Don't Tell The DCCC, But There's A House Seat We Can Win Back In West Virginia

West Virginia was Bernie territory in the 2016 primary. Most people know that he beat Hillary in every single county, but fewer people know he also garnered more votes than Trump did in many counties. West Virginia voters are a lot more progressive than people think. WV-02, the district Cathy Kunkel is running to represent, has 17 counties, though most of the population lives in just four. Kanawah is the biggest county in the district and trends blue. Bernie beat Hillary and the two of them combined had more votes than 10 Republicans combined! Although Hillary lost to Trump in the general, Kanawha voted against GOP incumbent Alex Mooney in 2018. Similar story in Jefferson County-- Bernie beat Hillary and the combined votes for those two top Dems were greater than for all 10 Republicans on the ballot. In some of the smaller counties, the two Dems also beat the 10 Republicans. In fact, in Braxton, Calhoun and Clay counties, Bernie beat the combined 10 Republicans on his own! In Randolph County Bernie beat Hillary 2,492 to 1,515 but the more interesting comparison was between Bernie and Trump, who led the Republican field but with just 2,206 votes. In the end, Bernie and Hillary has 4,007 votes compared to 2,828 votes for Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie combined.

No need to write West Virginia off-- even if he did win every single county and pulverize the status quo Democrat in the general. His 68.9- 26.5% win was one of his strongest showings in the country. West Virginians weren't interested in preserving the status quo. Since Trump was inaugurated in 2017, his job approval has decreased among West Virgina voters by 13 points.

Cathy Kunkel, who earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics from Princeton and Cambridge, is nothing like a status quo Democrat. She's been fighting for West Virginians for the last decade. After the 2014 Freedom Industries chemical spill contaminated the drinking water of Charleston and the surrounding region, Cathy co-founded Advocates for a Safe Water System, a community group that fought for three years to win improvements to the safety of the drinking water.

Cathy also co-founded and chaired Rise Up WV, an organization that advocates for expanded healthcare access, public education, and better services for people struggling with addiction. During West Virginia’s 2018 and 2019 school employee strikes, Rise Up WV administered strike funds that raised over $340,000 for striking employees. Rise Up WV has helped to win state legislative victories around healthcare access and to elect new candidates for municipal government and state legislature in the Charleston area.

As an energy policy expert, she has testified before the West Virginia Public Service Commission to defeat an electric utility corporate bailout that would have cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars; to defend West Virginia’s rooftop solar laws; and to strengthen energy efficiency programs and save consumers money.

She is running for Congress as part of WV Can’t Wait, a coalition of more than 90 candidates running for offices up and down the ballot in West Virginia who have all pledged not to take corporate money in their campaigns. Cathy is unopposed in the Democratic primary and will face Congressman Mooney this fall. Congressman Mooney won his re-election in 2018 with 54% of the vote, and the WV Can’t Wait coalition is working hard this year to turn out the thousands of voters who have become disenchanted with the establishments of both parties.


West Virginia Deserves Better
-by Cathy Kunkel

In recent weeks, Congressman Alex Mooney’s contempt for the people of his district has been on full display. In March, Mooney was one of 40 members of Congress who voted against the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act. Among other things, this bill mandated free coronavirus testing, expanded paid sick days and bolstered unemployment insurance and food assistance. Mooney’s argument was that he wanted to wait and see how the previous round of federal coronavirus spending went before authorizing more spending.

Of course, it turns out that both the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act and its predecessor were a drop in the bucket in terms of addressing the severe economic shock caused by the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, Congress passed the CARES Act, which authorized $1200 relief payments, pandemic unemployment insurance, the small business paycheck protection program, and a massive corporate bailout fund at the discretion of the Treasury. You might think that a fiscal conservative like Congressman Mooney would have been concerned about these corporate bailouts, but apparently not.

Instead, on May Day, Congressman Mooney co-sponsored legislation (H.R. 6657, the WUHAN Recissions Act) to claw back some of the spending authorized in the CARES Act-- not the hundreds of billions authorized for corporate bailouts, but the hundreds of millions (or less) authorized for the Legal Services Corporation, public transportation, rural telecommunications, international disaster assistance and the Peace Corps. Prior to the pandemic, nearly a quarter of West Virginia’s workforce was employed in low-wage, service sector jobs, and one in five West Virginia kids struggled with hunger. Today, demand at food banks has surged more than 40%, unemployment has skyrocketed and nearly 60,000 West Virginians have lost their employer-provided health insurance during a pandemic.

Yet the struggle of thousands of West Virginians to afford rent, food and healthcare is somehow not as important as cutting funding for programs that Congressman Mooney ideologically opposes. Sadly, this is no surprise given the rest of Congressman Mooney’s record. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, against raising the minimum wage and in favor of eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has even gone so far as to introduce legislation to put the U.S. back on the gold standard.

What West Virginia actually needs in this moment is not Congressman Mooney’s failed ideology, but real relief for working people. That includes rent and mortgage payment cancellations, ongoing economic stimulus payments, paid sick days for all workers and prioritization of small business relief.

And going forward, West Virginia needs Medicare for All and billions of dollars of federal investment to put people back to work building the infrastructure the state needs to move forward. West Virginia could employ thousands of people in building rural broadband, upgrading drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, and fixing the damage that coal and gas corporations have done to the state’s land and water. The pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis highlight the urgency of a Green New Deal to create jobs, protect workers and communities, and lay the foundation for a more diverse and stable economic future for the state.

West Virginia Can't Wait-- Meet Cathy Kunkel

There isn't a blue congressional district in West Virginia. But if there was one, it would be WV-02, which goes from the DC exuburbs in the east-- Jefferson, Berkeley, Morgan and Hampshire counties, through the middle of the state to the border with Ohio. The PVI is R+17-- a bit better than WV-01 in the north (R+19) and WV-03 in the south (R+23). The biggest source of votes is Kanawha county (Charleston) which is a blue county.

Bernie did well in the West Virginia primary in 2016. There are 17 counties-- or part of counties-- in the districts. Bernie beat Hillary in every single county and in the general election Hillary lost every single county. The list is by number of voters at it shows Bernie's and Hillary's percentage of the vote:

• Kanawha- Bernie- 48.0%, Hillary- 45.0%
• Berkeley- Bernie- 49.2%, Hillary- 44.0%
• Putnam- Bernie- 51.3%, Hillary- 40.1%
• Jefferson- Bernie- 50.1%, Hillary- 45.0%
• Jackson- Bernie- 49.9%, Hillary- 40.0%
• Randolph- Bernie- 52.3%, Hillary- 31.8%
• Upshur- Bernie- 52.9%, Hillary- 36.5%
• Hamsphire- Bernie- 50.5%, Hillary- 33.0%
• Morgan- Bernie- 55.1%, Hillary 39.3%
• Lewis- Bernie- 54.9%, Hillary- 31.8%
• Hardy- Bernie- 46.1%, Hillary- 34.2%
• Roane- Bernie- 52.9%, Hillary- 39.1%
• Braxton- Bernie- 51.3%, Hillary- 34.9%
• Pendelton- Bernie- 48.6%, Hillary- 38.6%
• Clay- Bernie- 51.0%, Hillary- 29.4%
• Calhoun- Bernie- 60.6%, Hillary- 23.6%
• Wirt- Bernie- 56.0%, Hillary- 29.2%

Last year, moderate Democrat Talley Sergent, a former Hillary campaign official, didn't have much to offer anyone, but she did better than Hillary had anyway, suggesting some voters were already beginning to fall out of love with Trump. Kanawha County performed at a D+10 level and Sergent significantly outperformed Hillary in Jefferson and Randolph counties as well.

Next cycle, Democrats are going to run a full-fledged progressive, Cathy Kunkel, running on unabashedly progressive issues-- Medicare for All, Green New Deal, $15 minimum wage, assault weapons sales ban, etc.

Kunkel is running on a slate with progressives all over the state, starting with gubernatorial candidate, Stephen Smith. In Cathy's own words, "I am running for Congress in West Virginia’s second Congressional district, but I am not running alone. I am running as part of a slate of candidates aligned with the WV Can’t Wait movement. WV Can’t Wait is a populist organizing project launched by the campaign team of gubernatorial candidate Stephen Smith to build the infrastructure for ongoing political organizing, independent of either party, beyond 2020. Like the way that sounds? You can contribute to Cathy's campaign here. This is what she told us about her campaign:

WV Can’t Wait has taken on much of the work that is typically done by a political party-- building local political infrastructure, supporting down-ballot candidates, constructing a basic political analysis to cohere his supporters and constructing a platform that is not constrained by the influence of corporate donors (which he doesn’t have). County teams exist now in most of West Virginia’s 55 counties, as well as various constituency-based organizing groups (Students Can’t Wait, Labor Can’t Wait, Veterans Can’t Wait, etc). Leadership in these teams include Democrats, Republicans and people who have not previously been active in politics. Smith himself is running as a Democrat, as am I.

The organizing strategy reflects a populist political analysis that points its finger directly at West Virginia’s political elites and their historic and ongoing collusion with outside industry as the source of many of West Virginia’s economic and social ills. It is an analysis that the West Virginia Democratic Party is institutionally incapable of providing because many of the Party’s top leadership are those elites. (For example, our current governor, Jim Justice, is a billionaire coal CEO who ran for office in 2016 as a Democrat and then switched parties shortly thereafter).

Strains of this analysis were heard during West Virginia’s historic school employee teacher strike last year, during which teachers and school service personnel flooded the state capital chanting “tax our gas!”-- demanding an increase in the natural gas severance tax to fund the public employee health insurance plan. It was also seen in the state’s strong showing for Bernie Sanders, who won every single county in the 2016 Democratic primary.

The strategy of building an organizing base outside of either party apparatus is to reach those voters who feel-- rightly-- that they have been abandoned by the leadership of both political parties. Over the last couple of decades, an increasing number of West Virginia voters have chosen not to affiliate with either political party. In 1998, West Virginia’s registered voters were 63% Democrat and 29% Republican. By 2019, the fraction of voters registered as Democrats had dropped to 41%, but the defectors had largely switched to “no party” (22%), with the Republican party at 33%.

WV Can’t Wait is recruiting candidates to run up and down the ballot. The WV Can’t Wait candidates are united by a pledge, which includes not taking corporate money, never crossing a picket line, and holding regular public meetings. In a state that has been dominated by extractive industries for more than a century, a pledge to not take corporate money is arguably the WV Can’t Wait movement’s strongest claim to be building something different. Nearly 60 candidates have signed the pledge so far.

In my case, I am running for Congress on a populist platform that includes Medicare for All, strong federal support for public education, closing corporate tax loopholes and raising taxes on the wealthiest, and-- crucially in West Virginia-- tackling the climate crisis without leaving behind workers and communities in Appalachia. But I know that I cannot deliver on these ideas without strong social movements fighting for them. For me, that is the fundamental reason to align with WV Can’t Wait-- because it is building an uncompromised organizing infrastructure that will last beyond the election.