There are 18 candidates currently running for president who have participated in the presidential debates this year.
Over the course of the seven debates, those candidates have substantively discussed coal a grand total of zero times.
Coal, still the dominant political issue in West Virginia, has been nearly entirely absent from the debates and the presidential campaign.
In the three prime-time Republican presidential debates, coal has been mentioned only once, when, in the first debate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich noted that his grandfather was a coal miner.
In the three undercard GOP debates, former New York Gov. George Pataki mentioned coal once, last week, as part of a larger answer castigating his own party for denying accepted climate science. The mention of coal, during an exchange with the moderator, was unintelligible.
In the Democratic debate, coal was mentioned once, when former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee named the coal industry as his proudest enemy in his political career. Chafee, a former Republican who never polled at more than 1 percent, dropped out of the race a little more than a week later.
While regulatory battles still rage in the courts and in Congress, through seven presidential debates it's hard to shake the feeling that the issue that dominates West Virginia politics just doesn't rate nationally.
Coal's fade from the presidential scene is in marked contrast to 2012, when both former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama went out of their way to say friendly things about coal.
"And by the way, I like coal," Romney said, somewhat gratuitously, in the first 2012 presidential debate. "I'm going to make sure we can continue to burn clean coal."
In the second debate that year, Obama, much derided in coal country for his environmental policies, went out of his way to attack Romney as insufficiently pro-coal.
"When you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, 'This plant kills,' and took great pride in shutting it down," Obama said to Romney. "And now, suddenly, you're a big champion of coal."
Fast forward three years and Obama, in an interview with the Gazette-Mail, stressed the need to "help retrain workers for the industries of the future, rather than the industries of the past."
Coal has, at least so far, largely disappeared from the presidential campaign.
The two leading Republican presidential candidates, Dr. Ben Carson and businessman Donald Trump, make no mention of coal on their campaign websites and almost never discuss it on the stump.
The two leading Democratic candidates, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have both promised more aggressive policies to fight climate change than those already proposed by Obama.
Energy industry executives have acknowledged that a coal boom is not around the corner.
Last week, Charles Patton, the president of West Virginia's largest electric utility, told a room full of energy executives and lobbyists that coal consumption is not going to increase, regardless of who the president is.
"If you're not in a coal-producing state, your affinity for coal is not there," Patton said. "The debate largely, at this point in time, has been lost."
Patton said his parent company, American Electric Power, has about $10 billion of planned investments in wind and solar, while at the same time, it expects coal use to be down 26 percent by 2026.
Two years ago, Consol Energy sold all of its coal mines in West Virginia, to focus more on natural gas. Last week, in a quarterly conference call with investors, Consol CEO Nicholas DeIuliis talked about a "significant and permanent shift" from coal to natural gas.
"That significant and permanent shift is going to require a significant, permanent supply response - emphasis on both significant and permanent," DeIuliis said. "I think we're going to see a lot more of that as time goes on, so that's more of a fundamental change, that we're watching the fallout occur as we speak."
In its own conference call last week, Peabody Energy, the world's largest private-sector coal company, told investors that capital spending by top coal companies has fallen by 70 percent since 2012 and companies will not be able to sustain their current production levels.
"Peabody projects U.S. coal demand to decline 100 million tons this year, largely due to lower natural gas prices," Peabody CEO Glenn Kellow said.
The plus side for the company, Kellow said, is that Peabody has mines in "the two best thermal coal regions in the U.S.," Wyoming's Powder River Basin and the Illinois Basin.
"In our view, PRB coal is most competitive against natural gas, as well as other coal regions," Kellow said.
He did not mention West Virginia or Appalachian coal.
In West Virginia, the issue has not mellowed, as it has nationally.
"Democrat war on coal to spike ball here," the state Republican Party headlined a news release, after Obama announced that he would visit Charleston to discuss opioid abuse.
The day Obama visited, to talk about the drug problem, state Republican leaders hosted a protest at the state Capitol to talk about coal.
"We lead the nation in drug overdoses, and there can be no mistake about the correlation between the loss of our coal jobs and the growing drug epidemic," gubernatorial candidate and Senate President Bill Cole, R-Mercer, said. "Today let's put an end to the war on coal."
Jim Justice, the billionaire coal magnate who is running for governor, recently released his second campaign ad, titled "Coal Man."
"I believe in coal, guys. I really believe in coal," Justice tells a group of miners, who credit him with reopening mines.
As the ad ends, an off-screen voice says, "We need a coal man running this state."
The outlier on coal among the major gubernatorial candidates is Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler, D-Marshall.
"It's not going to be the single dominant energy source, nor is it going to be the salvation of our state. The sooner we come to that realization politically, and our politicians tell the people that, I think the better off we'll be," Kessler said in a phone interview. "Global warming is real. I think the world knows that. Maybe it's time West Virginia recognizes it and starts planning for a future with coal being a prominent, but not the dominant, engine of our economy."
Kessler is the only one of the three gubernatorial candidates to embrace the POWER Plus plan, a $7 billion Obama proposal that would direct money and tax credits to coalfield communities to help create jobs and diversify local economies.
The state's congressional delegation has not been gung-ho about the potential for more federal dollars to help alleviate coal's decline.
"It's crazy to turn our backs on billions of dollars of assistance and aid that can help our coalfield communities," Kessler said. "Republicans want to continue the war on coal mantra and refuse to talk about some of the real issues causing and affecting the downturn in the coal industry."
Cole, in a prepared statement, declined to take a stance on the POWER Plus plan, but said he would work to "support funding increases to key programs and make certain that West Virginia gets its fair share of federal support, with a focus on retraining displaced miners."
He blamed the federal Environmental Protection Agency's "over-reaching regulations" for shifting the national discussion away from coal.
Justice, in a prepared statement, also declined to take a stance on the POWER Plus plan. He promised to fight the EPA, but if legal challenges against the agency fail, he said, "we need a backup plan that will support our coal industry and allow our miners to keep working."
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.