Hillary Clinton was guaranteed to lose the heart of coal country in West Virginia’s Democratic primary election Tuesday. But third place in a two-person race?
That was the judgment of Mingo County, population 25,292, which voted Huntington lawyer Paul Farrell second over the former secretary of state. He finished with 1,187 votes, or 23.7 percent, to Clinton’s 1,074 votes, or 21.4 percent. Bernie Sanders won the county with more votes than both candidates combined, en route to a winning share of 51 percent statewide.
Farrell filed election paperwork only in his home state in January and said he was running as an alternative to “none of the above” on the ballot. He described the candidates in both parties as a cast of characters to The Charleston Gazette-Mail: “a socialist, a felon, an alleged immigrant, a reality television star and a long list of scandalized career politicians.”
The “felon” is Keith Judd, a prisoner who 42 percent of West Virginia Democratic voters supported against President Obama in the state’s 2012 primary.
Farrell waged no such challenge this year, taking only 8.9 percent of the vote. But his runner-up finish in Mingo County, which was once a vibrant coal hub in the southwest part of the state, was a fitting result for the place where residents were photographed last week gesturing toward Clinton:
Clinton apologized for those remarks during a stop in Williamson, the county seat, where she said, “What I said was totally out of context from what I meant.”
