Republicans breathed a sigh of relief on May 8 when Don Blankenship—a bigot with a penchant for going after what he called “China people” and a coal baron who went to jail for a disaster that killed 29 miners—was soundly defeated in West Virginia’s GOP Senate primary. Following a May 1 prime-time Fox News debate in which Blankenship’s Republican rivals, Congressman Evan Jenkins and state attorney general Patrick Morrisey, attacked each other and ignored Blankenship, a handful of internal polls (conducted by the Jenkins and Morrisey campaigns and a Republican pollster unconnected to either candidate) suggested Blankenship got a bump that put him into contention to win the nomination. No public polls were released in the final two weeks of the campaign.
A Blankenship victory would have tossed away a good pick-up opportunity for Republicans, who now control the Senate 51-49 and see incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin as vulnerable. And it would have indicated that the Republican party was heading in a very ugly direction—that the Roy Moore fiasco in Alabama wasn’t a fluke, and the most demagogic aspects of Trumpism held more sway over a plurality of GOP voters than Trump himself. The president tweeted the day before the election that West Virginians should oppose Blankenship and vote for Jenkins or Morrisey, who had stopped fighting each other and focused on defeating Blankenship in the closing days of the campaign. In the end, Morrisey won with 35 percent of the vote, edging out Jenkins, who came in second at 29 percent. Blankenship came in a distant third at 20 percent. Blankenship’s poor showing likely means the polls were overstating his support. But it’s quite possible that the final days of the campaign, when Blankenship took fire from Trump and Morrissey, also hurt his election day performance.
