THE GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL ROADTRIP: WEST VIRGINIA
In 2008, a college friend of mine I took political science classes with and went on a senior trip to Washington D.C, was living back home to southern West Virginia and working in Democratic politics. His state delegate was retiring that year he decided to run for the House of Delegates, hoping to win the longtime safe Democratic seat in coal country on Hillary Clinton’s coattails.
Of course, that did not happen. Barack Obama won the nomination. Running in a district where the coal industry had collapsed and the population was dwindling, he ran a campaign that promised to replace lost coal jobs with, among other things, “clean energy” jobs, including getting funding in the Democratic congerssional majority for a hydroelectricity plant on the Big Sandy River. He was booed off stage and he lost by 17 points, just slightly better than Obama did in the district that John Kerry had won by 12. He and his family moved away in the next few years.
It wasnt’t that long ago that West Virginia, despite its reputation for being super conservative, was actually a mostly Democratic state. Outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin, the last Democrat elected statewide in West Virginia, is a relic of that era.
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