Pennsylvania coal miners firmly in Trump camp

 Salena Zito:

The one thing all the guys know about Sara Vance is she never cries.

Which is why her co-workers — all men — dropped their tools when Vance suddenly broke down in a flood of tears after she failed to shovel coal into a conveyor belt.

Pregnant with her first child and just weeks before the due date, she was 1,200 feet below the surface of the earth with no easy way out.

“I wasn’t in pain or going into labor,” Vance said. “I was just so frustrated because my belly was getting in my way of shoveling. I take pride in being able to do my job and those tears just started falling the more exasperated I became.”

Within minutes a dozen men were at her side. Vance was placed in the mantrip and driven through the seven miles of underground maze at Harvey Mine to an elevator where a stretcher waited to take her to the surface.

“I told them I do not need a stretcher and I certainly do not need an ambulance because I was not having a baby at that moment. I was just mad I couldn’t do my job,” Vance said, laughing at the memory.

Vance, who is 33 and blessed with thick, curly red hair, striking brown eyes and a rich Appalachian drawl, is standing in the cavernous locker room of the Harvey Mine in Greene County, Pa. It is eleven months since she had her daughter, Alexis, and she is about to descend once again for her daily shift.

The daughter of one of the first female coal miners in the country, Vance is dressed head-to-foot in full protective gear including overalls, hard hat, steel-toed boots, mining light, portable oxygen — and a red, white and blue mask emblazoned with the words “Trump 2020.”

In 2016, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump told coal miners in western Pennsylvania he was going to bring their jobs back — along with the engineers, chemists and geologists who work alongside them. In return, Trump won big around the coal-producing parts of Appalachian Pennsylvania. His oversized turnout in the coal counties of Washington, Greene, Cambria, Somerset, Westmoreland, Luzerne and Fayette helped earn him that 41,000-vote edge over Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, who famously told a town-hall audience during her campaign, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Four years later, I met with dozens of miners to see if their feelings for Trump have changed. All the workers I spoke to not only still support Trump for reelection, they firmly believe he has done right by their industry.

Those who live outside the hollers point to statistics that show more coal jobs have been lost since Trump took office. And it’s true: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were close to 90,000 coal-
mining jobs in 2012, compared with 46,600 today. In the last five years, 483 coal-fired electric generating units in the US have closed or announced their retirement.

But those who work in the industry said they aren’t blind to the data. Rather, they said that Trump’s shift away from Obama’s policies was the first step toward reversing the trend.

“We in the industry knew when he said he was bringing it back that it wasn’t going to happen overnight, nor was it going to ever look like it once did at its peak,” said Vance, the only female miner at the facility that employs 300 total underground.

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Zito got the Trump support right in 2016.  Unlike the pollsters, she gets out and actually talks to the people on their jobs.  She captures the human side of the Trump voters.