CHARLESTON – The second Republican revolution in West Virginia occurred November 3, 2020, as the longtime minority party swept away the last vestiges of Democratic dominance in the state, solidified the expanding political empire of the late Gov. Arch Moore and crushed the remnants of the Democratic Party in the Legislature.
Election night also rehabilitated the reputations of some GOP stalwarts hurt in interim elections while seriously eroding the power of teachers’ unions and trial lawyers.
Most importantly, it gave the GOP the holy grail of the election process: control of the Legislature in 2021, when redistricting will be required and the Republicans will manage that process for the first time in more than 80 years. It will be they who frame all the legislative and congressional districts, not the Democrats.
Gallagher
The first Republican revolution was in 2014, when Abraham Lincoln’s party for the first time in eight decades gained control of both the 100-member House of Delegates and the 34-member state Senate.
Democrats and labor leaders, however, rejected any suggestion they were punished by the voters in this election, and credited the lopsided Republican win to the affection Mountain State voters have for President Donald Trump.
The election was a Republican triumph at every level. West Virginia was the first state declared by all national news organizations, without any votes being tabulated, as a victory for Trump, who had been expected to win. But the Mountain State was the first red blip on every national counting board. Trump received 69 percent of the vote, improving by 1 percent how he bested the truly unpopular Hillary Clinton in the Mountain State in 2016.
“This election was a turning point for West Virginia,” declared Sen. Craig Blair (R-Berkeley), who is expected to be the new Senate leader when the Legislature convenes in January. “Issues,” however, were not the issue in this election.
Both education-union officials and Democrats believe voters were not punishing teachers.
“Trump had long coattails,” observed David Haney, executive director of the West Virginia Education Association. The rest just followed.
Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican Gov. Jim Justice, the target for criticism by the state’s major newspaper for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis and the way he distributed federal funds related to the epidemic, easily disposed of a trial lawyer and Kanawha County commissioner who was the challenger put forth by the Democratic Party.
Elected as a Democrat in 2016, Justice had taken lots of union and trial lawyer money and had the important backing of U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) then abruptly switched to his original political allegiance as Trump, a close friend, took controls in Washington, D.C. Democrats screamed foul, but did nothing about it, and Justice, a billionaire coal operator and hotel owner, ignored them. His relations chilled with Manchin and he ignored that, too. His easy victory by 63 percent in a bruising primary battle with his former economic development chief should have been a warning of the underlying popularity Justice enjoyed. Justice won the general election by more than doubling the votes of his opponent.
The legacy of the most-popular Republican governor of the 20th century expanded and entrenched as a result of the election, too. Shelley Moore Capito, daughter of former Gov. Arch A. Moore Jr., the first governor ever elected to three four-year terms, holds a double legacy in her own right. She easily won a second term to the U.S. Senate, a feat not achieved by a Republican in 115 years, and had won her first term six years earlier, an accomplishment not attained by her party in 58 years.
Ironically, the seat had been held by Gov. Moore’s longtime Democratic nemesis, Jay Rockefeller, whom Moore had defeated for governor in 1972. Capito’s son, Moore Capito, was re-elected to the House of Delegates from Kanawha County. He is expected to be elevated to chair the powerful House Judiciary Committee when the Legislature meets in January.
At the far corner of the state, in Jefferson County, another of Gov. Moore’s grandsons, Riley Moore, ripped aside the final statewide Democratic officeholder, and in the process rehabilitated himself from a failed re-election in one of the most-liberal House districts. John Perdue, who was treasurer for 24 years, had been the only Democrat to withstand the Republican tidal wave in 2016, but now he is on his way out, and all of the six statewide elected officials will be Republicans. Riley Moore beat Perdue, a one-time Democratic candidate for governor, by 85,000 votes.
Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, severely criticized and scrutinized by The Charleston Gazette for various causes, including his handling of cases involving the runaway opioid crisis that is endemic to West Virginia, easily disposed of his trial lawyer-opponent in the general election. The Democrat, in a tough primary, had defeated a House of Delegates member who had made a name for himself in challenging Justice for his alleged failure to maintain his domicile at the governor’s mansion in Charleston.
Morrisey, who bound himself tightly to Trump in political ads, had failed in an attempt two years ago to displace Manchin as U.S. senator. But that first defeat did not dampen the public’s enthusiasm for Morrisey this time. Manchin had beaten him only by only 3.3 percent of 586,000 votes cast. In his 2020 AG re-election campaign, Morrisey was re-elected with 458,000 votes, or 178,000 more than the total Manchin polled two years earlier.
In congressional races, the Democrats offered up three relatively unknowns against three incumbents with predicable results. Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., had stood out in the election because of his vociferous and unstinting support for President Trump and he steamrolled his opponent by 63,000 votes.
While much of the top of the ticket might have been predicted, except perhaps Riley Moore’s victory, the West Virginia Legislature was a question.
School teachers had twice revolted, went on strike and marched in mass demonstrations on the state capitol since the 2016 election, unhappy with smaller pay raise proposals from Justice and the Republican-controlled Legislature. Their demonstrations cowed the government into granting back-to-back increases of 5 percent.
But dissatisfied with the way they won the raises, which many Republicans then claimed as their own doing, the teachers vowed vengeance this year. They were joined by dissatisfied labor union and trial lawyers who both saw their powers eroded by the Republicans who had forcefully moved from 2015 onward to enact anti-union and business-defensive-minded anti-litigation legislation.
Central to the GOP revolution in 2014 had been a pledge to be more friendly to business by enacting the nation’s last right-to-work law, eliminating a law requiring a higher prevailing wage payment on certain government contracts, and curbing the demands of unions and access by litigants to the courtrooms for what many in business considered “frivolous” lawsuits.
The populists, however, were encouraged by the primary election that saw the powerful leader of the state Senate, Mitch Carmichael (R-Jackson) defeated by a school teacher in a three-way primary he was not expected to lose. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Blair (R-Berkeley), an outspoken proponent of the GOP programs in the Legislature, barely won his primary – by 800 votes – against an unknown. After that nail biter, Blair took 80 percent of the general election vote against a third-party candidate and no Democrat challenged him.
The second-ranking member of the House and former majority leader, Daryl Cowles (R-Morgan) was defeated in the primary, as was state Sen. Sue Cline (R-Wyoming). While an arch conservative and former Republican House speaker was elected in the “nonpartisan” state Supreme Court primary, another seat on the court went to a liberal Democrat and former state senator and the third seat went to another Democrat, narrowing the GOP majority on the court to 3-2. The Republicans had been slipping in the Legislature, too.
Since 2014, they had progressively, if slowly, lost their overwhelming numbers in both the Senate and House to where they were ahead 20-14 in the Senate and 59-41 in the House of Delegates going into the general election.
West Virginia Education Association Executive Director David Haney argued the other Republicans did well because they held on to Trump’s coattails. Mike Pushkin (D-Kanawha), so popular he had no general election opponent, agreed Trump was the primary Republican-win factor in this election. And those coattails were long. Joe Biden had a higher percentage of votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, but not significantly. Biden got 30 percent of the vote, but Trump buried him in a tsunami of 307,108 votes – an astonishing 118,000 more than Hillary polled in 2016.
“It was then Shelley Moore Capito, Jim Justice, and it just followed through with the rest,” Haney said.
The voters simply stayed in the red.
“I don’t think it was about our ideology, but our brand is really bad in West Virginia,” Pushkin said of the Democrats. “We have allowed the Republicans to define the Democrats too long and talk about national politics instead of what we have worked on here at the local level and what we need to do to help our people.” He denied the vote was a repudiation of labor or the actions of teachers. He believes the party must revamp its strategy and image.
Even with those modest primary gains for the liberals, important Democratic legislative leaders smelled blood in the water – mostly their own – and got out this year. Both the longtime House speaker and then minority leader Delegate Tim Miley (D-Harrison) and Senate president and then minority leader Sen. Roman Prezioso (D-Marion) called it quits and did not seek re-election this year.
On election night, Republicans picked up three Senate seats, giving the party a veto-proof 23-11 control of the chamber.
Republicans picked up an astonishing 18 seats in the House of Delegates, giving them a supermajority of 76 seats, while the Democrats fell from 41 to 24. That tops the historic best for the Republicans, which came in 1920, when they won 73 seats. Among 10 incumbent Democrats turned out were a number of long-serving members such as Bill Hartman (D-Randolph) and a member of the House since 2002; Delegate Margaret Staggers (D-Fayette) and a member of a famous political family with deep roots in West Virginia; and Rodney Pyles (D-Monongalia) the former assessor in Monongalia County.
Nine races in the Senate and three in the House of Delegates were targeted this fall by the labor-founded group known as Mountain State Values, according to its president and treasurer Lou Ann Johnson. MetroNews reported the group spent $3.9 million in the election and had raised $4.4 million. Finance chair Blair, who was not in the group’s crosshairs, said it will be much more in the final count. “It is my understanding, they spent $5.2 million in 10 Senate races,” Blair said. The group’s efforts were largely unsuccessful.
"Mountain State Values represents tens of thousands of hard-working West Virginia families,” Johnson said. “We supported candidates who have stood up for those families.” She, too, said Trump’s coattails were essential for the others to win. “That's unfortunate for our state and our working families as among those who did win on Tuesday are politicians who have tried to raise the state sales tax to the highest in the nation, and even a candidate who was arrested for soliciting a prostitute and missed over 400 votes in his first term. Those are not West Virginia values. We believe West Virginia citizens deserve better and have already started preparing for the 2022 elections.”
One targeted was Senate Education Chairwoman Patricia Rucker (R-Jefferson), the woman liberals love to hate. She represented all negatives to the progressives: a homeschooler who was chair of one of the two committees that controlled the state’s education system; an anti-vaccination proponent; anti-union, anti-abortion and a conservative Catholic. She particularly enraged the education establishment last year by forcing through legislation to create charter schools for the first time.
Furthermore, she was told often that she was an Hispanic from Venezuela, who had come to the United States in 1981 and didn’t have sense enough to know she, as an immigrant, should not align with the GOP. She pushed back a challenge by her former county sheriff with 52 percent, or a margin of 2,100 votes.
Ex-state Sen. Robert Karnes (R-Upshur) was another particular target. Former Delegate Denise Campbell (D-Randolph) ran against him. Karnes had been ousted from the Senate by a pro-teacher Republican delegate two years earlier. Karnes was perhaps the most conservative member of the Senate, who had proposed, and almost successfully gotten passed, a rewrite of the state’s tax laws during his first term in the Senate to ease the way for the elimination of personal income tax, but would have raised the sales tax to the highest in the nation. He epitomized all the conservative values loathed by the Democrats and liberals. It was razor-thin, but he beat Campbell by 1,211 of 45,000 votes cast.
Former House of Delegate Finance Chairman Eric Nelson (R-Kanawha) was another. He had been dethroned from his powerful position in a dispute with his leader and decided to challenge up to the Senate after considering, then abandoning, a run for mayor of Charleston. Nelson decided to run for the seat vacated by highly popular moderate state Sen. Corey Palumbo, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman when his party was in power and the son of a legendary state senator. Nelson faced a challenge from Delegate Andrew Robinson (D-Kanawha), a young, hardworking appraiser and the son of Gov. Arch Moore’s former workers’ compensation commissioner, but Robinson was a Democrat. He also was a favorite of liberals, trial lawyers and unions, while Nelson was despised by all of them. Nelson won with 54 percent.
Another was Sen. Michael Maroney (R-Marshall), a medical doctor, whose peccadillo of a sexual nature had been repeatedly and in graphic detail broadcast statewide, was also a target. He stuck it out and won by 56 percent.
The Democrats lost the race between former two-term state senator and ex-Fayette County Sheriff Bill Laird (D-Fayette), who was attempting to return to the Senate, where he served as majority leader and had left in 2016. Laird was an extremely popular Democrat both inside and outside the Capitol. He was defeated by newcomer and Summers County Commissioner David Woodrum with 59 percent of the vote.
Others included incumbent Ryan Weld (R-Brooke); challenged by a House member; former Delegate Rupie Phillips in Logan County, challenged by a House member; Delegate Patrick Martin, who upset incumbent state Sen. Doug Facemire (D-Braxton); and newcomer Kathie Hess Crouse, who lost her challenge to Sen. Glen Jeffries (D-Putnam), who received 57 percent; and newcomer Rebecca Polis, who lost a challenge for an open seat won by longtime Delegate and union leader Mike Caputo (D-Marion). Weld, Phillips, and Martin all won handily.
Blair was already looking ahead.
“Growth and prosperity are within our grasp,” he said, after the election. “High-speed internet, greater job opportunities, and improved educational environment, as well as increased tourism. Past stereotypes have and will be debunked. Many Americans will see West Virginia as their place to work, live and raise a family.”
Gallagher is a national award-winning writer for the Associated Press who also worked for United Press International and The Charleston Gazette. His piece on the first Republican revolution was published in the 2016 Blue Book.