Don Blankenship won’t let West Virginia recover.
The ex-con and ex-coal baron is keeping his political hopes alive with a last-ditch, third-party Senate bid, a referendum candidacy that he might think reflects the hopelessness writ-large of West Virginia. And while victory seems improbable, it also seems unimportant.
Blankenship is more interested in settling personal wrongs than he is in unseating incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. Now his nihilist populism could cost President Trump his ability to move his nominations through the Senate.
Blankenship would have to challenge and overturn the Mountain State’s “sore loser law” in order to fulfill his plan to run as a member of the Constitution Party. But his candidacy is without principle. He didn’t talk about the American dream or about reshaping West Virginia in his announcement Monday. He tapped into a well-worn victimhood narrative instead, blaming his primary loss on “the press and the establishment [who] colluded and lied to convince the public that I am a moron, a bigot, and a felon.”
That martyrdom might appeal to enough West Virginia voters to sink GOP nominee Patrick Morrisey. Twenty-percent of the Republican electorate, 27,153 voters, pulled the lever for Blankenship despite his cocaine conspiracy theories, his casual racism, and his year in prison for skimping on the safety of coal miners. They were so jaded by the broken promises of regular politicians, they voted for a candidate who embodies a nothing-really-matters cynicism. If Blankenship manages to get on the ballot, if he can appeal to alienated Democrats as well as Republicans this time, that political desperation might metastasize.
Some have equated Blankenship with Trump. That is a category error. There is a restorative optimism to Trump populism that appeals to the forgotten man, that laid off factory worker or that bereft parent who buried a child because of opioids. Trump promised to make America great again and they believed him. Blankenship just promises to get back at all the people fixing the system.
And it is rigged, Blankenship says, rigged at every political, economic, and judicial level. He says GOP party brass hamstrung him. He says regulations targeted his business (don’t even get him started on the relative advantages of authoritarian China to democratic America). He says his criminal conviction was a miscarriage of justice.
That last gripe has defined his candidacy. A grand jury found Blankenship guilty of criminal negligence for his involvement in a mining disaster that sent 29 men to their graves. But he found a grand conspiracy by the Obama administration.
“My First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment rights were violated when I was falsely charged and politically imprisoned following the unfortunate mining accident at Upper Big Branch,” Blankenship said in his announcement before inexplicably shifting blame to the federal government. “It is no surprise then that the establishment has worked so hard to cover-up the truth.”
All of this is without merit, of course. If anything, Blankenship owes his success to a system that rewards hard work and entrepreneurship. The evidence the court heard show that he owes his failures to himself. Unfortunately, voters disappointed by both Republican and Democrats alike won’t care about those facts.
Blankenship embodies the grievances of a hopeless electorate. Whereas Trump struck an anti-establishment nerve, I wrote before the primary, Blankenship tapped into an anti-institution artery. Now he is mainlining his politics of resentment right into the jugular of voters. He is a victim just like them. No one can fix the system. But he can burn it down. It won’t solve West Virginia’s problems. But it will make them feel better.
