No, contaminated drinking water isn't what Appalachians "voted for"
A recent 60 minutes segment on McDowell County, WV has people blaming the voters again. But the story is more complicated.
If your personal politics are even remotely to the left of “fuck the gays, fuck the immigrants, I am a mercenary at the behest of maximizing shareholder value” and are from Appalachia, you have dealt with the complex feelings inherent in loving a place whose modern voting record reflects a type of electoral masochism that confounds even the most astute political observer.
If that’s the case for you, then you’ve also dealt with condescending “enlightened liberal/centrist” outsiders who — after anything detrimental happens to that state, no matter how big or small — confidently proclaim they1 “got what they voted for.”
60 Minutes aired a segment on last Sunday about an ongoing water crisis in Southern West Virginia - primarily McDowell County.2 McDowell is one of the poorest counties in the country, the birthplace of the food stamp program, and a community in crisis in the heart of coal country.
The water has been contaminated for DECADES
There are some political observers who were born yesterday and cannot comprehend the concept of places like Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia ever electing someone with a big, fat, girthy D next to their name statewide, but those times did in fact exist - and not that long ago!
Political history side-quest
West Virginia, as the above image will show, was bluer than hell for a LONG time. But don’t get too far ahead of your skiis, that doesn’t mean they were all that left wing.
While Sen. Robert Byrd (aka “Big Daddy” aka “I use to hold rank in the Ku Klux Klan”) was good at getting lots of money directed back to the state, he wasn’t exactly spouting Marxist-Leninist revolutionary screeds and seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie capital owners.
So to speak…
I remember in early 2012, I was serving as president of the Shepherd University Young Democrats. I had been in the role since I transferred from WVU in 2010, and I was not very good at it. The crowning achievements were two debates with the Young Republicans, and attending the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally in D.C. We did, however, have some banger parties in my dorm/suite.
Anyway, the democratic primary for governor was well underway in West Virginia at this point, and I had a preferred candidate: Jeff Kessler.3 Kessler had travelled to Mingo County, WV and took pictures of peoples dirty, orange tapwater that had been contaminated by coal slurry run-off (he quite literally showed me the pictures on his phone). My sister was living in Mingo County at the time and could attest to the massive water problems, so this issue was very personal to me.
That was 2012. 14 years ago. An era of Democratic Party dominance in West Virginia.
But this crisis goes back even further, even before the 2000s. One of the reasons for this is pretty simple: coal companies. Coal has ruled West Virginia and its politicians for basically the past century. While they aren’t the sole source of water quality issues in southern West Virginia, they’re a chief culprit.
I’ll spare you all the environmental science details, but long story short, things like coal slurry have been contaminating the groundwater in these places. It had gone mostly unregulated (or poorly enforced) for many decades, leading to significant water problems including orange muck-looking liquid that came out of peoples taps.
Democrats didn’t fix the problem, and some contributed to it
Democrats technically held the reigns of power for many years, but you know who really held power in the state? Big. mother. fucking. coal.
It’s a running bit and common stereotype to say West Virginia is synonymous with coal. But the fun thing about stereotypes is there is always at least a kernel of truth to them. While most of the time that kernel is really tiny (you see one toothless man with no shoes chugging a 2-liter Mountain Dew in an Earnhardt jacket and suddenly he’s the mascot of the Appalachian region), sometimes those kernels are quite large. Coal is one of those kernels…or at least it was until very recently.
Coal’s stranglehold over the state’s politics is significant, and doing anything that would be perceived as “going against” the interests of the industry would have been political suicide.
Being ride-or-die for big coal was a bipartisan issue for many years. As the above article references, former congressman Nick Rahall (a democrat) was on the record poo-pooing suggestions that coal combustion wastes were harmful way back in 2009. And anyone who knows anything about Joe Manchin knows his decades-long political track record has been very coal-protectionist.
I provide all this background to say: the water contamination problems and crisis have been ongoing long before Republicans swept local, state, and federal offices permanently. So to suggest that if people in Southern West Virginia simply voted Democrat, their water problems would be solved is to deny history.
Clean drinking water is a human right
I don’t care what someone’s personal politics are, and I don’t care how despicable a human being they might be, it will not change the fact that I believe you deserve to have things like healthcare, shelter, and clean drinking water.
Meeting peoples basic needs is the primary function of government, and West Virginia has long failed the people of Southern West Virginia.
When I see self-described “liberals” and “centrists” and “never Trumpers” say things like “WHO DID THEY VOTE FOR?” “FAFO” “THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR”, it makes me question what values and convictions those people actually hold.
If you think clean drinking water should be means tested and ideologically gatekept, you can’t claim any moral high ground whatsoever.
The funny part to me is always that they LARP as an intelligent person while making the most baby-brained generalization about an entire geographic area. A generalization typically made on no more information other than whether that state shows up as red or blue on the latest electoral map - utterly disregarding the oftentimes millions of people whose votes are not reflected in that binary color. But I motherfucking digress.
Make no mistake, 60 Minutes has gone WAY downhill after Bari Weiss’s billioniare ascension to power, but real journalists still remain at the organization and this was very welcome coverage of an overlooked issue.
I was tasked with hosting a gubernatorial forum at Shepherd, and my responsibility was getting a crowd to attend. It was so poorly attended that I still, to this day, get anxiety thinking about it.
Kentuckian, there are a lot of unhelpful takes people feel like they must share. I feel your pain.
Despair is the hardest thing to overcome, I think.