In Virginia, Romney scours coal country aggressively for edge
When Jay Swiney emerges from the night shift in the coal mines to assume his duties as mayor of Appalachia, Va., it is hard for him to miss the partisan forces rocking the heavily unionized, Democratic hamlets in the mountains along the Tennessee border.
Billboards proclaim “America or Obama — You Can’t Have Them Both!” and “Yes, Coal; No-bama.” Outof-work miners are sporting baseball caps that say “Coal=Jobs” and T-shirts with the sarcastic message: “Make Coal Legal.” Yard signs and television ads for Mitt Romney are everywhere.
Romney’s campaign is aggressively tapping into anger at President Barack Obama’s environmental policies throughout the Appalachian counties where the state’s coal miners live, hoping that huge margins there will offset Obama’s equally aggressive campaign to woo women in the suburban communities of northern Virginia, just outside Washington.
The battle playing out in Virginia has echoes across the battleground states, where the final days of the presidential campaign have become a test of geographical strategies and an all-important focus on motivation, intensity and turnout.
Republicans are pushing hard in suburban Denver and central Florida to appeal to Hispanic small-business owners. Obama’s campaign is probing for white, male voters around Toledo, Ohio, where there are major auto plants that benefited from the auto bailout.
In Virginia, Republicans hope to keep the race razorclose in other parts of the state. If they do, aides believe Romney’s appeal in the sparsely populated coal country could tip Virginia’s 13 electoral votes into his column, a victory vital to his White House bid. With just 10 days left, few self-described hillbillies in southwest Virginia are undecided.
“I definitely will vote for Romney this time,” Swiney, 43, who considered backing Obama four years ago before deciding on Sen. John McCain, said in a telephone interview this week. “Not just because of the devastation that’s going on with coal now. I’m a firm believer in giving somebody a chance. We’ve given Obama a chance for the last four years.”
But the president, who lost much of that part of the state in 2008, seems at risk this time of losing by even larger margins. State Sen. Phillip Puckett, the longtime Democrat from the region, says he will not support Obama’s reelection because, telling a local television station last year, “It’s very clear to me that the administration does not support the coal industry.”
Strategists for Obama say coal miners and their families — many of whom are elderly — should be attracted to the president’s position on Social Security and Medicare. The president’s campaign is running ads in the region accusing Romney of wanting to turn Medicare into a voucher system. And surrogates are pressing the case.
“Romney is a political chameleon,” says Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, and a former head of the United Mine Workers. “He will say anything that he thinks people want to hear. For him to say he’s a friend of coal is absolutely ridiculous.”
But even longtime Democrats in the state concede that Romney is making a forceful push for votes in the 9th Congressional District, which encompasses the state’s halfdozen coal counties.
One of Romney’s ads, appearing frequently on television, begins with a coal miner saying, “Obama is ruining the coal industry.”
Dave Saunders, a veteran Democratic strategist who lives in the region, said: “Three things are sacred in southwest Virginia — the Holy Bible, moonshine and coal. That’s all I got to say. They will get big numbers in the 9th. No question at all.”
The Republican effort to gather votes for Romney has been supplemented by an aggressive and mostly negative campaign by third-party groups backed by conservatives and energy interests. A radio ad by the American Energy Alliance says the “president and his Washington cronies have declared war on affordable energy.” A TV ad by the same group urges miners to “Vote no on Obama’s failing energy policy.”