When officials in Logan, West Virginia, were contacted last week about hosting Hillary Clinton for a local rally, it didn’t take long for them to respond with an answer: Hell no.

“Bill and Hillary Clinton are simply not welcome in our town,” they wrote in a letter to the office of Sen. Joe Manchin, whose office had inquired about the availability of local facilities. “Mrs. Clinton’s anti-coal messages are the last thing our suffering town needs at this point. The policies that have been championed by people like Mrs. Clinton have all but devastated our fair town, and honestly, enough is enough. We wish them the best in their campaign, however we again state they are not welcome on our city’s properties.”


While Clinton might have the support of much of West Virginia’s political establishment in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, the Logan letter reveals the depth of some of the opposition to her candidacy. It’s sparked to some degree by a remark that continues to haunt her in coal country, two months after she made it in a March town hall.

Referring to the transition to clean energy, Clinton said: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

While Clinton later apologized for the comment, it’s proving to be a painful thorn in her campaign. She was publicly confronted about it at a West Virginia roundtable discussion last week and finds herself trailing Bernie Sanders in the two most recent public polls.

“It’s an uphill battle for Hillary in this state both in the primary and certainly much steeper uphill battle in the general election,” said former West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall, a Clinton supporter, said.

Clinton’s coal comment proved so jarring to West Virginia, where the Obama administration’s energy policies have been referred to as a “war on coal,” that a candidate for the nonpartisan West Virginia Supreme Court used the comment in a recent ad to contrast herself with Washington politicians.

“That clip, that sentence has been running all the time basically in the last two weeks in ads relating to [the] Supreme Court race here and it is a very heavily contested Supreme Court race,” said George Carenbauer, a former West Virginia Democratic Party chairman. “I would say they’ve had a couple of million dollars’ worth of ads in which that clip appears. ... So you’ve had the airwaves just pummeled with that, just constant, and I think that affects what goes on.”

Eight years ago, West Virginia gave Clinton a very different reception. Clinton swept every county in the state against Obama, winning 67 percent to 26 percent.

This time around, she’s got the support of Sen. Joe Manchin and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, the state’s highest-ranking Democrats, and the endorsement of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, the only daily newspaper in the state’s capital and largest city. But that’s where her advantages in the state end.

Clinton tends to run best in the most diverse states, but West Virginia is overwhelmingly white — which works to the Vermont senator’s advantage. And independents can vote in the Democratic primary, another factor which in other states has given Sanders an edge. While Sanders might be a little too liberal for the state’s culturally conservative Democrats, Clinton could suffer from her Obama administration ties — he’s unpopular enough that a felon won 41 percent against him in the 2012 Democratic primary.

On a state that is struggling economically, Sanders has focused on his message of economic inequality and highlighted his anti-poverty proposals during campaign stops.

“When I talk about the need to think big, to think outside of the box and to reject incremental change, I am talking about McDowell County and the thousands of other communities that have been tossed out, left behind, and abandoned by the rich and the powerful,” Sanders said Thursday during an anti-poverty forum in one of the poorest counties in West Virginia, one of his first campaign stops. “In my view, we need to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”

The Sanders campaign has also focused on college communities, hoping to run up the score in places like Morgantown, home to West Virginia University.

“We're working in the Northern Panhandle, the Eastern Panhandle. We're working in the southern portion of the state. We've been working in Huntington and Charleston,” Sanders state director Helen Strain said. “So we're working pretty much a large swath of the state.”

The larger problem for Clinton, Carenbauer argued, is that the state tends to resist establishment-oriented politicians and Clinton is not only one of the most high-profile politicians in the country, she’s one of the national Democrats most closely aligned with Obama.

“She’s a much bigger target than Bernie Sanders,” Carenbauer said. “You’re not going to find an ad — I don’t know where Bernie Sanders is on environmental issues, but I doubt it’s to the right of Hillary Clinton. ... You’re not going to find [Sanders] in any ads by Republicans because he’s not a big national figure. Hillary Clinton is, she’s well-known.”

