SPENCER, West Virginia — It shouldn’t be completely surprising for someone who has been volunteering for campaigns for 12 years and previously ran for elected office to at least win a primary contest.
Even if that person is only 22 years old.
Riley Keaton was 10 years old when he first volunteered for Shelley Moore Capito, now a senator, when she was running for reelection to the House of Representatives. When he was still in his senior year of high school, Keaton ran in the Republican primary against Rick Atkinson for a state delegate seat and lost by just 28 votes. Keaton returned the favor after four years in college, challenging Atkinson, now a five-year incumbent, and winning by 128 votes in a rural district that was ruby-red Republican and firmly anti-establishment before it was a thing in West Virginia.
“When I was a senior in high school, our longtime delegate [who was first elected in 1982] was appointed to the state Senate, leaving a vacancy. I decided to challenge the appointed incumbent Rick Atkinson in the Republican primary,” Keaton says so matter-of-factly you’d think every high school senior did this. “My thoughts were then and again in this primary that it doesn’t make any sense to me that we have this equivocating representative that is clearly mismatched with the district.”
Keaton was one of seven Republican primary challengers for the House of Delegates who ran and won against longtime incumbents in the state’s primary on June 9. Three incumbent state Senate Republicans also lost to challengers.
While some see this as a chance to chip away at the Republican majority in the state Legislature, that is unlikely in a state that continues to move more populist, more conservative, and more anti-establishment in each election cycle.
Republicans hold the governor’s office, the state attorney general’s office, one U.S. Senate seat, all three seats in the House of Representatives, and the majority of the House of Delegates and state Senate.
Keaton is part of Gen Z, roughly the cohort of young people born after 1996 who will represent 1 in 10 eligible voters in this November’s election. While their political clout is growing, he is one of the few who have made the leap to running for political office.
“The interests of young people are fundamentally the same as the interest of every age group in our state because all of the structural problems in West Virginia sort of manifest themselves as declining population,” he said. “Everything from addiction to employment to infrastructure, to lack of access to broadband, all of these individual issues all sort of metastasized because of our declining population. And I believe that that is happening primarily because our birth-death numbers are roughly even — sometimes a little upside down, sometimes a little on the upside of roughly even. It’s out-migration. It’s people my age being our state’s biggest export.”
In the 1950s, West Virginia peaked at about 2 million residents. Coal was king, post-World War II manufacturing was humming, and the state had six members of Congress in Washington, giving the state much more clout than it has today with only three.
With projections of another population decline since the last census, the state’s power in Washington will likely shrink even more to just two members representing the sprawling state in the House of Representatives.
“I think the way that we counteract that population decline is to serve the interests of young people. I should say also serve the interests of young people by making it possible for someone my age to start raising a family the same way that my parents did that,” he said. “I think Gen Z is sort of is unhappy with the idea of losing the pursuit of the American dream. So addressing the key problem of our time as a country, which is you need to be able to make sure that the average person, the ordinary person, the guy in the middle, gal in the middle, can start a family, earn a living, raise a family, build a home, and have a successful, fulfilling, well-meaning life in the community.”
“That,” Keaton said, “is the defining interest of my generation, and if West Virginia is on the cusp of fixing that problem, it solves a lot of West Virginia’s problems.”
The West Virginia University graduate said he ran on giving people their government back — not as a slogan but as a real issue in a region that suffers from poverty and the addiction and isolation that goes along with it. “If you are good and functioning representative of your district, you return calls and find ways to guide people towards services that can help them,” he said. “I heard countless stories from people locally about not getting calls back, not getting emails answered on infrastructure issues or any issues.”
In short, it really is true that all politics is local.
“There’s a lady who’s very concerned with grandparent custody rights who told me she never heard back from my opponent’s office for guidance. Yet when I am speaking to the more well-heeled crowd, they discuss how accessible he was,” he said. “That is a tale of two counties, and that is not okay.”
Drive through the district, and it’s hard to miss the billboard in the middle of Spencer that reads, in part: “If you want different results you need to elect different people.”
Spencer, the only true “town” in the district, is a charming little town of about 2,000 people. It’s the county seat and the largest town in the rural county of Roan. U.S. Route 119 runs right down the center of it, where it intersects and then joins up with U.S. Route 33 as it cuts across Appalachia.
There is a breathtaking and expansive view of the town at a park on a ridge overlooking the town. Locals call it Walmart Mountain because, well, there’s a Walmart right below it. Its real name is Goff Hill, and it marks the spot in the Civil War where a fake cannon appeared flying a Confederate flag. Upon discovering the ruse, Union troops captured it and placed it on Courthouse privy.
Keaton faces Democrat Mark Pauley, the marketing and development director for the Spencer mayor’s office, in November.
