Charleston, W.V. — Patrick Morrisey sounds more like a travel agent at times than a Senate candidate. He wants President Trump to move to West Virginia. He encourages the first family to consider a vacation home “at the minimum.” He even tries convincing Donald Trump, Jr. to pitch a tent in Appalachia.
And Trump Jr., whose Instagram is full of pictures of hunting and fly-fishing and hiking, might be in the market for river house or a little mountain cabin. “I’m kind of into the outdoor stuff,” he tells me on his visit there this week. “So obviously, West Virginia is a pretty good state.” A few moments before headlining a fundraiser with Morrisey, the New Yorker tells me a move to West Virginia “is very possible. It is very much my speed.”
Morrisey, the state attorney general, would be overjoyed because his pitch obviously isn’t about tourism. It is about politics. The more time that anyone with the last name Trump spends in state, the better his chances are at evicting Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.V.
To win in November, Morrisey must convince voters that Manchin is not, in fact, in the state’s political center. During a brief press conference in downtown Charleston, he invites the president’s son to “stay here between now and the election.” And Morrisey might get his way. Trump has visited West Virginia four times as president, and Trump Jr. just kicked off his midterm campaign for Republican Senate candidates in the Mountain State.
At the same time, Manchin seems increasingly out of place in a state that Trump won with an avalanche. A willingness to buck the party line kept his approval ratings afloat in reddening West Virginia during the Obama administration. But the senator has started to fall out of favor after voting against tax reform and repeal of the Affordable Care Act. That voting record may be forgivable, but not so much the photos with Hillary Clinton in coal country.
Clinton famously acknowledged on a trip to West Virginia that she was going to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This was her way of moving the discussion to the chimerical “green jobs” that she believed would replace well-paying, real-life coal jobs. It went over quite poorly, and when she toured the state with Manchin in May 2016, cable news was flooded with angry coal miners. How could she pledge to end their livelihood, they demanded, then ask for their vote?
“I just want to know how you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of, out of jobs, and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend,” Bo Copley asked Clinton in particularly damning exchanged. “Because those people out there don’t see you as a friend.” Manchin came to Clinton’s defense telling the teary-eyed, unemployed miner that “if I thought she wanted to eliminate one job in West Virginia, I wouldn’t be sitting here.” But Copley didn’t believe him, and neither did the rest of the electorate.
Clinton went on to lose the state by 42 points, and later Manchin would publicly ask the Democrat nominee to keep her distance. “It wouldn’t be wise for Hillary to come to West Virginia,” Manchin told CNN’s Kasie Hunt last November. “It wouldn’t be a good thing for her or for me.”
But a Clinton visit would be great for Morrisey. It might be an even better development than a Trump vacation home because, as state attorney general, that Republican made his name as the go-to legal champion of coal country. He sued Obama’s EPA a dozen times, secured a stay of the Clean Power Plan in court, and solidified a reputation as a fossil fuel savior.
“We welcome them to West Virginia too,” Morrisey says with a laugh. “Why should Joe Manchin view the world any differently now? It wasn’t long ago that he welcomed Hillary Clinton with his arms wide open. If they come back in, it’s just more revealing of his true self.”
