Campbell Robertson

Bevin had alienated many in both parties, describing some of those who protested his policies as “ignorant” and “selfish,” and leaving even political allies feeling insulted and bullied. Public school teachers, who were particularly angered by his approach, said openly that they had knocked on thousands of doors across the state to defeat Bevin.

He lost by more than 5,000 votes in a year when every Republican on the state ticket won easily and after President Donald Trump campaigned for him on the night before the election.

“We’re going to have a change in the governorship based on the vote of the people,” Bevin said to the crowd of reporters and others gathered outside his office in the Capitol, who were unsure up until the last minute whether the governor would acknowledge defeat or fight an increasingly solitary crusade to contest the election.

His fellow Republicans, who conspicuously did not swarm to Bevin’s defense when he began alleging widespread voting irregularities without presenting any evidence, were candid about the reason for his downfall.

“This race did not turn on policy,” said Robert Stivers, the state Senate president and a Republican, in an interview this week. “If it had been on policy he would have won hands down. What it turned on was personality. And his comments and rhetoric basically fatally wounded him from a political standpoint.”

The defeat came after Bevin, among the least popular governors in the country, had wrapped himself in the mantle of Trump, whose fervent advocacy for Bevin did not work out as either of them had hoped. And it now raises expectations for the final governor’s race of the year, the Louisiana election Saturday.

Trump has inserted himself on behalf of the Republicans in all three governor’s elections in cherry-red states this year. In the two that have taken place so far, the results are split. While Bevin lost, the Republican in Mississippi, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves — the least endangered of the three — won.

Now all eyes are on Louisiana, where the Democratic incumbent, John Bel Edwards, is trying to survive a challenge from Eddie Rispone, a Republican businessman. Rispone has explicitly styled himself after Trump, who is campaigning for him.

In his concession speech Thursday, Bevin thanked his staff, trumpeted the successes of his term and wished the best to Beshear, the son of a former two-term Democratic governor. He concluded his speech by criticizing the voting process as insufficiently transparent in the age of electronic voting machines, and continued to maintain that there had been improprieties in the election, just not enough to affect the outcome.

As it happened, Beshear’s margin of victory remained unchanged after the recanvass, according to the secretary of state: 5,136 votes out of more than 1.4 million cast.

Beshear delivered a sort of second victory speech after Bevin’s concession. He began by thanking the governor but also made remarks clearly meant to differentiate his style from Bevin’s.

“I believe that we can change the tone as we have seen it in Frankfort,” he said, “that we can be an example not just for the state but maybe even for the nation on how we can move forward on areas that we can agree on and how we can civilly disagree on areas that we might not have common ground.”

Though his final words were largely positive, Bevin had kept up his pugnacious style to the last days. At a conservative youth conference last weekend in California, he talked about people who aim “to hijack our political process,” who are talking of Russia collusion while “at the back gate robbing us blind.” He denounced electronic voting as unaccountable and spoke ominously of voting by noncitizens and dead people — “multiple times even.”

Fellow Republicans, however, had made clear that they were ready to move on.

“I think the right course is easy to determine,” Jason Nemes, a Republican legislator from Louisville, said this week, “and that’s to concede the race unless you have significant and specific evidence of illegal votes that were cast for the opponent.”

Bevin had never provided such specific evidence, instead simply raising doubts more generally about the integrity of the process.

In announcing the results of the recanvass shortly after Bevin’s concession, the outgoing secretary of state, Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, rebutted such claims by pointing out the decentralized administration of Kentucky elections, which are essentially 120 different elections, one in each county.

“By no means is there any vast conspiracy to hurt one candidate or party,” she said to reporters. “This is a process that depends on a lot of people. Its decentralization is its greatest asset.”

Kentucky had already begun preparing for a new administration before Thursday’s news, with construction of the inauguration platform underway at the state Capitol building. Beshear has named the grand marshals of his inauguration parade, and both he and Bevin said Thursday that their teams had already been working together on transition matters. The House Republican caucus has invited Beshear to its annual retreat to discuss areas of possible policy agreement.

This transition had been going on quietly despite the scheduled recanvass, which Bevin had requested and which, given the relative closeness of the election, many Kentuckians felt was justifiable. While it was hard to find people who supported a prolonged challenge beyond this, as Bevin had been indicating, a recanvass is a relatively easy and straightforward procedure.

The process Thursday morning was hardly gripping, unfolding in the 120 counties across the state much as it did in the third-floor conference room at the Scott County Courthouse in Georgetown, Kentucky. Pulling envelopes out of a plastic bin, Rebecca M. Johnson, the county clerk, read the vote totals, one precinct at a time, to a handful of county officials gathered around a conference table, along with the county sheriff, a local Democratic Party official and a couple of observers from the Bevin campaign. After winning Scott County handily in 2015, Bevin had come 97 votes short last week. It was among the closest margins in Kentucky.

After about 45 minutes of reading totals, and a few more minutes’ talk of weather and basketball over the rattling of adding machines, Beshear’s victory margin in Scott County was, again, 97 votes. Bobby McDowell, 61, chairman of the Scott County Democratic Executive Committee, who sat in on the recanvass, had doubted from the start that anything would change. But he was sure that he and most people in Kentucky, including Republicans, were ready for this election and all the business that followed to come to a definitive end.

“Everything’s got to have an amen,” he said.

This article originally appeared in

In Kentucky, a Governor Who Picked Fights Loses a Big One

FRANKFORT, Ky. — For a governor who had invariably made the political personal, it was a pointedly personal outcome on Thursday when Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky bowed to the inevitable and conceded after a recanvass of votes showed clearly that the Democrat Andy Beshear would be the state’s next governor.

“We’re going to have a change in the governorship based on the vote of the people,” Bevin said in a brief speech from a podium in front of the governor’s office.

Bevin, who had raised unspecified allegations of voter fraud and left open the option of challenging the results, instead acknowledged the victory of Beshear, the son of a two-time Democratic governor.

Beshear’s margin of victory remained unchanged after the recanvassing, according to the secretary of state: 5,136 votes out of more than 1.4 million cast.

The defeat of Bevin, who had become among the least popular governors in the country after a long and bruising battle with the state’s teachers over pensions, was a stinging rebuke in an election in which Republicans swept the other statewide races. And it came after Bevin wrapped himself in the mantle of President Donald Trump, who campaigned for him the night before the election.

In his speech, Bevin thanked his staff, trumpeted the successes of his term and wished the best to Beshear, the now uncontested governor-elect. But he continued to say that voting was not sufficiently transparent in the age of electronic voting machines and maintained that there had been irregularities in the election he had just conceded.

“The actual number’s going to fluctuate somewhat,” he said, referring to a statewide recanvassing of the vote that he had requested and which was coming to a close as he spoke. “But not so significantly that it’s going to change the outcome of this election.”

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin on Thursday conceded to Attorney General Andy Beshear after a recanvass of votes confirmed Beshear’s victory in last week’s governor’s election.

Bevin Concedes Kentucky Governor's Race

“We owe it to the victims and their families,” Attorney General William Barr said in July, “to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

As much as anyone, Earlene Branch Peterson, who lost her daughter Nancy and granddaughter Sarah in those murders, is the kind of person Barr was talking about. Now 80, and a conservative Trump supporter who lives in the Ozarks, she has come to a firm conviction about what she is owed and not owed.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t put Daniel Lee to death.”

There is nothing straightforward about death as retribution: who wants it, who gets it and on whose behalf it is carried out. This is true even in a case like that of Lee, whom Peterson first saw as “the persona of evilness.” The process that led to his death sentence left her and a striking number of people close to the case with a disquiet that lasted for decades.

Peterson is hardly alone in her belief that Lee should be spared. Her surviving daughter, Kimma Gurel, who sat beside her every excruciating day of the six-week trial, strongly agrees. So does her granddaughter, Monica Veillette, who has for years been pleading with officials to change Lee’s sentence. Not all family members are adamantly opposed to the execution. Scott Mueller, whose father William Mueller was the third victim, said: “It don’t really matter to me whether they kill him or not.”

But the lead prosecutor in the trial, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Stripling, wrote in a 2014 letter to Eric Holder, who was then the attorney general, that though he believed in capital punishment, he was disturbed by the randomness of its imposition. Lee’s death sentence, he wrote, “perfectly illustrates this inexplicable randomness.”

The federal judge who oversaw the trial — G. Thomas Eisele, a Nixon appointee to the bench, who died two years ago — wrote in a 2015 letter to Holder that he had second-guessed his decisions ever since and was left “with the firm conviction that justice was not served in this particular case, solely with regard to the sentence of death imposed on Daniel Lewis Lee.”

Little of this is motivated by any doubts about Lee’s guilt. His lawyers raised questions about the reliability of key witnesses, but “that is not the issue here,” said Gurel, 60, now living in Washington state. She was persuaded during the trial that Lee was guilty of heinous crimes and that he believed things she had always found abhorrent. Her husband is currently running for their local City Council on a platform of rejecting “hatred and bigotry.”

But on how the penalties were dispensed for that guilt, she said: “It just made no sense.”

Much of the unease revolves around the fate of the other man involved, Chevie Kehoe, whom the judge described as “the ringleader” in the crime.

Raised by his family in a white supremacist religion, Kehoe traveled the county proselytizing for the Aryan Peoples Republic and recruiting others to join his family’s small but lethal cell. Most of the trial was focused on Kehoe — his involvement in other murders and robberies, his violent threats toward his own family, his shootouts with the police. He had allegedly burglarized the Mueller home for guns once before and had brought Lee along for more. According to the testimony of Kehoe’s mother and brother, it was Chevie who had killed 8-year-old Sarah, because Lee could not bring himself to do it.

But Kehoe was clean-cut and charismatic, “like a young businessman,” Peterson remembers. The jury sentenced him to life in prison.

Lee — one eye ghostly, lost in a fight, his neck gilded with Nazi tattoos — was introduced to white supremacy by violent young men during his youth, spent in a series of religious boarding schools, mental health hospitals and juvenile detention centers. He drifted in the vicious periphery of skinhead groups before meeting Kehoe. Together they carried out anti-government plans, Kehoe as the mastermind and Lee, as one prosecutor put it in the trial, as “the faithful dog.”

When Kehoe was sentenced to life, the prosecution team collectively agreed not to seek death for Lee. They told his lawyer and the victims’ family members, who gave their assent. But Justice Department officials in Washington overruled this decision. So the prosecution argued that Lee was too dangerous to let live, even in prison, and the jury sentenced him to die.

“We were shocked,” Veillette said. “Shocked. That he got death. And Chevie didn’t.”

The disparity of the two sentences troubled Gurel, eventually leading her to question capital punishment altogether. Over the course of the trial, Veillette had begun to see the two men as at least partially being punished for their brutal upbringing.

“His dad and mom should be in jail for the way they raised their children,” Veillette said of Kehoe. “They did that to their child.”

Peterson does not look at things this way. A person must answer for his choices alone, she said. She disagrees with a lot of the views of her progressive daughter and granddaughter. At the time of the trial, she believed the answer for the men’s choices was plain.

“They both should die,” she said. “I felt that with all my heart.”

The killings were the worst thing that ever happened to Peterson, in a life that was not free of other tragedies. Nancy and Sarah’s pictures hang in Peterson’s bedroom, and Nancy’s handmade ceramics still sit on her bathroom sink.

After being abandoned by Sarah’s father, Nancy married William Mueller, whom she worked for as an electrician. He had come to rural Arkansas from New York, by way of Vietnam.

Peterson said that he beat Nancy badly, sending her to the hospital with broken bones. (Scott Mueller said he never saw physical abuse.) He insisted that her family members keep their distance. But they became aware that Mueller, a hoarder of guns and gold, had drifted into the orbit of far-right fanatics in the anti-government fervor of the 1990s.

Peterson and her husband became so concerned that they withdrew money from the bank, intending to pay someone to steal Nancy and Sarah away. Then, in January 1996, the whole family disappeared. And the following June, Peterson was at the coroner’s office identifying familiar winter coats, after bodies were found by a woman out fishing.

Peterson saw the disparate sentences for Kehoe and Lee as unfair. But she had no objection to death as punishment, not at first. She hated those men and was consumed with that hatred through years of prayer and talks with her pastor, through the death of Nancy’s father and her new life of solitude.

But she kept rereading one Bible verse. “My grace is sufficient,” she said, quivering with tears, almost unable to get the words out. She had been reading it for five years. “It ended up being that,” she said. “I come out whole. I’m OK. I’m a warrior.”

“I believe putting Daniel Lee to death is not the answer,” she said, composing herself. “It’s an easy way out. He should have to live through this. Like I did.”

She is now actively supporting efforts by federal public defenders seeking clemency for Lee — not freedom, Peterson clarified, but a life in prison. She has requested an audience with President Donald Trump. The sentences were not fair, she would tell him.

And the right punishment for Chevie Kehoe?

“Chevie has used the system his whole life,” Peterson said. She doubted that he would ever change, as the nuns who had spent time with Lee in prison told her he had. But, she said, “he’s a child of God. And I have to love him, too.”

This month, a polite man from a federal “crisis support team” called the family. He explained that the government would pay for flights to the execution, for a hotel and meals for up to eight people. A chaplain and counselor would be on hand. There would be a dinner before the execution and trips arranged to and from the facility.

When Peterson told the man she did not support any of this, he said he didn’t need to know that. He just needed to know if she planned to attend.

Family Asks U.S. to Spare 'The Persona of Evilness'

HECTOR, Ark. — In early December, if nothing else changes, Daniel Lewis Lee will be the first federal prisoner put to death in nearly two decades. He was sentenced 20 years ago after being convicted — along with another man, both white supremacists on the hunt for guns and cash — of taping bags over the heads of a husband, wife and 8-year-old girl, tying rocks around them and throwing them into a bayou.

But the lead prosecutor in the trial, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Stripling, wrote in a 2014 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder that though he believed in capital punishment, he was disturbed by the randomness of its imposition. Lee’s death sentence, he wrote, “perfectly illustrates this inexplicable randomness.”

The federal judge who oversaw the trial — Thomas Eisele, a Nixon appointee to the bench, who died two years ago — wrote in a 2015 letter to Holder that he had second-guessed his decisions ever since and was left “with the firm conviction that justice was not served in this particular case, solely with regard to the sentence of death imposed on Daniel Lewis Lee.”

Raised by his family in a white supremacist religion, Kehoe traveled the county proselytizing for an Aryan Peoples Republic and recruiting others to join his family’s small but lethal cell. Most of the trial was focused on Kehoe — his involvement in other murders and robberies, his violent threats toward his own family, his shootouts with the police. He had allegedly burglarized the Mueller home for guns once before and had brought Lee along for more. According to the testimony of Kehoe’s mother and brother, it was Chevie who had killed 8-year-old Sarah, because Lee could not bring himself to do it.

Earlier this month, a polite man from a federal “crisis support team” called the family. He explained that the government would pay for flights to the execution, for a hotel and meals for up to eight people. A chaplain and counselor would be on hand. There would be a dinner before the execution and trips arranged to and from the facility.

Before First Federal Execution in Years, Family of Victims Dissents

Men and women, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, crowded elbow to elbow around tables at the Jewish Family and Community Services building, making blankets for refugees and packing bags of crayons and coloring books for the young and undocumented.

“We are here and we are not scared,” declared Laura Horowitz, a member of Dor Hadash, one of the three Jewish congregations that were attacked Oct. 27, 2018, by an anti-Semitic gunman enraged about their welcoming of refugees.

Horowitz tied another knot in the fringe of a blanket, and then qualified her declaration. “Maybe we are scared,” she said. “But we’re here anyway.”

On Sunday, Pittsburgh marked one year since 11 worshippers of three congregations were killed at the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue. It was a citywide commemoration, beginning with community service projects all around town, continuing in Torah study sessions at the city’s largest synagogue, and culminating with a solemn service at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, the site of a packed commemoration the day after the attack.

“I stood here one year ago still in shock over the brutal massacre in my synagogue, Tree of Life, not knowing what to say,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Myers in remarks Sunday night.

The evening program was full of psalms and prayers, candle-lighting and poetry. A video was played showing family members of the 11 deceased, now known by name across the city: 97-year-old Rose Mallinger; the beloved Rosenthal brothers, David and Cecil; Richard Gottfried, a pillar of the New Light congregation. The governor and the mayor spoke briefly, but most of the time was given to leaders of the three congregations.

“Xenophobia is as ancient as humanity; anti-Semitic hatred is also nothing new,” said Anne-Marie Mizel Nelson, a daughter of founding members of Dor Hadash. “It has not defeated us yet. And it will not defeat us now.”

Since almost immediately after the attack, a discussion about how best to move forward has never been far removed from the grief of what was lost. It was not far Sunday, either.

Apparently alluding to those who have urged a focus on policy changes like gun control in response to the attack, Myers acknowledged that people had chided him “that my efforts would be better spent on more achievable goals.” He continued: “My tradition teaches us the following: It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but you are not absolved from trying.”

Immediately following him, Rabbi Jonathan Perlman of New Light Congregation drew a long standing ovation when he specifically called on politicians to pass gun control measures. He followed that with a criticism of the government for pushing toward a capital trial for the synagogue attacker rather than accepting a guilty plea for life in prison. A trial, the rabbi said, would “retraumatize our families.”

“Please,” he said. “Please, let us treat each other with great warmth and sympathy.”

Many in the three congregations had not especially been looking forward to Sunday, having already spent a year in grief. Some of those who had lost relatives in the attack simply left town. The day’s agenda, though, was created by family members, as well as others in the congregations and a host of Jewish service agencies across the city.

The morning’s community service projects were scattered all over the city, at the JFCS building, at food pantries, libraries and blood drives, and, with saws and clippers, at the vine-choked Shaare Torah cemetery in the city’s South Hills.

“People have asked me this year, ‘How do you move on?’ ” said Rabbi Daniel Wasserman at the cemetery, his work-gloved hands on his hips. “We’re not moving on,” he said sermonically. “We’re moving forward. There is a difference.”

Hacking through the brush on the hill in front of him were a couple of dozen volunteers, including two women who had driven that morning all the way from Baltimore and a 74-year-old Pittsburgh man who had just come across the grave of his great-grandfather.

As at all the volunteer events, some of the participants had close connections with the congregations that were attacked, and some had no ties at all. There was much talk about the need to do something to mark the day, of the particularly Jewish imperative of doing good in the world, and of how this was an essentially Pittsburgh impulse as well.

“Maybe it’s the influence of Mr. Rogers,” said Noah Jordan, 32, who had grown up in the Tree of Life congregation and Sunday morning was among the volunteers making bags for immigrants. In the earliest hours after the shooting, he said, he thought of it as an attack on the Jewish community. “But then, everyone in Pittsburgh saw this as an attack on all of us.”

Pittsburgh Marks a Massacre's Anniversary With Prayers and Projects

PITTSBURGH — It was a scene that would have infuriated the man who set off a whole year of pain and sorrow.

Unemployment is lower than it has been in many years. Wages are inching up. Despite multiple signs of a recession in manufacturing nationally, many manufacturers here say they just don’t see it.

How Ohio votes in 2020 could come down to one question: Are people judging things based on the dismal economy of a decade ago? Or on the heyday of the well-paid union worker in the state’s industrial past?

“If you were to compare what’s happening now to what the past 20 years have been like, things are really good,” said Jay Goyal, 38, who runs a metal manufacturing firm in this small industrial city between Cleveland and Columbus. “Anyone who wants a job right now can get a job, and that hasn’t necessarily been the case.”

Compared with 20 years before that, on the other hand: “That’s where I think it gets a little tricky.”

Of course, many things are tricky in looking at the economy of Ohio, once a crucial swing state that has drifted steadily toward the Republicans over the past decade.

Ohio still has one of the largest manufacturing workforces in the country, but manufacturing is no longer the dominant employment driver it was. As recently as 1990, it accounted for nearly a quarter of the state’s workers. Now, after years of shrinking population, the loss of talent to other industries and an opioid crisis, it accounts for about one in eight workers.

And the current economic picture is decidedly mixed. On some key measures of economic health, including labor force participation, Ohio has gone from above average to trailing the nation. Median hourly wages, according to a report from Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland-based think tank, are below what they were in 1979.

So these are hardly the boom times. But, as comes up repeatedly in conversation, it has been a whole lot worse.

For all the talk of an industrial recession, small and midsize Ohio manufacturers of everything from corrugated boxes to precision screwdrivers say they’re feeling fine, even better than fine. Overall, things might not be moving as fast as last year, but that was when they were still on a tax-cut-fueled tear.

“Our manufacturers are reporting a little gradual slowing in their activity rates,” said Mark Schweitzer, a senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. “They are not reporting things dropping off precipitously.”

Mark Romanchuk, 57, who owns two small manufacturing firms in Mansfield and who, as a Republican, won the local state legislative seat in 2013 from Goyal, a Democrat, went further: “We’re not seeing any kind of slowing, and we don’t feel like one’s coming either.”

In interviews, manufacturers attributed any current tapering in growth not principally to President Donald Trump’s trade war, though that has dampened profits, but to a labor market so tight that new skilled workers just can’t be found.

The current General Motors strike, in its fourth week and coming after the closing of a large GM plant in Lordstown, is illustrative of a changed state. A generation ago, when GM was by far the state’s largest employer, this would have shaken Ohio’s economy to the core. But now, as The Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports, GM is the 72nd largest. This puts it just above Starbucks.

Ohioans who pay attention to these things note with amusement that the Democrats are having their debate in a suburb of Columbus, a city that seems markedly unrepresentative of the state it sits in. Though it is the state capital and home of the flagship university, Columbus is often talked of as if it were airlifted from the Sun Belt, a booming, service economy-based city dropped in a state full of shrinking postindustrial hubs.

But Columbus is a lot more representative than it used to be. The whole state is moving toward the service economy. The Cleveland Clinic is now the state’s largest employer, followed by Walmart and Kroger. There is only one manufacturer, Honda, in the top 20.

This is easy to grasp in Mansfield, where part of the abandoned Westinghouse factory, once the pillar of a boomtown, now sits as a colossal ruin just outside the city center. The litany of plant closings over the past few decades, culminating in the shutdown of a GM plant in 2010, was positively brutal.

These days “Help Wanted” signs line the road into a pretty downtown of boutique shops, salons and a winery-restaurant. It is not quite the Mansfield of 1965, nor the Columbus of 2019. But it is better than it has been for a while.

“If you’re 30 and you were born in Mansfield, this is the best Mansfield has been,” said Jay Allred, the publisher of a local news site, the Richland Source.

Still, many of those readily available jobs are not like the good-paying union jobs of 40 years ago, jobs that were dependable enough to build a life around. The top occupations in the city now are cashiers and retail workers. Even some of the entry-level factory jobs now pay wages that barely cover rent.

“We have positions that start at $9, $10 and get up to $12 an hour,” said Heidi Spade, 48, who worked in a $12-an-hour factory job herself but now works at a staffing service in a Mansfield nonprofit group. For her clients, “buying a car is not in cards right now.”

At a time when jobs seem to be plentiful, Democrats like Sen. Sherrod Brown, who grew up in Mansfield, are focusing on the quality of those jobs — the pay and security — especially as companies are doing so well financially.

“Corporate profits have soared, executive compensation has exploded, but wages are flat,” Brown wrote in an email message. After the tax cuts, he continued, “companies turned right around and closed factories, spent $1.5 million every minute of every day on stock buybacks, and companies like GM shipped manufacturing jobs overseas.”

Still, for all the partisan debate, it just can’t be assumed that how people feel economically directly translates into how they will vote. Plenty of voters in prosperous Columbus, for example, are certain that the president is taking the country in the wrong direction.

“He hasn’t done anything for the economy,” said Abby Lavelle, 63, a retired supervisor at the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, who was on her way to a Democratic activist meeting at a Columbus microbrewery.

Meanwhile, a short drive north, there is Bret Davis, 59, a fourth-generation farmer, who is, in his own words, going through hell.

“The rest of the economy’s going pretty good and we’re sitting here having the worst year we’ve ever had,” he said. China is Ohio’s number one soybean customer and Trump’s trade war has left beans sitting unsold, distraught young farmers considering getting out of farming entirely and Davis with no clue what will happen next. He took Friday’s announcement of a partial trade deal, he said, “with a grain of salt.”

And yet, “the worst that I can see,” he said, maintaining that the trade war has been long-needed and must be seen though to a successful end, “is if the administration changes.”

Democrats' Debate Is Set for Ohio, Where Strength of Economy Is Debatable

MANSFIELD, Ohio — When they gather near Columbus for their fourth debate, Democrats will be coming to a state that, if not “great again,” is by many accounts doing quite OK, certainly much better than a decade ago.

In years past, it was the men who would empty out of the hollows of Letcher County before sunrise. All day long they would be underground, digging out coal as their fathers and often their grandfathers had done. Lucas’ husband, Denley, had a job with one of the big mining companies, with good benefits and an income approaching six figures when all the overtime was added. She stayed at home to raise their four children.

“We had a good life,” she said.

It has been a hot and mean summer in Letcher County, with a rash of coal mine bankruptcies and layoffs even crueler than the ones that came before. From the barstools at the American Legion post to the parking lot of the unemployment office, there was little debate: The coal business around here is going under. The only question was what would keep everyone afloat.

These days, the answer has been: women. From 2010 to 2017, Letcher County saw a greater shift in the gender balance of its labor force than almost any other county in the United States.

The share of women in the workforce rose substantially in places throughout Central Appalachia, as well as in parts of the industrial Midwest and the rural South. But few places have seen a more dramatic change than Letcher County, in hilly Eastern Kentucky, where for generations the archetypal worker was a brawny, coal-dusted man in reflective overalls. Just 10 years ago, nearly three-fifths of the workforce was male. Now the majority is female.

“The mines have shut down and the women have gone to work,” said Billy Thompson, a district director of the United Steelworkers union, which represents thousands of medical support workers in the region. “It’s not complicated at all.”

There are over a thousand fewer coal mine jobs in Letcher County than there were a decade ago, and virtually all of those lost jobs were held by men. The number of mining jobs, according to state figures, fell to under 50 in 2017, from over 1,300 at the beginning of 2009. The number has inched back up; this summer it was 100.

Coal mining has always been boom-and-bust, but it is hard to shake the feeling that this might be the last bust. Some men picked up and left at word of mining jobs elsewhere, some went to work as linemen or truck drivers, and others, figuring they were too old or physically broken to start over, just dropped out of the labor force. It was as if the very identity of a Letcher County man had been declared insolvent.

“I could always tell the man who worked in the mines,” said Debbie Baker, a cleaner in Whitesburg, the Letcher County seat. For one thing, “they had money.”

She recalled a family who lived comfortably where she grew up; the father worked underground and his sons followed, one by one. “The next would get old enough and get a wife and go working in the coal mines,” she said. “I don’t think any of the men did anything else.”

“When the mines left, they all ended up on drugs,” Baker added. “And their women went to work.”

Women in coal country always found paying work in greater numbers during the lean times, cleaning houses or making burgers, earning enough to get the family by until the mines picked up again. When that happened — and it always did — wives often returned home or cut back on hours because they could and because someone had to, child care being an elusive commodity. But just tiding the family over is not enough anymore.

There is little hope of finding work that could replace a miner’s income; women in Letcher County still on average make substantially lower salaries than men. But in a place stricken by chronic disease and opioid overdoses, there is one area where workers are in constant demand: Health care. Signing bonuses for nurses can reach into the five digits.

It is impossible to miss driving into Whitesburg. Heading in from the east, there is an outpatient mental health clinic taking up a roadside mall and then, on a perch overlooking downtown, the county’s major hospital, founded by the miners’ union in the 1950s and recently expanded. Coming in from the west, there is a brand-new heart, vascular and neurology clinic that opened in the old Super 8 hotel building, and just beyond it, across from the grocery store, is the 75,000-square-foot Mountain Comprehensive Health Corp. clinic.

This is the region’s economy now, and its workforce. At the regional network of MCHC clinics alone, there more than 110 nurses, according to Mike Caudill, the chief executive. Four of them are men.

From Miners to Nurses

“We wouldn’t have half the nurses that we do if we still had coal mines,” said Ciara Bowling. She certainly wouldn’t have decided to go to work herself. As far back as she can remember, she wanted only to be a coal miner’s wife.

But Bowling, 25, came out of high school into the coal bust. Her boyfriend, already laid off, drove the county roads asking about openings at the mines, while she earned their living at the dollar store, then the Pizza Hut, then the McDonald’s. Most of the women she worked with, she said, were wives of out-of-work miners.

The idea was always to quit when the men found jobs. This was the arrangement articulated by a friend of Bowling’s, a former miner named Jody Ray Rose: “A man works and does what he’s supposed to do, or has to do,” Rose said, “to take care of his family.”

But without the mines this was nearly impossible. Bowling and her boyfriend sold their TV and refrigerator; at one point they had their water cut off. He never found a mining job. After they split up and Bowling started seeing a new man — also looking for work underground — she enrolled at the local community college to become a medical assistant.

“Take care of your husband, that’s all you want to do,” she said. “But when that doesn’t work out, you’ve got to go to work.”

This is the conversation Lucas, the hospital worker, and her husband, began having when the coal business started falling apart. Even before Denley was laid off, the Lucases, with four young children and a mortgage, had been watching mines shut down one after another. More than a decade after dropping out of college, Amanda Lucas, 38, raised the idea of going back to school.

“To be honest, I wasn’t real crazy about it to start,” her husband said, sitting with his wife in a living room noisy with children on a Fourth of July afternoon. He saw it as his obligation to ensure that she didn’t have to work, an obligation he’d kept for 18 years. But she wanted this, he said, so he didn’t get in the way.

As it was, they needed it. A state program for miners’ families not only paid tuition but, critically, also provided money for living expenses. Amanda Lucas spent long days studying while her mother and sister-in-law helped Denley Lucas with the children.

After graduation, Amanda Lucas went straight to work as a respiratory therapist. The job comes with health insurance, but it doesn’t draw the salary Denley Lucas used to earn in the mines. That is a reality common to care workers, looking after people who made more money than they likely ever will. She sees former miners suffering from black lung and other ailments she has known firsthand in her own extended family. She thinks of the work as an act of reciprocity.

“They helped us to establish everything around here, and now I can help them,” said Amanda Lucas, who is now training other wives of out-of-work miners at the college. “I’ve always heard if you love what you do it don’t seem like a job, and that’s how I feel right now.”

The family has learned to live on less. Denley Lucas works construction jobs when the opportunity arises, but he hasn’t ruled out going back underground.

“I liked it pretty good the way it was and I’m sure she did too,” he said, nodding toward his wife. It was true that working in the mines was rough, and he appreciates his wife’s success. “I’m sure she’s glad she’s done what she did, and I understand that,” he said.

“But,” he repeated, “I did like it pretty good the way it was.”

“Things Have Just Changed”

Bowling had ultimately found a life like the way it was, or the way she’d long wanted it to be. Her fiancé, Blake Johnson, had found a job in the mines. Every day he went in before sunup and came home 12 hours later, exhausted and coated in coal dust.

“We as a community are so proud of our miners,” Bowling said. She was sitting on a hot afternoon at the Hemphill Community Center, in a building that once housed a long-shuttered grade school. In the parking lot stands a shrine to those who died in the nearby mines, the names listed on black marble of miners “who gave so much that future generations may benefit with a better life.”

Johnson’s father was killed in the mines. His brother was laid off this summer, after decades with one company. He had few illusions about coal work. He wanted to go back to school himself and when he got a good job, he said, Bowling would no longer have to work.

She has different ideas. “Things have just changed,” she said.

She didn’t drop out of school when Johnson got his mining job, as she would have done in years past. There was now the prospect of real independence, of not always having to defer to a husband because he paid the bills.

“Women now, they got a little taste of freedom,” Bowling said. “Men has been able to do whatever the hell they want for so long while women has had to sit in a chair and keep their legs closed and be nice and polite. Now they don’t have to.”

It felt strange to be saying these things out loud, she said. There were plenty of men less open to change than Johnson, who had supported her going to school. Her friend Rose, for example: He didn’t want his wife working at all. But none of them, she said, understood how big a shift was underway.

“All these men, they just don’t know what’s about to happen,” she said.

“They’re not going to be able to sit at the house and do nothing. They are going to have to help. Because she is going to have just as much invested in their life as he does.”

In August, Bowling started her long days of clinical rotations. Johnson was laid off.

A short drive from the community center up Coal Miner’s Highway, in a house his grandfather built, Rose considered the way Bowling went about things, and the way preferred by men like himself.

“We’re definitely a dying breed,” he said. He had been released from prison a few weeks earlier — drugs — and was now delivering merchandise for a hardware store. Getting back underground was the aim, but he wanted his sons to see how it was supposed to be: him hard at work and their mother at home with them.

This was getting harder to sustain, though. And fewer people seemed interested in holding onto it.

“The way of life is changing so bad,” Rose said. He grew quiet. “You’ll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.”

The Coal Mining Jobs Left, So the Women Went to Work

FLEMING-NEON, Ky. — In the pre-dawn hours when all is dark and quiet, Amanda Lucas leaves her house and begins the long drive to her job at a hospital an hour away.

On the governor’s right were a handful of House Democrats, who as a group in February said they were “no longer confident in the governor’s representation of Virginians,” after learning of a shocking racist photo on Northam’s medical-school yearbook page.

On his left were mostly Republicans, including the speaker of the House, Delegate Kirk Cox, who had declared that Northam’s “ability to lead and govern is permanently impaired.”

Some on stage were members of the legislative black caucus, which called the yearbook photo “disgusting, reprehensible and offensive” and “a complete betrayal.”

Even so, as Northam took out a pen at the event last week and signed bills to overhaul the state’s foster care system, the lawmakers of both parties stood behind him, grinning and clapping.

This is the strange, suspended state of Virginia politics, just two months after scandal after scandal seemed to be devouring the state’s government from the top down.

In the space of a week in early February, the public was stunned by revelations about each of the three highest statewide elected officials, all Democrats: the racist photo in the governor’s yearbook, accusations of sexual assault against the lieutenant governor and the attorney general’s appearance in blackface at a party in college. Protesters and news crews swarmed the Statehouse. Calls for resignations came from fellow Virginia Democrats, Republicans and even 2020 presidential candidates.

And then? “It just went poof,” said Natalie Draper, a librarian sitting in the back of a coffeehouse last week in Richmond. “It’s like it never happened.”

Virginians have various theories as to how this surreal normalcy set in.

Some say the whole mess was so exhausting and embarrassing that by the time the Legislature adjourned Feb. 24, the outrage had burned itself out. Others point to polls that showed Virginia voters were considerably less hungry for resignations than their representatives were. Some political observers mused about more fundamental changes to the life span of scandal, describing President Donald Trump’s approach to bad press as if it were a revolutionary medical breakthrough.

“Don’t apologize, move on and everybody will talk about something else next week,” is how Ben Tribbett, a Democratic strategist, described it. “Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong over the last 100 years.”

For the Democrats, perhaps above all, there are the blunt political realities. Whatever may happen in the 2021 election for governor, every seat in the Republican-controlled Virginia General Assembly will be up this November and Democrats have a chance to take back power in at least one chamber of the Legislature. That will be hard enough now, given the bales of fodder Republicans now have for attack ads. But the idea of trying to raise money and hold rallies while spurning the three highest officeholders in the state came to be seen by many Democrats as just a needless handicap.

Betsy Carr, a Democratic delegate, said shortly after stepping off the stage last week with Northam that voters “want to move on.” “They want positive things to happen, they’re concerned about the elections,” she said.

That sort of hard pragmatism is common among Democratic figures these days. But it is not unanimous. Many younger people in the party, in particular, are frustrated by what they see as the leadership’s hurry to move on from the scandals rather than come to grips with them.

“Winning is important,” said Taikein Cooper, the 30-year-old chairman of the Prince Edward County Democratic Party, “but we also have to have some morals.”

In the immediate wake of the scandals, the governor all but disappeared, either avoiding public events or being explicitly disinvited from them.

The gears of state government kept turning — bills were signed or vetoed, Cabinet secretaries did their work — but Northam’s public resurfacing was slow, beginning with an appearance in early March at the third annual Public Safety Unmanned Aircraft Systems Conference.

Still, it is only in recent days that his public schedule has approached normal — or at least, something that looks normal from the outside.

“I think groups are struggling with, ‘What do we do? What do we do about inviting him? Do we want him the centerpiece of an announcement?'” said Cox, the House speaker, who spoke with Northam at the bill-signing for the first time since February. “It’s going to be pretty hard to say we’re just going to have a normal governorship for the next three years,” Cox said.

Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, too, has been showing up at public events more often. But rather than trying to change the subject from the allegations against him, he dives right into them, even unprompted, as he did on the last day of the legislative session in a surprise speech comparing himself to a victim of lynching.

Mark Herring, the attorney general, has taken questions from the public on a few occasions since his own blackface scandal broke. But when he talked recently with reporters in Washington, after a Supreme Court hearing on gerrymandering, no one asked him about the episode.

Democrats fully acknowledge that there is unfinished business in all this. But they cite the lack of resolution as a reason to slow down on those immediate calls for resignations.

“Most people wanted to give the governor time to sort out what had happened,” said state Sen. Scott A. Surovell. “I think a lot of people question whether he’s in that picture and they’re waiting for more information about who’s actually in it.”

Initially, Northam apologized for appearing in the yearbook photo, which shows a man in blackface makeup standing next to someone wearing a Klan robe and hood. But since then, he has insisted that he is actually not either of the people in the picture and he has pledged to get to the bottom of the matter. The mechanism for that appears to be an inquiry that began last month, conducted on behalf of Eastern Virginia Medical School by the law firm McGuireWoods.

That investigation into the role of racism in the past and present culture of the school was also examining the circumstances of the infamous photo. No findings have been announced yet and the investigation is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks.

Still, Northam made another pledge around the time he announced that he was staying put: to focus for the rest of his term on addressing racial inequities in American life, a theme he now repeatedly emphasizes in speeches.

The governor “welcomes the opportunity for future conversations” on improving racial equity, said a spokeswoman, Ofirah Yheskel, who pointed out various measures the governor has supported in recent weeks that reflect “his focus on the equity issues.”

One of the chief barometers of Northam’s success on this front has become the opinion of the legislative black caucus, to which other Democrats have readily deferred since the scandals broke. Members of the caucus have laid out their priorities in meetings and conversations with the governor, and they say he has mostly abided.

“He’s been trying hard, from what I can see,” said Delegate Lamont Bagby, the chairman of the caucus. “He’s stumbled on his own feet a couple times, I think he would agree to that.” But Bagby gave his approval to the governor’s choice of bills to veto and amendments to propose over the past few weeks, and he said he believed that long-delayed but badly needed conversations about race had begun.

At a Baptist church in Richmond on a recent Sunday afternoon, Northam delivered brief remarks referring to lingering inequities at a ceremony in honor of Dorothy Height, a grande dame of the civil rights movement. He was followed at the pulpit by Fairfax — the first time they appeared in public together since the scandals erupted.

Fairfax began with praise for Height’s “oratory around the issue of anti-lynching,” but it quickly became clear he was also talking about other matters.

“She saw what was happening in this country, where people were being falsely accused,” Fairfax said. “They were not given due process. They were having their lives in so many ways impacted negatively, in some ways taken away, because people wanted not to get to the truth but ultimately wanted things changed in a negative way for nefarious reasons.”

It was barely subtext and he would revisit these themes more forthrightly two nights later at a Women’s History Month mixer in Hampton, Va., an event sponsored by the local chapter of the NAACP. After the lieutenant governor gave a short speech on his fight against “fabricated claims and false allegations,” the crowd erupted in cheers of support.

Like Northam, Fairfax has insisted on an investigation into the accusations against him. He contends that he is being accused of sexual assault and rape for encounters that were consensual.

His demands for an investigation are echoed by fellow Democrats, as Northam’s are. But it remains unclear where exactly such an investigation is to come from.

RICHMOND, Va. — More than a dozen state lawmakers filed onto the stage, summoned by the smiling leader of their state: Ralph S. Northam, the governor of Virginia.

Campbell Robertson

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