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In reply to the discussion: Poor hardworking miners, their troubles are great [View all]cyclonefence
(4,483 posts)She didn't know how to talk to the coal miners and their ilk. She should have sent Jay Rockefeller as her surrogate to WV; he at least knows how to communicate with them. Hillary's message was fine; nobody would listen to it because she started out with "we're going to lose a lot more jobs in the coal fields."
I think there's been an enormous amount of resentment toward the Obamas among the uneducated, and I think a significant portion of Trump support was to "show" the democrats that they had had enough of being lorded over by an uppity black man. I think racism among Democrats also helped dampen voter turnout.
I heard an interview on NPR some time ago where a journalist said he had had no patience with people like coal miners who refused to consider retraining for other work. But then he thought, "what if *my* industry suddenly disappeared, and *I* was urged to stop what I had been doing for thirty years and be retrained to do something else, something that certainly would not pay me as well as I had been paid, something that would require me to start at the bottom and work my way up." He says his eyes were opened at that point.