West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Research Podcast

Greg Thomas has spent years being treated like some kind of dark prince of West Virginia Republican politics, the fellow you hire when you want to get mean, get loud, and get even. But strip away the whisper campaign, the swagger, and the expensive mythology, and what you find is something much less impressive: a consultant whose reputation was built in the long shadow of one billionaire’s checkbo...

If you just made it through another primary election feeling talked at instead of talked to, this is for you. If you found yourself watching ads, flipping through mailers, or scrolling past campaign videos thinking, none of this actually sounds like me, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong for feeling that way. There’s a certain hollowness that sets in after a while—when every candidate starts t...

Mother’s Day is supposed to be a pause. A day for family. A day for gratitude. A day when the noise can wait. But today, a dear friend of mine had her Mother’s Day interrupted by a political attack text. And when she told me about it—when I saw what had been pushed onto her phone—it ruined mine too. The message opened with a line so cynical it’s hard to believe someone typed it and hit send: “Sorr...

If you want to know how power works in West Virginia politics, don’t just watch the speeches. Watch the paperwork. The slogans are local, the candidates insist they are local, and the mailers are aimed at local loyalties, but a surprising amount of the machinery behind West Virginia’s 2026 Republican primaries leads somewhere else entirely: to Beverly, Massachusetts, and to a familiar circle of co...

My father once told me something that stopped me cold. He said the coal miners of West Virginia were treated like property. That they were bought and sold, worked until they broke, and discarded when they had nothing left to give. And then he said something harder: that nobody cares about their suffering the way they care about others’. It was a controversial comparison—miners to slaves—and I bris...

I am currently working on a new piece titled, “How PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) Lobbyist Organization, Novartis Pharmaceutical Corporation, and AbbVie Inc., destroyed West Virginians’ access to affordable healthcare and medication.” As part of this project, I have been reviewing legislative committee meeting videos regarding the distribution of prescription medicati...

If you live in Kanawha County and haven’t checked your mail lately, consider yourself lucky. The rest of us are wading knee-deep through a fresh load of glossy, red-and-black horse manure. The target of all this high-dollar hyperventilation? State Senator Dr. Tom Takubo. Now, don’t go thinking this is some organic, homegrown outrage from your neighbors down the road. What you’re looking at is the...

This week, Huff Consolidated Elementary and Middle School in Wyoming County didn’t just make a nice showing in a national STEM contest. They won in Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow program and also took home a Community Choice award for a home water filtration system they designed because their own taps can’t be trusted. Their project is a multi-layered, affordable filtration and monitoring setup mean...

Thanks for reading West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Research! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. If you spend enough time looking at West Virginia campaign finance reports, a pattern starts to emerge. Actually, scratch that. It doesn’t emerge . It smacks you in the face. What we are watching is not organic political energy. It is not some spontaneous uprising of...

Dear kids (and yes, I’m looking at my own younger siblings first), I love our politics talks. I love them because you’re honest in a way most grown-ups aren’t allowed to be in public without someone calling them “negative.” And your most consistent point is also your most devastating one: You’re tired of the same politicians running the show. Not “tired” like bored. Tired like what is the point of...

Dear 19-year-old Carrie, I’m writing to you from twenty-two years in the future, from a life you can’t yet imagine. You’re sitting in Dr. DiClerico’s American Presidency class right now, probably taking notes while Katherine Smith mutters something about Scooby-Doo being a better presidential candidate than George W. Bush. You’re serious about politics in a way that makes you feel grown-up and pur...

The legal distinction between primary and general elections has a robust constitutional basis: political parties possess First Amendment freedom of association rights to control their nomination processes, while general elections carry universal voting protections under the 14th and 15th Amendments. This two-tier framework—affirmed by the Supreme Court across multiple landmark decisions—means that...