be voting on legislation to address the issue before the end of the year. 

In the week before election day, UMWA’s national president President Cecil Roberts had endorsed Lamb at a campaign stop with labor union members, noting his full support for coal miner pensions as a deciding factor. As the Washington Post reported, Saccone didn’t even try to outflank Lamb on the issue of pensions: “On Monday, as he campaigned at Canonsburg’s famous Sarris Candies with Trump Jr., Saccone dodged a question about the bill on miners’ pensions and accused a reporter who asked about it of talking to ‘liberals’ instead of real miners.”

Indeed, the UMWA saw Saccone as dismissive of the issue. In a press release issued Wednesday, they pointed out he seemed to prefer “to eat ice cream rather than answer whether he supported the American Miners’ Protection Act.”

After Tuesday night’s results came in, UMWA’s Roberts acknowledged in a statement that many of the local members probably had voted for Trump or not voted at all in 2016. “They may still agree with the President about a lot of things, but they know that if they lose their pension they will be scrambling just to survive,” he said. “All the other things any politician is doing or saying fall by.”

Concern over pensions was actually a minor issue in the 2016 presidential election. As Natalie Schreyer reported then for Mother Jones:

The dispute has its roots in 1946, when, in response to a massive coal strike, the Truman administration nationalized the mines. In order to end the strike, then-United Mine Workers of America union president John Lewis and Interior Secretary Julius Krug worked out a deal in which coal companies would pay royalties into a pension fund for retired miners and would also contribute money (deducted from miners’ paychecks) into a health insurance fund.

In recent years, the pension and health care funds have lost much of their value as coal mines have closed, companies have declared bankruptcy amid cheap natural gas prices, and the 2008 financial crisis gutted many pension funds. Some troubled companies have offloaded workers’ benefits into volatile offshoots that don’t always honor commitments to health and pension benefits. Phil Smith, a union spokesman, told Schreyer, “As coal firms slashed their workforces, the amount of money being paid out in retirement benefits surpassed the amount coming in.”

If the UMWA fund runs out of money, Congress would play an important role. The federally backed Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation would foot the bill, but it too could run out of money and require taxpayer bailout. They would have to juggle a number of competing demands, not just from former coal miners, but multi-employer pensions in other declining industries.

The UMWA has lobbied for federal intervention for years, and while there’s bipartisan support for it, congressional action has languished. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote on one fix at the end of 2016. There have even been a few proposals that would not have increased the budget deficit. According to the Washington Post, one intervention would have charged slightly higher “merchandise processing fees” for importers in 2025. Congress last year scraped together a solution at the last minute for the 22,000 ex-miners who were about to lose health care benefits, but the pensions issue remained in limbo.

In 2018, Congress has created a bipartisan 16-person committee comprised of House and Senate members to come up with solutions to the problem. They aren’t just looking at pensions for coal miners, but multi-employer pension funds in other industries backed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, and potentially affecting 1.5 million workers in states like Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The committee’s first hearing was the day after the Pennsylvania election, as it worked towards a bill that can be put to a vote before the end of the year. 

This issue could come up again in other districts with deep coal roots. And as Tuesday’s election shows, it might even be a deciding factor in places where Trump triumphed in 2016. 

“This is the most important issue our union is confronting right now,” Smith says. “This is issue one. If you’re not going to be with us you’re not going to be number one.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate