Can the Most Hated Man in West Virginia Win?

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Can the Most Hated Man in West Virginia Win?

Don Blankenship went to prison after the deaths of 29 of his miners. For some Republicans, that’s the beginning of a successful Senate campaign.

By KEVIN ROBILLARD

March 26, 2018



The Friday Cover
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TRIADELPHIA, W.Va.— On a recent Thursday afternoon, less than nine months after he was released from prison for his role in the worst U.S. mine explosion in the past 40 years, Don Blankenship made his first campaign stop of the day at a shopping center in the skinny spike of West Virginia’s northern panhandle. For 25 minutes, he delivered an anti-government assault, railing against the “District of Corruption” and demanding drug tests “for as many officials as possible,” everyone from judges to members of Congress, which he believes would lead to dozens of high-level government employees losing their jobs.

His vehement, if soft-spoken, speech was received enthusiastically by the one person in the audience who was not a member of his staff, a reporter covering the event or a tracker paid by Blankenship’s opponents to videotape the event. The middle-aged woman told Blankenship she liked what he had to say, and she’d be supporting him in the primary. For months, Blankenship has been appearing at these town halls (he wants to do at least one in all 55 counties in West Virginia) in a quest to unseat second-term Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin. The spreads of food have always been lavish, even if the crowds haven‘t.

Admittedly, this part of the state was not his power base when he was the bottom-line-driven CEO of Massey Energy, one of the state’s largest mining companies. (“I used to come up here to sell coal,” he told me later in an interview. “Before Obama.”) But the almost nonexistent turnout seemed about right for a man who just three years ago had a statewide approval rating of 10 percent, lower even than Congress, the standard for disdain. In 2015, when he was sentenced to a year in prison on a misdemeanor charge of conspiring to violate mine safety standards in the 2010 explosion that killed 29 men at the Upper Big Branch mine, three-fifths of people surveyed thought the judge should have put him away for longer.

Initially, Blankenship had told prison officials that upon his release he planned to move to Nevada, where his girlfriend lives. Instead, on January 23 he signed the papers to challenge Manchin. A 67-page manifesto he had written in prison decrying his political persecution by the Obama Justice Department effectively became his political platform. The idea that a former inmate who many view as an unrepentant murderer would dare to run for Senate seemed laughable at first, even to members of his own party.................................................



Blankenship is predictably dismissive of the idea that he represents a threat to the GOP’s chance of beating Manchin—“I think anybody in West Virginia could beat Joe Manchin. You could move here tomorrow and beat Manchin if you could somehow get the nomination,” he says—but Democrats agree with the establishment GOP’s assessment. Blankenship could pull off an improbable primary win, but that will be the end of his run.

“It’s the best thing Joe Manchin could’ve hoped for,” Rahall says, hastening to add: “But I also thought Donald Trump was the best thing Hillary Clinton could’ve hoped for.”





After the Town Hall Blankenship held at the Holiday Inn in Weirton, he prepares to drive to the Pittsburgh airport in his Jaguar. | Scott Goldsmith for Politico Magazine



A memorial to the 29 miners who were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. | AP Photo

[Skittles]

1. typical republican

takes responsibility for NOTHING

[Vinca]

2. Nothing would surprise me.

What's his slogan? "If you're considering suicide, vote Blankenship?"

[DarthDem]

3. No.

N/t