West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Research Podcast

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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...

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...