SHEPHERDSTOWN, West Virginia — Rep. David McKinley is walking a tightrope in embracing Trump administration policies despite the former commander in chief’s support for his Republican primary opponent, Rep. Alex Mooney, in the heated primary battle for West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District.
While McKinley spoke with roughly two-dozen voters at a town hall at Shepherd University, a small college in a left-leaning enclave in the Mountain State’s Panhandle, on Monday evening, former President Donald Trump released a statement attacking the congressman over his vote on infrastructure.
“Congressman Alex Mooney is a conservative warrior running in West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District. His opponent is a RINO who supported the ‘Unfrastucture Bill’ and the Sham January 6 Unselect Committee,” said Trump, who initially endorsed Mooney in November. “Alex fights for our Veterans, for Energy and Clean Coal, Election Integrity, our Borders, Jobs, and against the horrible drug epidemic. On May 10th, Vote for Alex Mooney, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement. I love West Virginia!”
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McKinley and Mooney are involved in one of five member-on-member primaries brought about by reapportionment and redistricting in the 2022 midterm election cycle. In the case of West Virginia’s 2nd District, it’s because the state is dropping from three House members to two. It reflects West Virginia’s steep drop in population from 2010 to 2020 when decennial censuses were taken.
West Virginia’s population dropped by a whopping 3.3%, the largest dip by far of any state, as its traditional extraction industries continue to bleed jobs and economic development is sparse. Rep. Carol Miller is set to win reelection in West Virginia’s 1st Congressional District, covering the state’s southern tier. But it’s a dogfight for the Republican nomination in the 2nd Congressional District, a merger of territories currently represented by both McKinley and Mooney, stretching from the Ohio state line east to the Washington, D.C., exurbs around Harper’s Ferry and Charles Town.
McKinley was elected in the 2010 Republican wave, and Mooney was elected four years later. That after moving across the upper reaches of the Potomac River from Maryland, where Mooney was previously a state senator and state Republican Party chairman. McKinley, 75, and Mooney, 50, are divided by a generation. And while both usually vote the GOP line in the House, there have been other key differences.
McKinley, an engineer by trade, was one of 13 House Republicans to vote for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a key part of President Joe Biden’s agenda and one of the congressional Democrats’ biggest accomplishments this term. McKinley on Monday defended his support of the sweeping $1.2 trillion infrastructure law and asserted that bipartisanship should not be frowned upon, touting that the Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked him as the 34th most productive Republican.
“That infrastructure vote was for West Virginia, I don’t know how else to say that, it’s for West Virginia,” McKinley told the crowd. He noted that Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia played a role in helping craft provisions that made it into the final bill, and he suggested that the Democratic House speaker from California wouldn’t give Trump a political win on infrastructure, an issue the Republican president long touted.
“Nancy Pelosi was not going to let Donald Trump get a vote on infrastructure, period — it’s simply that,” McKinley said. “So I went four more years, then Shelley Moore Capito, you know her, our senator, started working in Washington to come up with something with Biden, and she got very close to getting a deal made. And so hers is the basis of it, and quite frankly, a lot of what is in that bill was Donald Trump’s ideas. She just recaptured it.”
McKinley also voted in favor of certifying the election results that made Biden the new president. He was one of 35 GOP lawmakers who voted in favor of establishing an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. McKinley stressed the difference between the independent commission and a House select committee, which he did not vote for.
“There were two votes on Jan. 6. despite what other people were saying,” he said. “The first vote was trying, what we wanted to do was replicate what had happened after Benghazi, what happened in 9/11, what happened on the Warren Commission. Let’s really get to the root of what’s happening, but let’s not engage politicians in this.”
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McKinley has taken heat from Trump and faced attacks and accusations of being a Republican in name only from Mooney during the course of the race over his voting record. But McKinley noted that he statistically voted with Trump more often than Mooney, with a 92.2% to his opponent’s 87.9%.
The race has intensified with a slew of attack ads coming from both camps, with McKinley going after Mooney for having run for office in three different states — including for state representative in New Hampshire as a senior at Dartmouth College. One ad calls Mooney a “political prostitute,” while McKinley has had to defend himself against RINO charges.
“We’re mainly here because we’ve gotten so many negative advertisements from Mooney,” said Sally, a West Virginia resident who requested that her last name be retracted for privacy reasons. “I didn’t necessarily like all of his [McKinley’s] answers because, a lot of them, you can emphasize you’re an engineer all you want if you’re still very much a politician by the answers.”
John Park, a voter who also attended the event, said, “I have not seen anything Mooney has done since he’s been there, and he’s not really West Virginian.”
While political operatives have emphasized that Trump won the state by 38.9 percentage points in 2020 and remains highly popular in the newly drawn district, McKinley said he doesn’t see the Trump endorsement as a deal-breaker with voters. The West Virginia Republican noted he had received an endorsement from Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. McKinley further argued that the infrastructure vote had been well received when he explained to voters that it was not part of the Democratic push for a larger social spending bill.
“I think we have some momentum going. We had Donald Trump’s secretary of state come out, we’ve had his assistant secretary of energy — they’ve always been supportive — I think I can do just fine on this,” he told the Washington Examiner.
McKinley added the timing of Trump’s endorsement of his GOP primary rival was hardly coincidental.
“I think someone [Mooney] needed that [re-upped Trump endorsement], so they called to get that again, reinforce it again,” McKinley said. “Look, a lot of what Donald Trump did, I agreed with a lot of his policies — I had a higher voting record of 92%, far better than my opponent — then I voted for the infrastructure bill. We had to go through an education process, and it was longer than I thought it was going to take to make sure people can separate the Build Back Better from the infrastructure.”
