Don Blankenship has manufactured a campaign from martyrdom, hoping his victim mentality might be enough to make him a U.S. senator in West Virginia.
This makes Blankenship something of a barometer, because the coal baron turned federal convict isn’t just running against the establishment. He is running against the institutions themselves. Whatever support he earns at the polls next Tuesday—right now Blankenship is in third place with 16 percent—will give a rough indicator of how much of that electorate has simply given up on democracy.
Despite his millions of dollars and his multimillion dollar Las Vegas mansion (complete with waterfalls and dolphin statues), he says he is the victim of a system rigged at all levels—political, judicial, economic, and otherwise.
When Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison for his involvement in an explosion that killed 29 at the Upper Big Branch mine, it was a political set up, he argues. From his cell in a federal penitentiary, he wrote a small booklet describing himself as “an American political prisoner” of the Obama administration. Running for Senate two years after his release, he cut an ad dismissing his conviction as a hatchet job.
Normally, a prison sentence is a liability for most candidates. Asked about the Russia Investigation and Robert Mueller at the final primary debate, he used it to his advantage. “You know,” Blankenship said pausing for effect, “I’ve had a little personal experience with the Department of Justice. They lie a lot, too.”
Now that Blankenship has turned towards politics, the Republican system is working against him. He has attacked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for trying to hand the nomination to another candidate. He even accused McConnell, R-Ky., and his wife, U.S. Treasury Secretary Elaine Chao, of trafficking cocaine. That turned into an ad too. Different material but same message: the system is corrupt and out to get him.
Blankenship even started questioning democracy and capitalism and praising communist China. At least in their system, the states acts with a singular will to improve the quality of life for the people. “[When] you have democracy,” he complained to a local radio host, “you have all the issues that come with that: all the bureaucracy and people getting elected and people trying to get re-elected.” That governance, which hamstrings business “by the need for permits and so forth,” dogged him when he was still a negligent coal executive.
Some will look at those grievances and make no distinction. The easy analysis is that the rhetoric of Blankenship and Trump is the same. But a distinction is important here. While Trump said that the swamp needed to be drained and the right people need to be put in place. Blankenship says the swamp is here to stay. West Virginia might feel the same way.
Trump won the Mountain State with a 41 percent avalanche in 2016. The Make America Great Again message resonated with the coal miner out of work, the parents who lost a child to the opioid epidemic, and the generally forgotten. The voters Blankenship can carve out of that base, those will be the ones who have given up entirely.
Blankenship is a convicted criminal who spreads cocaine conspiracy theories and flirts with communism. So what, those voters will say. System is rigged anyway.
