West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Research Podcast

My Recent Articles This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

Everything in this article is based on public records such as property tax records, 990 tax filings, SEC filings, and more. There is a policy collision happening in plain sight. Serious young athletes increasingly need school schedules that accommodate training, tournaments, recruiting visits and travel. Virtual charter schools can offer that flexibility without requiring students to show up in a...

I did not leave Facebook because I stopped caring what people think. I left because I wanted to think again. Facebook and the rest of the social media machine trained us to consume public life in fragments: a headline, a meme, a screenshot stripped of context, an angry comment from someone who did not read the article, an advertisement, a conspiracy theory, somebody’s casserole, and then another p...

West Virginia politicians have a favorite phrase: economic development . They say it at debates. They say it at ribbon cuttings. They say it in campaign ads while standing in front of a mountain, a factory or some unsuspecting small business owner who probably just wanted to finish lunch. They want to create jobs. Grow small businesses. Keep young people here. Invest in West Virginia. Then the cam...

Predictions are in the audio recording above Something to Watch My Stats for Views Reading Suggestions * If you are in West Virginia, go to cfrs.wvsos.gov Search for all campaigns and PACS paying Flexpoint Media. Then tie it back to this. Message me if you get stuck. * If you want to laugh: lots of foul language but an accurate assessment of our situation. * We need to start talking more about dar...

I’ll be honest about how this article came to be. The Clean-Seas West Virginia plant in Belle had fallen off my radar. I knew the broad outline from 2023, when then Governor Justice announced a $50 million “advanced recycling” investment with the usual fanfare, and I knew the project had slipped and shrunk since. But somewhere between the delays and the incomplete applications, I stopped following...

What you’ve asked West Virginians to be “friends” with, for generations, is a system that treated them as expendable. You built an economy that depended on people having no better options—and then congratulated yourselves for offering them one. You paid wages just high enough to keep people tethered, in places where opportunity had already been stripped bare. And when those wages cycled right back...

I have been home sick all day with the summer cold that seems to be making its way through everybody’s house, office, school, and grocery store checkout line. So, lucky—or unlucky—for my readers, I have had time to sit still long enough to read, and write about Elon Musk’s VoteSafe.org . And I have to say: my mind has not changed. Back in June, I wrote about why I told my newly 18-year-old daughte...

At first glance, the political groups surrounding West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey do not seem like natural allies. Americans for Prosperity is tied to the Koch/Stand Together network and promotes lower taxes, deregulation, and privatization-minded policy. Club for Growth and its School Freedom Fund are backed by wealthy conservative donors, including Jeff Yass and Richard Uihlein, and are...

The Supreme Court’s 1976 per curiam opinion in Buckley v. Valeo established the constitutional framework that makes dark money and unlimited campaign spending legally possible—not Citizens United . While Citizens United (2010) became the public lightning rod for criticism, legal scholars increasingly recognize it as merely an extension of doctrines Buckley cemented 34 years earlier . As Columbia L...

The Foundation: A Decade of Nonpartisan Service (2010-2022) My political evolution began in an unexpected place: outside of politics entirely. For ten years, I served as the legislative liaison for the Kanawha County Commission, registered as “no party affiliation” from 2010-2022. This wasn’t a statement of apathy—it was a commitment to understanding how government actually serves people, unfilter...

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 1 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 2 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 3 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 4 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 5 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 6 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 7 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 8 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 9 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 10 Mountaineer Conservative Action: 11 Mountaineer C...

West Virginia turned 163 this week. I’m a couple days late to the party, so let me make it up to the old place with a present worth giving. Here’s some history worth sitting with on a birthday. On June 20, 1863, the western counties did something almost nobody in American history has done: they looked at a government run by people who didn’t represent them — power and policy tilted toward interest...

My daughter just turned 18. She’s smart, opinionated, and absolutely ready to vote. And I did something that feels almost sacrilegious for a parent who cares deeply about democracy: I told her to wait. Not forever. Not to disengage. Just to hold off on registering until we’re closer to the deadline this fall. Why? Because right now, our voter registration systems are a mess — a political battlefie...

Hunger in West Virginia is not an accident. It is what happens when the same small circle of men controls the budgets, the lawsuits, and the money machine behind our elections—Governor Patrick Morrisey, Attorney General JB McCuskey, and consultant Scott Will. Have you ever been hungry? Not the kind of hungry that nudges you toward the fridge between meals. Not the kind of hungry that has you scrol...

In my last piece , we met the Election Integrity Network — Cleta Mitchell’s meticulously branded operation for turning election anxiety into model legislation, one state capitol at a time. We walked through the handbook, the ten principles, the suspiciously timed poll, and the whole apparatus designed to make you feel like democracy is held together with duct tape and good vibes. Today, we need to...

They Played Themselves: A Note Before We Begin Let’s be honest about what we’re doing here. Someone handed a bunch of out-of-state dark-money lawyers a whiteboard and a dream, and asked them to write a Model Election Laws Handbook that would turn West Virginia — and every other state willing to listen — into a laboratory for voting restrictions. The result is a 116-page document that dresses up ac...

Quick Note: *I left you a metric ton of breadcrumbs at the bottom of this article…* Let’s stop pretending this is normal. For nearly a decade, West Virginia’s top election official, Mac Warner, used his office not to invite more of us into democracy, but to lock us out of it. He did it while parroting Donald Trump’s Big Lie. He did it while carrying water for one of the most notorious voter‑suppre...

This week, I was reading about Governor Patrick Morrisey’s record as Attorney General and got stuck on a question that wouldn’t leave me alone: When did I ever ask my Attorney General to file a multistate lawsuit? I couldn’t remember a single time. Not once. Not in conversation with neighbors, not on a ballot question, not in any candidate forum I’d ever watched. I’ve thought plenty about consumer...

In the August of 2015, Patrick Morrisey — then West Virginia’s Attorney General, today the state’s 37th Governor — stood in a room at the Greenbrier resort and made a frank request of the energy, financial-services, and healthcare executives in front of him: keep writing the checks. UtilitySecrets.org obtained audio of that fundraiser, hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA)....

*Disclaimer * I wrote this to share my perspective regarding Senators Brian Helton and Rollan Roberts’ recent claims of fighting utility companies and advocating for clean water through Senate Concurrent Resolution 7 and Senate Resolution 32. After months of observation, it has become clear that these actions may be more about influencing the primary election than achieving substantive change. I b...

What you’ve asked West Virginians to be “friends” with, for generations, is a system that treated them as expendable. You built an economy that depended on people having no better options—and then congratulated yourselves for offering them one. You paid wages just high enough to keep people tethered, in places where opportunity had already been stripped bare. And when those wages cycled right back...

On May 1, 2026, Jason Huffman — the West Virginia state director of Americans for Prosperity — logged on to X and wrote this, in his own words, under his own verified handle, about sitting State Senator Dr. Tom Takubo: “For the record, @AFPWV isn’t involved in @DrTomTakubo’s race — as he seems to suggest in this interview. But our grassroots activists and staff across the state are deeply involved...

I keep coming back to a simple question that feels harder to answer the longer I sit with it: if we aren’t taking care of each other, what are we even doing? We like to talk about independence in this country as if it’s the highest form of strength. We celebrate self-reliance, grit, and the idea that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough. But beneath all of that is a quieter, less comfor...