A mistake by coal country voters?

Right now, separate congressional committees have cleared two bills to have the federal government save the miners’ health care and benefits. But the efforts have gone no further: McConnell has blocked attempts to solve the problem.

In mid-December, Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown and Joe Manchin threatened to shut down the government if Congress didn’t pass their proposed Miners Protection Act. The bill would have covered the former miners through a fund originally established to pay states for reclaiming abandoned mines.

It failed. Instead, McConnell advanced a four-month temporary extension to their benefits through what’s called a continuing resolution — a temporary stopgap measure that will set the stage for the exact same fight to be replayed in April. Enough Democratic senators agreed to go along with McConnell that Brown and Manchin’s rebellion failed.

McConnell is not the only Republican opposed to Brown and Manchin’s bill. Republican senators whose states benefit the most from the abandoned mine funds — in particular, Wyoming’s Mike Enzi — have also been among the most stalwart opponents of that effort. Up to this point, the Moulitsas argument seems to make sense: These powerful Republicans want to end the benefits.

The reelection of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell in the heart of Appalachia is one. The UMWA endorsed Democratic Sen. Allison Grimes in her 2014 bid to unseat McConnell, but McConnell crushed her across the state. Then he spent the next two years holding up the coal miners’ pension and health care recovery package, which some have viewed as retaliation for the UMWA’s endorsement of Grimes.

And then there’s Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton ran on a suite of proposed policies to invest heavily in Appalachia and transform its economy away from coal. And yet Appalachia swung heavily for Trump, giving him among his biggest landslides throughout the country. But McConnell and Trump ran in coal country primarily as opponents of President Obama’s coal regulations, which they said were killing the coal companies that were the foundation of many Appalachian communities’ economies. Neither ran on a platform of stripping the miners of their benefits and pensions.

“Why did people vote for McConnell? Because they believed in the ‘war on coal’ rhetoric in Kentucky and overcame the rest of their concerns about him based on that issue,” Smith says.

Similarly, Trump excelled in Appalachia not because he vowed to end the miners’ pensions — he didn’t — but because he promised to restore the coal industry to its former glory and bring back coal jobs.

That may be mostly campaign rhetoric; the biggest factor in coal’s fall was the market, not the administration’s new regulations. But it’s not crazy to see the steps taken by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency as hurting or accelerating the decline of the coal industry. Voting for whoever was promising to stop that makes sense as rational economic self-interest.

You can say that voting for McConnell was a tactical mistake for the miners, or that it was naive for them to have believed in Trump’s outlandish promises to bring coal jobs back. But it certainly doesn’t support the conclusion that the white working class loves politicians who want to take away miners’ benefits.