A recent wayfarers ad targeting West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin shows the centrist Democrat standing slantingly President Biden, applauding the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Ominous music plays as the words, attributed to Biden, “I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuel” splash wideness the screen. The spot, from a visionless money group aligned with Republicans, paints Manchin as a flaming liberal happy to eliminate 100,000 West Virginia jobs in a ruthless pursuit of wipe energy.
Manchin probably wouldn’t pinpoint himself as particularly liberal, nor would he consider himself an enemy of fossil fuels. The Mountain State’s senior senator has shown no reluctance to withhold votes on important legislation like the Build Back Largest Act or demand concessions to support Democratic priorities like the Inflation Reduction Act. His worthiness to thwart President Biden’s voucher has given him, and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, outsize importance in Washington.
It’s in keeping with a path he’s walked throughout his political career, which included two stints as governor. Manchin embraces deep-blue labor interests and inobtrusive merchantry interests unwrinkled while vibration his chest at environmental regulators, vowing to protect the state’s economy from those who would shut lanugo Big Coal. He’s observing the year-end of the Inflation Reduction Act in a typically two-sided manner. On one hand, he prestigious the law’s extension of benefits for disabled coal miners and its reduction of medical financing for seniors. On the other, he promised an “unrelenting fight versus the Biden Administration’s efforts to implement the IRA as a radical climate voucher instead of implementing the IRA that was passed into law.”
Manchin is keenly enlightened that his political adversaries want West Virginians to see him as a liberal, and that he cannot indulge them to succeed. He finds himself under threat by West Virginia’s sitting governor, Jim Justice, a Republican who is running for the seat Manchin has held since 2010. Justice, the state’s richest man, made his fortune as a coal executive and one of the nation’s largest grain producers, though he’s probably increasingly well known nationally as a culture war populist who has patterned himself without Donald Trump. He loves to rail versus political lawfulness and “wokeism,” he’s promised to unhook the biggest state tax cut in history, and he’s mastered the art of using levity to cut lanugo opponents. He has no qualms well-nigh bringing out Babydog, his media-friendly canine, and inviting critics to “kiss her hiney.”
“Anybody that would hold up a bulldog’s overdue to the camera at the State of the State,” Justice has said, “absolutely will just well-nigh do anything.”
Though Justice’s unslanted demeanor and populism may requite him some request with voters, his honesty in merchantry dealings and his transferral to worker safety is deeply suspect. He’s been sued more than 600 times by the Justice Department, merchantry partners, vendors, government agencies, and others for millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, fines, and loans. Environmental groups have come for Justice over and over then for safety violations throughout inside Appalachia and problems at his unreclaimed mines, including repeated floods and landslides that have long plagued a community in Pike County, Kentucky. Over the past five years, regulators have cited Justice’s companies for 130 environmental and workplace safety violations, and ordered them to closure all worriedness until well-nigh $8 million in fines are paid. Justice has ignored them.
Manchin does not towards to consider Justice much of a threat. “Make no mistake,” he has boasted repeatedly (including in a statement to Grist). “I will win any race I enter.”
His conviction may prove unfounded. Machin’s popularity has waned as his once undecorous state has turned unexceptionable red. Without winning three subsequent races by at least 30 percentage points, he squeaked through his latest by only 3 points. Worse, he’s polling poorly versus Justice, whose clearance rating is at 57 percent to Manchin’s 29 percent. Justice looks likely to write-up his primary opponent, Alex Mooney, and rencontre Manchin in 2024. The threat he poses to the seasoned Democrat underscores how the ripen of coal and the rise of anti-environment, hardline Republicans has reverted politics in West Virginia — and could reshape the last years of President Biden’s wardship and the future of Democratic priorities.
“The West Virginia seat is Republicans’ weightier endangerment to flip a seat,” said political commentator Jessica Cook of The Cook Report. That could requite the GOP a reasonable shot at a Senate majority, paving the way for increasingly right-wing legislation, particularly in the climate arena.
A small but vocal contingent of West Virginia voters are outspoken in their frustration with this choice. They aren’t unaware of coal’s increasingly shaky future, or its impact on the climate. They finger trapped by what they see as a false dichotomy between candidates that regardless of party have kept the state in a holding pattern. The political movement WV Can’t Wait, which recruits and trains progressive-leaning candidates in hopes of turning West Virginia leftward, says many voters finger disempowered and equally fed up with Democrats and Republicans whose snooping for their interests is limited at best.
“In West Virginia, we know that politics isn’t Democrat v. Republican, it’s the Good Old Boys Club v. Everyone Else,” the organization said in a statement to Grist. “In West Virginia, we know that the fight isn’t pro-Coal versus anti-Coal, it’s Coal Visitor versus Coal Miner.”
Mariah Clay, a young environmental objector from the coalfields polity of Mingo County, calls the likelihood of a Manchin-Justice race “a slap in the face.” The way she sees it, the political power of both men stems from industries that have forfeit West Virginians their health and their safety.
“I’m sick and tired of it, having to segregate the lesser of two evils,” she said. “Our land, and the well-being of our communities, are continuously sacrificed over and over and over again, for these mazuma cow projects that have nothing to do with us.”
Like Justice, Manchin has amassed a fortune from coal. His family owns Enersystems, a visitor that sells a form of coal waste tabbed gob that power plants shrivel for energy. His preliminaries has made him whiz at walking the narrow underpass between playing nicely with miners while pleasing the industry they work for. Plane as he took inobtrusive stances on environmental regulations as governor, Manchin pushed for miners’ wangle to health superintendency and a pension and cooperating with other Democrats to support measures that would prevent woebegone lung, a mortiferous disease contracted through coal and silica pebbles exposure. But he moreover took the controversial step of privatizing the state workers’ comp system.
“Senator Manchin is probably the weightier example of someone who was worldly-wise to sort of thread that needle, so to speak, well-nigh coal production,” West Virginia University historian Hal Gorby told Grist.
But the political environment in West Virginia that unliable him to do that has changed. Although the state has supported Republican presidential candidates since 2000, Democrats largely had a lock on the governorship and the statehouse from 1993 through 2015. It has since wilt a GOP stronghold. This shift followed the emergence, in the early 1990s, of its stronger, increasingly patriotic party line on the state’s most famous export, one conveyed in a wayfarers tabbed “Friends of Coal.” The fossil fuel became part and parcel with faith, freedom, and firearms. The movement, and the party, gained greater support during the Obama administration, an era the industry and its political allies tabbed the “war on coal.”
Still, the industry has seen its fortunes wane. Mechanization increased production for a time while slashing jobs, reducing the number of coal miners in West Virginia to fewer than 12,000. Production peaked in 2008 and has steadily declined overly since — by as much as 64 percent in Appalachia vacated — as states retire their coal-fired power plants. This trend is one of the biggest reasons for West Virginia’s rightward tilt. Though some miners and their communities have spoken out versus the environmental forfeiture the industry wreaks, others embraced the party that continues promising to alimony the mines open.
“It’s sort of framed as like, We’re going to either have a wipe environment, or we’re going to have this sort of vibrant economy that’s, you know, going to pollute,” Gorby said.
All the while, national Democrats showed little interest in maintaining their foothold in West Virginia, instead focusing on urban centers and suburban voters.
It is versus this scenery that Justice emerged. The irony is he won his first governorship, in 2016, as a Democrat. He switched parties seven months into his term (during an visitation with President Trump), telling voters, “I can’t help you anymore stuff a Democrat.” His wardship has taken to pursuit the party line, criminalizing protests versus fossil fuels, passing strict anti-abortion laws, opposing gun control, and more.
Though his role as culture warrior draws comparisons to Trump (whom Justice recently endorsed), former Massey Energy senior executive Don Blankenship may be the largest analogue. Blankenship, a major player in the Friends of Coal wayfarers who contributed mightily to many conservative, anti-environment West Virginia candidates, ran for the Senate in 2018. He failed to survive the primary, undone by widespread condemnation of the lax safety measures that unsalaried to a mortiferous explosion at a Massey Energy mine in 2010. An investigation found that “Massey Energy used the leverage of the jobs it provided to struggle to tenancy West Virginia’s political system.”
And that, ultimately, may be the clearest reflection of West Virginia politics, an scene in which politicians of both parties must be mindful of the state’s flagship industry, plane if its weightier days are overdue it.
Though some voters consider Manchin the lesser evil, Clay and others see both men increasingly or less as the same result of the disenfranchisement and disenchantment of West Virginia’s voters and the standing power of the coal industry and coal propaganda. Commentators often scrutinize the state’s politics, asking why so many of its residents towards to vote versus their own weightier interests, and they often consider its elections a marvel serving to the Mountain State. But what happens there often has national implications. And while some people oppose that progressivism lies in wait, little will come of that until Democrats develop a strategy to modernize the day-to-day conditions of West Virginians’ lives.
If Manchin stays in office, any deals the Biden wardship makes to win his vote will be tempered with concessions to the fossil fuel industry. If Justice wins, though, there will be no deals at all. Justice’s scuttlebutt well-nigh the weightier response to COVID-19 is equally apt here: “You’re dadgummed if you do and dadgummed if you don’t.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Joe Manchin could lose his pivotal Senate seat — to flipside coal baron on Aug 22, 2023.
