“Where Trump goes we all go,” says Kevin Backus, 32, of Mt. Lookout, W.Va., a coal miner at CONSOL Energy’s Harvey Mine in Sycamore, Pa. Backus has worked in coal mining for 10 years.
At the Harvey Mine, most of the miners are supporting President Trump, believing that his rollback of regulations has helped their industry survive.
In the early 1920s, coal miners accounted for 2% of the country’s workforce with over 800,000 miners. Today, there are about 45,000 coal miners left in the U.S. Pennsylvania is one of the nation’s largest coal producing states behind Wyoming and West Virginia, producing about 7% of the the coal.