Daily Times

West Virginia: Each morning for the last 65 years, 93-year-old Ed Shepard has walked to work to open up the Union 76 service station, here in rolling hills of West Virginia coal country.

When he looks out his window, he can see a sweeping mural that shows what life in Welch used to be like. A United Cigars shop on one side of the street, a Western Union sign on the other. Lines of cars stretch into the distance. Even Shepard himself — who is as much a fixture of Welch as any of its buildings — is in the mural, a blue cap perched on his head.

“There wasn’t ten square feet in this town that didn’t have a successful business in it, a business of every kind,” Shepard said in an interview. “No matter what you wanted or needed, you could buy it in Welch.”

Those were better days.

Now it’s a place, people who live here say, that politicians use as a convenient photo op and that the federal government has left behind, a sentiment common among white working class voters. 56% of non-college educated whites say the government in Washington does not represent them, according to a new poll conducted by CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation. And two-thirds say they are dissatisfied with the influence people like them have on politics.

Locals referred to the once-bustling Welch as “Little New York,” but now the town and the county around it are slowly slipping away. The storefronts are empty. The buildings and houses here are now crumbling with decay. Shepard used to take checks to the bank each Monday — sometimes $1,000, sometimes $1,500. He hasn’t had to do that in four or five years he said, because he hasn’t had one customer in that long.

“It’s depressing to watch the population disappear, the business disappear and the activity to stop,” he said. “Back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, it’d be hard to walk up the sidewalk because there was so many people. Now you walk up the sidewalk and there’s nobody.”

McDowell County’s population is just 19,835 down from 100,000 in the 1950s. That decline is expected to continue. West Virginia University economists estimate that McDowell will continue to lose residents at a rate of 1% each year.

Some, particularly in rural areas like McDowell County, say the government’s at fault. Rural working class whites are more likely to blame the federal government for their economic problems than their urban counterparts. Seven in ten say the federal government deserves all or most of the blame for the economic problems facing the working class, in the CNN Kaiser survey, compared with half of urban working class whites. That could explain the appeal of a candidate who is not only intent on upsetting the political system, but has at times seemed bent on breaking it down to start over again.

On this winding drive through the hilly roads of Appalachia, there are few signs signaling support for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but Trump is expected to do well here. West Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democrat since Bill Clinton’s second term. Much has changed in the last 20 years and now Clinton is seen as squarely at odds with the coal industry, which is the bedrock of Welch and the surrounding county.

No matter who wins in November, some residents of West Virginia coal country don’t believe anything will change their lives. They have come to accept, as Gary Hall, a 55-year-old Trump supporter put it, “that next year is going to be worse than the last year” no matter who is president.

Hall said he felt alienated from the political process, but rejected the idea that he and other whites without college degrees were angry and flocking to Trump as a result. The CNN/Kaiser foundation survey suggests that’s the case, too. Just 19% of working class white voters described themselves as angry about how things are going in their own lives.

“We’re conditioned that there’s really nothing you can do about it. The only thing outrage and protesting and stuff does is cause bad feelings,” he said. “People are just resigned to have what they have. The ones that want to leave, the ones that can leave and want to leave leave. Everybody else just stays here.”

Rural working class white voters like Hall are more likely to say America’s best days are behind us and that their children will be worse off than they are today. In the CNN/Kaiser survey, 58% of rural working class whites say America’s best days have come and gone and 57% say their children will be worse off compared with less than half of urban working class whites who say the same.