A central message: Public schools are where West Virginia’s future is built, especially for the 90%+ of students who attend them.

Public Schools as Community Lifelines

All three superintendents emphasized that schools serve far beyond the 8:00AM to 3:00PM school day:

* Jackson County: Public schools are open 365 days a year for community use—track walking, Little League, pageants—all free to taxpayers.

* Ohio County: During recent floods, schools became emergency shelters, food distribution centers, and care hubs late into the night.

* Hardy County: In a remote rural area, schools provide health clinics, social work support, and even transportation to medical appointments—services families couldn’t access otherwise.

Hidden supports many don’t see:

* Free breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner.

* Laundry services so students have clean clothes.

* Help finding housing or jobs for parents.

* Mental health counseling and crisis intervention.

The Funding Myth and Reality

* Myth: “Public schools get money for kids who aren’t enrolled.”

* Reality: Funding is based on the October 1 student count. If a student leaves for a Hope Scholarship, the district loses that per-pupil funding—even if the student returns later in the year.

* Impact: For roughly every 14 students who leave, a program (often electives, gifted classes, or career-tech) must be cut.

* Superintendents stressed this isn’t just about budgets—it’s about community stability. When teachers are cut, they often move away, taking their tax contributions and local engagement with them.

What’s at Risk

When funding shrinks, the first cuts hit non-mandated but vital programs:

* Electives: Arts, music, advanced courses.

* Career and technical education: HVAC, welding, robotics—programs that lead directly to jobs and industry credentials.

* Support staff: Social workers, Communities In Schools coordinators, nurses—roles that remove barriers so students can learn.

Dr. Van Meter noted that in Hardy County, losing social workers would mean students come to school hungry, stressed, or in dirty clothes—making teaching nearly impossible.

Success Stories Worth Celebrating

Despite challenges, the superintendents shared powerful examples of public school excellence:

* Ohio County: A history teacher’s monthly community classes draw 200–300 people of all ages, turning local history into a shared civic experience.

* Hardy County: A student-led robotics team—supported by two dedicated teachers—won national awards and sent graduates to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology on full scholarships.

* Jackson County: Fairplain Elementary, a high-poverty school, went from low rankings to #1 in the state for ELA progress, with one fifth-grade math teacher achieving near 100% proficiency through relentless teamwork and community support.

A Call to Action

The superintendents urged listeners to:

* Share positive stories about their local schools.

* Contact legislators—especially ahead of the interim session—to advocate for public education.

* Fact-check before sharing information online; misinformation spreads quickly and harms public trust.

* Vote and stay informed: With low voter turnout, most elected officials represent a small fraction of constituents—but engaged citizens can shift the balance.

As Superintendent Hosaflook put it: “The real hope in West Virginia are public schools.”

Where to Learn More

* Campaign website

* West Virginia Association of School Administrators

* RAND Report: Recommendations to Enhance Adequacy, Fairness, and Efficiency of State Funding for Education

* Hope Scholarship Annual Reports

* School Finance Data

What You Can Do This Month

The superintendents gave concrete answers, and I’m passing them along:

* Share your public school story. The successes, the teachers who changed your life, the programs that saved your kid. Out loud, on social media, everywhere.

* Call your legislators. Tell them how much your public schools matter to your community.

* Fact-check before you share. Just because you read it on Facebook does not make it true.

* Vote — and get others to vote. Only about 20–22% of registered voters showed up last cycle. That means 78% of us haven’t spoken yet.

* Visit ilovewvpublicschools.com and join the campaign.

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My political evolution began in an unexpected place: outside of politics entirely. For ten years, I served as the legislative liaison for the Kanawha County Commission, registered as “no party affiliation” from 2010-2022. This wasn’t a statement of apathy—it was a commitment to understanding how government actually serves people, unfiltered by partisan loyalty.

During those years, I watched both parties from a unique vantage point. I saw which elected officials delivered for constituents and which ones just talked. I understood budgets, policy implementation, and the technical machinery of governance that most political volunteers never see. My political science education had already created an automatic distrust of political parties—I saw them as obstacles when trying to pass meaningful election laws. This decade of nonpartisan observation confirmed that instinct.

The Infrastructure Void: Joining the Democratic Party

In 2022, I made a decision that would further illuminate the crisis in American politics. When West Virginia’s Republican supermajority passed an abortion ban criminalizing doctors and others who help women obtain abortions, I switched my registration to Democrat. This wasn’t about partisan loyalty—it was simply the only available vehicle to oppose legislation I found morally abhorrent.

What I found in the Kanawha County Democratic executive committee shocked me. The infrastructure was gone, extracted by national organizations since the early to mid-2000s. The VAN database—supposedly the nervous system of modern Democratic organizing—was awful, limited to county boundaries and full of outdated information. The 2021 redistricting had chopped legislative districts so badly that some lines ran through rooftops, making field organizing nearly impossible.

The county committee was divided into three groups: old-school Democrats trying to run things like 1968, political wannabes who didn’t know what they didn’t know, and energized young people who wanted to help but had no idea how. None had the tools or knowledge to rebuild what had been lost.

Seeking Knowledge: The Lincoln Project Experience

Recognizing the infrastructure gap, I sought knowledge from an unexpected source: The Lincoln Project’s The Union. Unlike MomsRising, they were transparent from the start. Two phone interviews, an application process, and a nondisclosure agreement that clearly explained FEC regulations. I knew exactly what I was contributing to—a sophisticated political operation connected to a presidential campaign.

This wasn’t exploitation—it was education. The Union demonstrated that even within existing political structures, organizations could choose transparency over deception. I learned high-level campaign strategy, modern field operations, and the technical skills needed to rebuild political infrastructure. Most importantly, I learned that cross-partisan collaboration based on competence was possible.

The Walls of “Leadership”: Being Shut Out

Armed with technical knowledge from my redistricting work, strategic understanding from The Union, and innovative solutions like adapting Virginia’s “power packs” for GOTV operations, I returned to the West Virginia Democratic Party ready to help rebuild.

I was blocked at every turn.

Despite having more practical knowledge about modern political operations than most of the “leadership,” I was labeled an outsider. Those clinging to positions in a hollowed-out structure saw my knowledge as a threat, not an asset. They would rather preside over decay than step aside for renewal.

This rejection crystallized everything I’d learned. The problem wasn’t just extraction by national organizations or infrastructure abandonment—it was active gatekeeping by those who benefited from dysfunction. Every person like me who gets blocked reinforces the narrative that “nothing can be done” in places like West Virginia.

Creating the Alternative

That rejection freed me to think bigger. If existing leadership wouldn’t let competent people rebuild, then rebuilding had to happen outside their control. I transformed my anger into action, my disillusionment into education.

I created comprehensive political education materials—the resources MomsRising should have provided, the knowledge the Democratic Party hoarded, the skills The Union taught me. When I shared these materials with another Hub Leader, she called them “gold” and said I should publish them. But charging money would replicate the very exploitation I was fighting.

So I made them freely available. I wrote my resignation letter from MomsRising not just as a personal goodbye but as a documented exposé of exploitation. I created the Political Evolution Project to share everything I’d learned about building authentic political power.

The Vision: 100% Access to Political Education

My journey from nonpartisan public servant to exploited volunteer to blocked reformer to political educator taught me crucial lessons:

* Political parties have become obstacles to democratic participation rather than vehicles for it

* Organizations across the political spectrum extract value from volunteers while hoarding knowledge

* Geographic extraction creates sacrifice zones where communities are drained of resources

* The gatekeeping of political knowledge maintains systems of exploitation

* Cross-partisan learning based on competence is more valuable than partisan loyalty

My goal now is simple but revolutionary: 100% access to political education. I want every person—regardless of location, party, or resources—to understand how political power actually works. My materials don’t use partisan labels. They teach political theories and concepts that anyone can apply according to their own values.

This isn’t about converting people or building another organization that might become extractive. It’s about democratizing the tools of political analysis and action. It’s about proving that another way is possible—where knowledge is shared freely, where communities build their own power, where political evolution transcends partisan constraints.

My journey continues, but now it’s not just mine. Every person who learns from these materials and teaches others, every community that builds power outside traditional structures, every act of political education shared freely—all of this is part of the political evolution we desperately need.

The infrastructure in West Virginia is still broken. The exploitation continues in organizations nationwide. The gatekeepers still hoard their positions. But something has changed: more people can see it now. And once you see the patterns of extraction and exploitation, you can’t unsee them. You can only choose what to do with that sight.

I chose to teach others to see. What will you choose?

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NOTE: I’ve decided to republish this piece because it sets the stage for a podcast recording that will be released on Friday, July 17, 2026. This article has not been updated since its original October 2025, publication date.

I know you don’t have time for this. You’re working full-time, shuttling kids to activities, doing homework help at 9 PM, and trying to figure out what the hell a “Hope Scholarship” even is because your neighbor mentioned it at the bus stop and you nodded like you knew.

I get it. I’m doing it too.

I’m a single-parent with two kids in West Virginia public schools. I work full-time. I have a college degree in public policy analysis and 15+ years of government experience, which is a fancy way of saying I can read policy briefs without falling asleep and I know when politicians are lying.

In the video below, State Board of Education President Paul Hardesty perfectly illustrated what policy analysts call asymmetric regulation. It’s a classic managed-decline strategy. You don’t actively destroy your target—you just rig the game so it can’t possibly compete. Impose crushing compliance costs on one player while letting competitors operate with zero constraints.

The Funding Trap: Policy Malpractice 101

Let me put on my nerd glasses and explain the con at the heart of this whole scheme.

West Virginia funds schools through the Public School Support Plan (PSSP)—an enrollment-based model. Simple concept: money follows students. Enrollment up? Funding up. Enrollment down? Funding down.

Sounds fair, right?

Here’s the trap: This only works if costs are variable. If expenses scale directly with student numbers, enrollment-based funding makes perfect sense.

But most school costs are fixed, not variable.

Let’s break down what school districts actually pay for:

* Infrastructure: Buildings, maintenance, utilities (fixed)

* Transportation: Buses, routes, drivers—especially in rural areas where you can’t just cancel a 40-mile route because three kids left (fixed)

* Administration: Principals, superintendents, support staff (fixed)

* Debt service: Bond payments on capital projects (fixed)

Only a slice of costs—mainly teacher salaries and instructional materials—actually vary with enrollment.

So when a school loses students, it loses proportional funding but cannot reduce its fixed costs proportionally. The result? A structural deficit that can only be “solved” by cutting teachers and programs or closing schools entirely.

This is what we call policy malpractice. Any competent first-year policy student would flag this model as unsustainable.

The legislature knows this. They’ve been told. Repeatedly. By the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy and others. They’ve done nothing to fix it.

* West Virginia Must Modernize School Funding Formula to Prioritize Community Schools and Student Needs

* Tracking Public School Closures in WV

* The Perfect Storm: Limited Oversight and Accountability Contribute to Growing Costs of the Hope Scholarship

The ALEC Playbook: Starve the Beast

When President Hardesty named ALEC—the American Legislative Exchange Council—as the architect of West Virginia’s school choice strategy, I wasn’t even slightly surprised. I’ve tracked ALEC’s model legislation for years.

When he said, “If you bankrupt the school system, change can occur,” he was describing a strategy ALEC has deployed across multiple states. It’s called “starve the beast.”

Here’s the playbook:

Step 1: Create alternatives (charters, vouchers, ESAs) that siphon students and funding from public schools.

Step 2: Maintain crushing regulations on public schools while exempting alternatives, ensuring public schools can’t compete.

Step 3: Underfund the public system while pointing to “declining enrollment” as justification, manufacturing a fiscal crisis.

Step 4: Point to the crisis as “proof” that public schools are “failing” and must be replaced with privatized alternatives.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it’s devastatingly effective.

The Competitive Rigging I See Every Single Day

Here’s where my policy and mom brain really start screaming at each other.

As policy analyst, I can explain regulatory capture and asymmetric compliance burdens. As a mom, I live the consequences.

My son’s elementary school principal spends hours every week on compliance paperwork:

* Special education documentation

* Teacher evaluation protocols

* Attendance reporting

* Nutrition program requirements

* Safety drills

The list is endless.

Meanwhile, the charter school that opened last year? “Exempt from many regulatory constraints.” They hire and fire at will. Set their own curriculum. Establish enrollment “preferences” that—surprise, surprise—let them cherry-pick students.

This is textbook competitive disadvantage imposed by regulation. And it’s deliberate.

The legislature could have:

* Reduced regulatory burden on public schools when they created charter alternatives

* Applied equal accountability standards to all schools

* Leveled the playing field

They did none of that. Because fair competition was never the goal. Managed decline was always the plan.

The Numbers They Hope You Won’t Notice

Let me show you what the data actually reveals—because this is where policy expertise becomes most valuable.

State Funding Trends (inflation-adjusted):

* FY 2009 baseline: 100%

* FY 2026: 83% (down 17%)

Enrollment Trends:

* 2009-2026: Down 14.7%

See the problem? The funding decline (17%) exceeds the enrollment decline (14.7%). That means per-pupil funding is actually decreasing, not just total funding.

Per-Pupil Spending (2023):

* West Virginia: $14,575

* National average: $16,526

* Difference: -$1,951 per student

* Regional ranking: Dead last among all neighboring states.

Now here’s the question any policy analyst has to ask: Is this because West Virginia is poor? Can’t afford education investment?

Nope. West Virginia has run budget surpluses in recent years. The state has money.

The legislature is choosing to underfund public education while simultaneously pumping $245 million into programs designed to drain students from those schools.

This is a policy choice, not fiscal necessity.

MY KIDS: Why This Isn’t Academic For Me

I need to tell you about my kids, because this isn’t abstract policy analysis for me. This is my family’s future.

My oldest started kindergarten in Fall 2013. They’re graduating high school in Spring 2026. That means they’ve watched West Virginia public education transform from 2013 to 2026—the entire arc of their K-12 experience.

They’ve spent their middle school and high school years watching programs shrink, teachers leave, class sizes grow, and opportunities disappear as funding gets diverted to subsidize private school tuition for families who already had money.

My fourth-grader has ADHD and a high IQ. They’re in the gifted program, which provides exactly the kind of specialized, individualized support that makes the difference between a kid who thrives and a kid who struggles. I am terrified that program will be cut.

Because here’s what happens when $52 million gets diverted from public schools: specialized programs disappear first. Gifted programs. Advanced courses. Arts. Music. The “extras” that aren’t actually extras—they’re what makes education work for kids whose brains work differently.

Private schools don’t have to replicate these services. They don’t have to accept kids with IEPs. They don’t have to provide the same level of special education support. They can be selective in ways public schools legally cannot.

So when families with resources leave public schools via Hope Scholarships, the students who remain—the ones who need the most support, the ones with learning differences, the ones whose families can’t afford alternatives—get fewer services with less funding.

My fourth-grader, who needs that gifted program? They’re not going anywhere. We can’t afford private school even with a $4,921 subsidy. I can’t homeschool because I work full-time. We’re staying in public school.

And that public school is getting gutted to fund scholarships for other people’s kids.

Tell me how that’s fair. Tell me how that’s “choice.” Tell me how that helps my child.

I’ll wait.

The Money Behind the Machine: Koch Cash and Dark Money Pipelines

Here’s where we follow the money—because understanding who’s funding this dismantling matters.

Behind the deliberate strategy to bankrupt public education sit powerful organizations operating in close coordination:

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

The model legislation factory. They write the bills, lawmakers copy-paste them into state law.

Americans for Prosperity West Virginia (AFP-WV)

The ground-level mobilization arm. They organize, lobby, and campaign for the policies ALEC designs.

Both are funded extensively by Koch family foundations—Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch Charitable Foundations among others. These foundations channel millions through donor-advised funds like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, which serve as dark-money conduits for politically aligned campaigns supporting both ALEC and AFP.

The Stand Together network acts as an umbrella funneling resources to grassroots advocacy and model legislation strategies. This funding supports lobbying, organizing, and promoting school choice legislation that siphons money from public schools to privatized alternatives.

AFP-WV operates as the key state-level mobilizer, campaigning for education policies aligned with ALEC’s model legislation while obscuring funding sources and coordination.

This isn’t conspiracy theory. It’s documented funding flows and organizational relationships. The question isn’t whether this network exists—it’s why more people aren’t talking about it.

The Constitutional Violation Nobody’s Prosecuting

West Virginia Constitution, Article XII, Section 1: “The Legislature shall provide, by general law, for a thorough and efficient system of free schools.“

Current reality:

* Thorough? 53 schools closed, 25 more closing, programs gutted

* Efficient? Spending $52 million to help 2.2% of students while defunding schools for the other 97.8%

* Free? Hope Scholarship covers 27-32% of actual private school costs

As a policy analyst, I’d argue this constitutes a violation of the state’s constitutional duty.

As a mom, I’d argue they’re breaking their promise to my kids.

The McDowell County Smoking Gun

Here’s the data that should end every “school choice helps poor kids” argument forever:

McDowell County (poorest in WV): ZERO Hope Scholarship recipients. Not one. Nada. Zilch.

Berkeley County (wealthy DC suburbs): 439 recipients

Just five affluent counties (Kanawha, Berkeley, Wood, Cabell, and Raleigh) captured 40% of all Hope scholarships. These same counties contain 30% of the state’s private schools.

My Battle Plan: What I’m Doing With This Knowledge

I’m in a unique position. I have policy expertise to understand exactly what’s happening and personal stakes to care deeply about stopping it.

So here’s my battle plan:

* Documenting Everything: Building a comprehensive dataset showing direct correlation between Hope Scholarship expansion and public school decline. Data doesn’t lie, even when politicians do.

* Translating Policy Into Plain Language: Most parents don’t have time to decode legislation and fiscal notes. But they need to understand what’s being done to their schools. So I’m writing, speaking, explaining.

* Organizing: Individual parents feel powerless. Organized parents are a political force. We need a coalition of parents, teachers, and community members who understand what’s at stake.

* Holding Legislators Accountable: Tracking votes, analyzing statements, calling out the gap between rhetoric and action. When legislators claim to support public education but vote to expand vouchers without fixing the funding formula, their constituents need to know.

The Frustrating Truth: This Is Completely Fixable

The legislature could:

* Reform the funding formula to account for fixed costs and provide stability grants to declining-enrollment districts

* Level the regulatory playing field by reducing burden on public schools OR increasing accountability for charters (pick one, cowards)

* Adequately fund public education at competitive regional levels

* Add guardrails to Hope Scholarship to control costs and prevent fiscal collapse

* Conduct comprehensive fiscal impact analysis of school choice policies on public school sustainability

These aren’t radical ideas. They’re basic good governance.

My mom heart knows they won’t do any of this unless we make them.

To Every Parent Who’s Too Tired to Fight (But Too Angry to Quit)

I know you don’t have time to analyze policy. You’re working, raising kids, trying to survive. I get it—I’m doing it too.

But here’s what you need to understand:

This isn’t incompetence. It’s not budget constraints. It’s not demographic destiny.

It’s a deliberate, coordinated, billionaire-funded campaign to destroy public education.

They’re betting you’re too busy to notice, too tired to fight, too overwhelmed to organize.

Prove them wrong.

Print these numbers. Make them explain how ZERO scholarships to McDowell County helps “poor kids.”

Ask uncomfortable questions: Why are we subsidizing families who already chose private school?

Share this everywhere. Make it viral. Make it uncomfortable. Make them answer for it.

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In West Virginia, people know what it feels like to be overlooked.

Not always in some dramatic or headline-making way. Often it is quieter than that. It is the feeling of showing up, speaking up, voting, calling an elected official, and still wondering whether anybody with real power is actually listening.

That feeling matters because democracy is supposed to mean more than being allowed to cast a ballot every few years. It is supposed to mean having a real voice in the decisions that shape everyday life. That is why Political Action Committees, or PACs, should be understood not only as a campaign finance issue, but as a human-rights issue.

The United Nations recognizes political participation as a human right. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to take part in the government of their country, directly or through freely chosen representatives, and says the will of the people is the basis of government authority. Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says every citizen has the right and the opportunity, without unreasonable restrictions, to take part in public affairs, to vote, and to be elected.

If participation is a right, then politics should not be designed to reward the people who can afford the loudest megaphone. Those rights are not abstract; the UN handbook on elections says meaningful participation depends on equality, non-discrimination, access to information, peaceful assembly, freedom of movement, and a safe environment for making political choices.

That idea may sound abstract at first. But in practice, it is not abstract at all.

The Difference Between Voting and Being Heard

Most people already know, deep down, that money has too much influence in politics. That does not require a law degree or a policy seminar to understand. It is visible in the constant ads, the carefully managed talking points, and the feeling that some people can get close to power much more easily than others.

That is what makes PACs such a serious problem. They do not just raise money. They help shape the entire political atmosphere around a candidate, an issue, or an election. They amplify some voices far beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. And once that happens, democracy begins to feel less like self-government and more like a competition between people with resources and everyone else.

Yes, ordinary people can still vote. But voting is not the full measure of democracy if wealthy people and organized interests can still buy a louder voice, better access, and more influence over the rules than everyone else.

A system can preserve the ballot and still leave people feeling shut out. A system can hold elections and still make ordinary citizens feel as if the real decisions are being shaped elsewhere. That does not mean elections are meaningless. It means democracy is incomplete.

Why This Hits Hard in West Virginia

This issue lands hard in West Virginia because many people here already know what it feels like to be treated as an afterthought.

People in small towns and rural counties know what it means to be remembered during campaign season and forgotten after Election Day. Working people know what it means to stretch a paycheck across rent, groceries, gas, medicine, and school clothes. Parents know what it means to worry about childcare, healthcare, and whether the next emergency will push the family over the edge.

When you live with that kind of pressure, it becomes very easy to see when politics is responding more quickly to money than to people.

And when PAC money begins to dominate the political space, it does not feel like some distant technical problem. It feels familiar. It feels like one more reminder that access to government is not equal, and that some voices carry more weight because they come with more money behind them.

The Human-Rights Question

The real question is not whether PACs are legal. The real question is whether a democracy that gives amplified access and influence to money is living up to the principle of equal political participation.

I’m sick of watching the First Amendment get dragged out every time somebody wants to defend PAC spending. Let’s cut through the noise: this is not some sacred free-speech crusade. What PAC money does in the real world is drown out regular voices, tilt access toward the wealthy, and make democracy feel less like self-government and more like a rigged auction. That is a human-rights problem, plain and simple, and it is past time to talk about it that way.

If participation in public affairs is a human right, then the public must be able to participate in a way that is meaningful. A right that exists only on paper, but is weakened in practice by unequal influence, is not fully protected. The right to vote matters. But so does the right to be heard, the right to have a fair chance to shape public debate, and the right to approach government as a citizen rather than as a donor.

That is the human-rights piece so many people already understand instinctively. They may never say “political participation” out loud or use the textbook terminology. But they know what it feels like to be talked over. They know what it feels like when decisions are being made in rooms they were never invited into. They know what it feels like when their lives are shaped by people who have more access, more reach, and more protection than they do.

Human rights are not only about what governments stop people from doing. They are also about whether people can stand on equal civic ground. When politics consistently rewards the people who can afford the loudest megaphone, equal civic ground starts to disappear.

What Equal Participation Should Mean

Equal participation should mean that a citizen matters because they are a citizen, not because they can fund a political operation.

It should mean that a teacher, a miner, a nurse, a parent, a small business owner, a service worker, a retiree, or a young person just starting out has a real chance to influence the public conversation. It should mean that government is accessible to ordinary people, not only to donors, consultants, industry groups, and the well-connected.

That is not some radical standard. It is the bare minimum of a democracy worthy of the name.

If the will of the people is supposed to be the basis of government authority, then the people must be more than spectators while money does the talking.

What a Better System Would Require

If democracy is going to feel real again, it will require more than frustration. It will require rules that make the public matter again.

That means stronger transparency so people can see who is funding what. It means tighter rules that prevent moneyed interests from dominating the political environment. It means public financing and reforms that give ordinary citizens a more realistic chance to compete, organize, and be heard. And it means refusing to pretend that flooding politics with money automatically strengthens freedom.

Speech matters. But so does political equality.

The point is not to silence anyone. The point is to stop allowing wealth to speak so much louder than citizenship, and to make the path from money to influence visible enough that West Virginians can judge it for themselves.

Why Tracking This Money Matters for Human Rights

The West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Substack publication and podcast are dedicated to tracking the flow of political money into West Virginia’s elections and policy-making process because that flow is not neutral. It shapes who gets heard, who gets access, and whose priorities move through the system.

If participation is a human right, then transparency and accountability are not optional extras. They are the minimum conditions for a democracy that takes equal participation seriously.

The point of this work is not to lament the presence of money in politics. It is to make that money visible, traceable, and subject to public judgment. When people can see where the money comes from, where it goes, and what it buys, they can begin to challenge the system that produces it.

The right to vote matters.

But the right to be heard matters too.

And if participation is truly a human right, then politics should not be designed to reward the people who can afford the loudest megaphone.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Articles 1 - 27

HUMAN RIGHTS AND ELECTIONS A Handbook on International Human Rights Standards on Elections Handbook

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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Mountaineer Conservative Action: 2

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 3

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Mountaineer Conservative Action: 5

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 6

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 7

Mountaineer Conservative Action: 8

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Mountaineer Conservative Action: 11

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition: 1

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition: 2

The texts messages (verbatim)

Reproduced exactly as received, including punctuation, emoji, formatting, and one typo. Each message is preceded by the sender name and phone number as it appeared in the recipient’s inbox.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Defending girls’ sports should be simple common sense.

But Sen. Tom Takubo voted against HB 3293 (4/18/21) that would protect female athletes, putting their opportunities at risk.

Call Sen. Takubo TODAY at 304-357-7990 and tell him to “Stop Endangering Our Girls!”

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

We must protect our children from the radical woke left agenda.

Chris Pritt has proven he’ll do that by:

✅ Voting for record tax cuts to create jobs and put money back in working families’ pockets ✅ Passing a ban on gender surgeries for minors ✅ Voting to ban men from playing women’s sports ✅ Voting to prevent illegal aliens from stealing our jobs

Call Chris Pratt TODAY at 304-573-9980 and thank him for protecting our children!

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo is too liberal for West Virginia!

Takubo called banning puberty blockers “dramatic overreach” and voted to give puberty blockers to children.

These are not West Virginian values.

Call Tom Takubo TODAY at 304-357-7990 and tell him to “Stop Endangering Our Children!”

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Associated Press, 3/2/23; The Register-Herald, 3/29/23; SB 471, 2018; HB 3293, 2021

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo said it was TOO EXPENSIVE to protect your children.

Takubo voted to allow men to play in women’s sports (HB 3293, 4/8/21), putting young female athletes at risk.

West Virginia families deserve better. Call Tom Takubo and let him know he doesn’t share our values.

☎️ 304-357-7990

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: Metro News. “Push from Senate President’s political action committee targets a GOP colleague” 3/24/26; HB 3293, 2021

Reply STOP to stop.

Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo isn’t being honest.

Takubo claimed to support girls’ sports, but voted AGAINST protecting them (HB 3293, 2021).

Tell him West Virginia families expect better.

📞 Call now: 304-357-7990

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Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Watch our new video 📺

Tom Takubo is misleading West Virginians.

What’s real is that Tom Takubo voted AGAINST protecting girls’ sports (HB 3293, 2021).

Call Tom Takubo and tell him to “Stop endangering West Virginia’s girls!”

📞 304-357-7990

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Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc. 304-990-0480

Tom Takubo voted to put men in women’s sports and give puberty blockers to children.

These are not close calls. These are basic commonsense values that every West Virginia parent understands.

Takubo failed that test. Badly.

Call Tom Takubo TODAY at 304-357-7990 and tell him to stop endangering our kids!

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, Inc., a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Associated Press, 3/2/23; The Register-Herald, 3/29/23.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Don’t be misled by Tom Takubo.

Takubo voted to give puberty blockers to kids, and the record proves it.

West Virginia families deserve the truth.

On May 12th, 𝗿𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

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Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo fought tooth and nail to pump puberty blockers into West Virginia children.

When conservatives stopped it, Takubo called it the most anti-Republican bill he had ever seen.

He is endangering our kids and lying about it. 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼 on May 12.

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Sources: Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; Register-Herald, 3/29/23

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo supports an extreme agenda:

❌ Voted to allow men to play in girls’ sports (HB 3293, 2021)

❌ Called banning puberty blockers “Dramatic Overreach” (Health and Human Resources Committee)

Woke liberal Tom Takubo has a reckless record that endangers West Virginia children.

𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼 on May 12.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

May 12 is coming. Senate District 17 cannot afford to get this wrong.

✅ 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁: Pro-Trump conservative. Banned puberty blockers. Banned gender surgeries on minors. Protected girls sports. Protecting our kids, our families, and our values.

❌ 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰: Woke Liberal. Voted for puberty blockers for kids. Called banning them “Dramatic Overreach.” Voted to allow men in girls sports. Pushing woke liberal policies that endanger our children.

𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗺𝗽 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲. 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘬𝘪𝘥𝘴.

Vote Chris Pritt on May 12.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: HB 3293, 2021; AP, 3/2/23; HB 2998, 2021

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Election Day is May 12. Vote early if you can!

As a Delegate, Chris Pritt has a record of putting West Virginia families first, voting to ban puberty blockers and to ban gender surgeries for minors.

As your State Senator, Chris Pritt will fight for our children, our values, and our families every single day.

𝗩𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Did you know? Steven Eshenaur backed DEI policies, partnered with radical left activist groups, and supported needle exchange programs.

West Virginia values are on the ballot. Steven Eshenaur’s record is clear-too liberal, too woke.

𝗢𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮, 𝗿𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: Kanawha-Charleston Health Department Website, “About” Page, Accessed 3/10/26; 2. Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, Press Release, 8/26/22. 3. The Daily Yonder, 12/19/22

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

📽️Watch our new video about Radical Liberal Michael Antolini.

Michael Antolini is the head of an organization backing abortion on demand (1) and is bankrolled by radical liberal donors (2).

We don’t need this woke agenda in West Virginia.

𝗢𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮𝘁𝗵 - 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗲𝗹 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗶.

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Source: 1. WBOY, 6/28/22; 2. West Virginia Secretary of State

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

May 12 is election day. Vote early if you can.

West Virginia families deserve a State Senator who stands firm for conservative values, protects our kids, and never backs down.

That is Chris Pritt. 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰.

𝗩𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮. 𝘙𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Radical Steve Eshenaur leads the 𝘄𝗼𝗸𝗲 Kanawha-Charleston Health Department that is committed to pushing an extreme diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agenda.

Steven Eshenaur is too liberal for West Virginia. Let your voice be heard!

𝗩𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿.

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Source: Kanawha-Charleston Health Department Website, “About” Page, Accessed 3/10/26.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵: Tom Takubo voted to give puberty blockers to kids.

These policies hurt West Virginia families.

Don’t let 𝘓𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 get away with misinformation. Let your voice be heard!

Vote Early Now: 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗟𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

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Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo voted for radical policies that put woke politics ahead of West Virginia values.

❌ Voted for puberty blockers for kids (1)

❌ Voted to allow men in girls’ sports (2)

West Virginia families deserve better. On May 12, reject Tom Takubo.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: 1. The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23; 2. HB 3293, 2021

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Don’t let 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿 fool you.

Steven Eshenaur supports a radical left agenda pushing DEI politics, needle exchanges, and using tax dollars to promote a LGBT group’s “Big Gay Cookout”

Let’s face it, Steven Eshenaur is too liberal and woke for West Virginia.

Make your voice heard on May 12th - 𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗘𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗮𝘂𝗿!

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: Kanawha-Charleston Health Department Website, “About” Page, Accessed 3/10/26; The Daily Yonder, 12/19/22

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Tom Takubo is lying again, and voters deserve to know the truth.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵: Tom Takubo has NOT been endorsed by President Trump. That claim is false - don’t be misled by lying Tom Takubo.

𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 is a woke liberal who voted for puberty blockers for kids, called banning them “Dramatic Overreach”, and voted to allow men in girls’ sports.

Don’t let 𝘓𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰 get away with misinformation. Let your voice be heard!

𝗥𝗲𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23; Health and Human Resources Committee; HB 3293, 2021

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

Sorry to interrupt Mother’s Day.

We have 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 to share.

Tom Takubo was caught LYING about having an endorsement from President Trump.

🔗Read more about Lying Tom Takubo here: https://www.nationalfile.com/article/busted-wv-sen-tom-takubo-caught-lying-about-trump-endorsement-in-desperate-primary-push

𝘖𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘺 12𝘵𝘩, 𝘳𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘶𝘣𝘰.

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Source: 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘍𝘪𝘭𝘦, 5/9/26.

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Mountaineer Conservative Action 681-867-0840

📽️ICYMI: Watch to learn about the real Tom Takubo.

Tom Takubo is wrong for West Virginia. Takubo voted to give puberty blockers to kids and allow men to compete in girls’ sports.

𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟮𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝟲:𝟯𝟬𝗔𝗠 𝘁𝗼 𝟳:𝟯𝟬𝗣𝗠.

Make your plan to vote tomorrow and 𝗥𝗘𝗝𝗘𝗖𝗧 𝗧𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝘂𝗯𝗼.

Paid for by Mountaineer Conservative Action, a registered political organization. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Sources: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, 3/8/23; The Register-Herald 3/29/23; HB 3293, 2021.

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Why? Because right now, our voter registration systems are a mess — a political battlefield where our personal data is being treated like a weapon, passed around between governments and third‑party vendors, and routinely left hanging out on the open internet like a forgotten file on someone’s desktop.

I don’t want my kid’s full name, address, date of birth, and partial Social Security number sitting in some unsecured cloud bucket or in the hands of a contractor who treats “security” as an afterthought. And that is not a hypothetical fear. It’s exactly what has already happened, over and over again.

This is not about discouraging her — or anyone — from voting. It’s about the adults in charge of this system behaving so irresponsibly with voter data that I don’t trust them with my freshly 18‑year‑old’s information right now.

When Your Voter File Becomes a Political Weapon

Over the last couple of years, the federal government has been on a crusade to get its hands on complete, unredacted statewide voter registration lists from almost every state and Washington, D.C. These aren’t just the public records versions that include name and address. They want the whole thing: full legal names, residential addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and pieces of Social Security numbers.

The Department of Justice has sent demands to at least 48 states and D.C., and has sued Washington, D.C. and 30 states that refused to turn over their full statewide voter registration lists with driver’s license and Social Security information. Some of these lawsuits target states the administration lost in 2020, and the stated justification is “we just want to check whether your rolls are accurate.”

Let’s be clear: there is a world of difference between auditing election systems and hoovering up the most sensitive information on tens of millions of voters into federal hands, to be processed by contractors we know almost nothing about. Election officials from both parties have raised alarms because the federal government has never had full, unredacted voter lists at this scale before.

Some states have said no. Illinois, for example, refused to hand over dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and Social Security information, citing state law and privacy protections, and instead sent a more limited file like the one it shares with political committees. The DOJ wrote back and said, essentially, “Not good enough. We want the entire database, all fields, including full name, date of birth, residence, driver’s license, and last four of the Social Security number.”

Other states have been sued and then vindicated in court. A federal judge in California dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit that sought to force the state to turn over its full, unredacted voter registration list, including addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. In total, at least eight of these cases — including ones against California, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oregon, Maine, and Wisconsin — have already been dismissed, and the DOJ is appealing several of them.

So from my vantage point as a parent, here’s how this looks: the federal government is in a legal knife fight with dozens of states trying to pry loose as much sensitive voter data as possible, while courts are saying, “Hold on, you may not be allowed to do that.” That is not a stable, trustworthy environment for me to casually toss my daughter’s data into.

The Grown‑Ups Left the Door Wide Open

If this were just a theoretical debate about who could access what, I’d still be uneasy. But this isn’t theoretical. We have a long, ugly history of voter data being leaked, misconfigured, and left exposed — not by some movie‑villain hacker, but by the very entities that collect and monetize this information.

A few greatest hits:

* A tech contractor in Illinois left at least 13 databases with about 4.6 million records on the open internet — no password protection — containing names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, voter registration history, absentee and early voting records, even death certificates from multiple counties.

* Security researchers found a misconfigured database sitting online that contained information on about 191 million U.S. voters — including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails — accessible to anyone who knew where to look.

* A huge dataset compiled by Deep Root Analytics, a political data firm that worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, exposed personal information on roughly 198 million Americans due to a misconfigured Amazon S3 server. Again: names, demographics, political data, all sitting out there.

* In Alaska, a cyberattack on the state’s online voter registration system exposed personal information — names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses, party affiliation — for about 113,000 people.

* Another leak involved about 593,000 Alaska voter records associated with a national voter file compiled by TargetSmart; the data was exposed because a third‑party AI software company that licensed the data failed to secure its database.

These are not minor slip‑ups. These are systemic failures: misconfigured servers, unsecured cloud storage, and contractors who don’t lock the damn door.

And every time this happens, we get the same bland apology: “We take security very seriously.” No, they don’t. If they did, the personal information of millions of voters wouldn’t keep ending up on the internet like someone’s forgotten public Dropbox folder.

The Third‑Party Vendor Problem Nobody Wants to Own

Here’s the part that really sets me off: when states and the federal government collect this data, they don’t just keep it in some mythical, perfectly secured government vault. They share it. They license it. They hand it to third‑party contractors — data analytics firms, consultants, vendors — who then store, copy, and manipulate it on their own systems.

That’s how you end up with situations like:

* Deep Root Analytics compiling a massive trove of voter data for campaign work and leaving it exposed because of a misconfigured S3 bucket.

* TargetSmart’s licensed data being left unsecured by Equals3, an AI software company, leading to the leak of hundreds of thousands of Alaska voter records.

* Illinois counties’ data sitting in unsecured cloud storage run by a technology contractor, with Social Security numbers and full personal details just hanging out for anyone who finds the server.

It doesn’t matter which party these vendors are aligned with. I don’t trust any of them if their idea of security is “remember to maybe set a password later.” Yet these are exactly the kinds of entities the federal government and the political parties rely on to store and process the giant voter files they’re currently fighting over.

So when I picture my daughter registering to vote, I’m not just picturing our local elections office. I’m picturing a diffuse, poorly governed ecosystem of contractors and data firms that have already demonstrated, time and again, that they are fully capable of screwing this up on a massive scale.

“Mom, Are You Saying I Shouldn’t Vote?”

No. I’m saying I don’t trust the people holding the keys to the system right now.

When I tell my daughter, “Let’s wait until October before you register,” I’m not telling her to sit out democracy. I’m telling her that her information has value, and that the adults who designed and run these systems have not earned our blind trust.

I’m also acknowledging something we usually gloss over: once your data gets sucked into one of these giant voter databases, you don’t really get it back. You can’t un‑expose a Social Security number. You can’t un‑leak a birth date and home address that have already been scraped, copied, and sold fifty times.

So yes, I am asking my daughter to delay — strategically. I want to see:

* Whether more courts push back against these sweeping federal data demands.

* Whether our state clarifies what exactly it is sharing, with whom, and under what security controls.

* Whether there are any new breaches, “misconfigurations,” or “contractor errors” in the months ahead that change the risk picture.

Do I think the system will magically become safe by October? No. But I’d rather not reward ongoing, active recklessness with my kid’s data while the lawsuits are still flying and the breaches are still being disclosed.

What I Want Before I Hand Over My Kid’s Data

If I’m going to feel even moderately comfortable telling my daughter to go ahead and register online, I want to see three basic things.

* Data minimization and clear limits I want my state to say, in plain language: “Here’s what we collect when you register. Here’s what we do not collect. Here’s what we share, and with whom, and here’s what we will never share.” If you don’t need driver’s license numbers or pieces of Social Security numbers to run a secure, accurate election, stop hoarding them.

* Vendor accountability with teeth If a contractor exposes voter data — like the firms involved in the 191 million‑voter exposure, the 198 million‑record Deep Root leak, the Alaska voter file mess, or the Illinois county databases — there should be real, painful consequences. Not “we’re sorry and we updated our settings,” but termination of contracts, fines, mandatory independent security audits, and public disclosure of what happened.

* Independent security oversight I want more than “trust us, we’re professionals.” I want independent security researchers, auditors, and watchdog organizations to be part of the process, not treated as the enemy when they discover yet another unsecured database. When Chris Vickery or another researcher finds millions of voter records lying around in the wild, that shouldn’t be a PR crisis to spin; it should be a fire alarm to fix underlying practices.

Until that culture shifts — until the people who hold our voter data act like they’re handling live explosives, not email marketing lists — I’m going to be very selective about when and how my daughter’s information enters that system.

What You Can Do If You Feel the Same

If any of this resonates with you, here are a few practical steps you can take without walking away from democracy:

* Ask questions of your state elections office. What fields are collected? Who gets access? Is anything shared with the federal government or third‑party vendors, and under what agreements?

* Watch the lawsuits. Pay attention to which states are resisting federal overreach and which courts are pushing back on massive, unredacted data demands.

* Support organizations that fight for data privacy in elections. Groups tracking DOJ data requests and voter file security are doing unglamorous but essential work pressing for limits and safeguards.

* Make your own call about timing. Maybe you’re comfortable registering now. Maybe, like me, you want your freshly 18‑year‑old to register closer to the deadline. That’s your call as a parent and as a voter.

What I refuse to do is pretend this is normal. It is not normal to have nearly 200 million voter records exposed because of a misconfigured server. It is not normal for millions of records from multiple Illinois counties to be dumped onto the open internet by a sloppy contractor. It is not normal for the federal government to be locked in litigation with dozens of states, trying to force them to hand over the most sensitive details of their voters’ lives.

My daughter will vote. She will participate. She will use her voice.

But until the people demanding her data stop treating our voter files like a political chew toy and start treating them like the dangerous, sensitive assets they are, I’m going to protect her information as fiercely as I can — even if that means telling her to wait.

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Have you ever been hungry?

Not the kind of hungry that nudges you toward the fridge between meals. Not the kind of hungry that has you scrolling through a takeout app on a Tuesday night. I mean truly, stomach-aching, nothing in the cabinet, kids going to bed without dinner hungry.

In 2026, the wealthiest country on earth is quietly letting millions of families go without food. At what point did hunger stop being a moral crisis and become just another policy argument? The distance between a full refrigerator and an empty one is the same distance between our leaders and the people they’re supposed to serve.

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot lately. Because while lawmakers in Washington and right here in Charleston debate budgets, score political points, and protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, real people—your neighbors, your coworkers, the family down the street—are going without food. This isn’t a hypothetical. This isn’t a distant problem. This is happening right now, in 2026, in the wealthiest country on earth.

And when you follow the decisions and then follow the money, you keep landing on the same three names.

If you’ve been reading my work on this Substack, you know this isn’t a standalone story. In “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore,” I laid out how RAGA and DAGA turned the AG’s office into a national partisan litigation machine. In “Your Help Really Makes a Difference,” I showed how Patrick Morrisey’s donor world operated at the Greenbrier. And in “Sugar Maple PAC may be buying the ads, but the real story is the small circle of operatives routing, reporting, and managing the machine behind West Virginia’s 2026 Republican primaries,” I traced the same pattern through Scott Will, SW2 Political, Matchstick, Bulldog, Red Curve, and the PAC infrastructure behind West Virginia’s Republican primaries. This piece sits on top of that groundwork. It is about what happens when that same machine meets something as basic as whether kids in West Virginia eat dinner.

The Numbers Are Staggering — And They Should Shame Us

A new Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis found that food insecurity in America has reached levels higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic. One in ten American households reported not having enough food to eat, or that their children missed meals—more than double the share who said the same in June 2020, at the height of the crisis. More than a third of households are now dipping into their savings just to buy groceries.

Meanwhile, food prices in April 2026 were about 3.2 percent higher than a year ago, the fastest monthly spike in nearly four years. Overall inflation has climbed to roughly 3.8 percent, the highest in almost three years. People are not imagining this. It is real, and it is relentless.

And yet, Congress passed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” slashing around 186–187 billion dollars from SNAP—food stamps—over ten years. That’s about a 20 percent cut to the one program millions of families depend on to keep food on the table. Before the cuts, children made up roughly 39 percent of SNAP recipients, and older Americans around 20 percent. These are the people lawmakers decided could afford to go without.

The Trump administration actually celebrated removing people from SNAP—as if hunger is a victory condition.

Right Here in West Virginia: Patrick Morrisey’s Hunger Budget

West Virginia already knows what hunger looks like. We live it. According to Feeding America, 1 in 5 children in our state faces hunger. In fiscal year 2025, about 272,800 West Virginians—15.4 percent of our entire population—relied on SNAP benefits just to eat. Our state consistently ranks among the most food-insecure in the nation.

And now, on top of federal cuts to SNAP, WIC, and school nutrition programs, our state is facing its own budget crisis—one that threatens the programs quietly holding West Virginia families together.

Governor Patrick Morrisey recently revealed a 40 million dollar structural gap in West Virginia’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding. His early suggestions for closing that gap? Cutting childcare assistance. Cutting the clothing allowance that helps low-income families buy school clothes for their kids. Putting the futures of 58 Family Support Centers across our state in jeopardy.

These aren’t just buildings. Family Support Centers are places where families get parent education, child-development support, after-school programs, GED classes, food and hygiene pantries, and a hand when they need it most. In a single recent year, just four of these centers served nearly 5,000 individuals statewide. They are lifelines—and they are now staring down an uncertain July with no guarantee of continued funding.

The Department of Human Services scrambled to send a letter on June 11, 2026, extending Family Support Center grants for a “fifth quarter” to buy time. A fifth quarter. That’s the language of crisis management, not a government that has its priorities straight.

No one forced Patrick Morrisey to start balancing his TANF books on the backs of childcare, school clothes, and community supports. In a state where 1 in 5 kids is already hungry, choosing children’s clothing vouchers and Family Support Centers as the first place to cut is not prudence. It’s a statement of values.

JB McCuskey: The Fights He Chooses and the Hunger He Ignores

If Patrick Morrisey’s budget tells you who he is willing to sacrifice, Attorney General JB McCuskey’s docket tells you what he thinks is worth fighting for.

On May 20, 2026, McCuskey filed a sweeping consumer-protection lawsuit against Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), a proxy-advisory firm based in Rockville, Maryland, accusing it of deceptive trade practices and claiming its climate and diversity policies harm West Virginia investors.

This lawsuit didn’t materialize out of thin air. It closely tracks the playbook pioneered by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office has been at the center of the national anti-ESG crusade and who has repeatedly targeted proxy advisers and climate-related investing. McCuskey’s wife, Wendy, is from Texas, and instead of writing his own script for West Virginia, he is following Paxton’s lead—importing that culture-war agenda into a state where families are more worried about their grocery bill than about whether a proxy-advisory firm graded Exxon’s climate plan too harshly.

He can marshal outside lawyers and national Republican AG figures to go after a company in Maryland, but when it comes to standing up for the most basic interest his constituents have—being able to feed their families—his pen goes dry. On twenty-three attorneys general from across the country signed a letter to the U.S. Senate urging it to restore SNAP protections in the Farm Bill. They called the cuts economically shortsighted and morally wrong. They warned that some states may have to consider withdrawing from SNAP altogether because the cost-shifting is so severe. They asked Congress to reverse the damage before millions more Americans lose the ability to feed their families.

West Virginia’s Attorney General, JB McCuskey, was not among them.

That omission is extraordinary in a state like ours. In one of the hungriest states in the country, with one in five children facing hunger, our attorney general stayed silent on the program that keeps many of them fed. Analysts estimate that the Farm Bill changes will shift more than 80 million dollars in new costs onto West Virginia by the end of 2026, straining a state budget that already struggles to meet basic needs. Twenty-three of his peers looked at that reality and said, “not on our watch.” Our attorney general looked at the same crisis and stayed quiet.

I know JB McCuskey. He comes from a family with means. His wife is from Texas. I would be willing to bet he has never once opened a refrigerator and felt that particular kind of dread—the kind where you already know it’s empty before you look. That’s not an insult. It’s an observation about how distance from struggle shapes the decisions people make.

When you’ve never been hungry, hunger is a statistic. When you have, it’s a memory that never fully leaves. McCuskey’s record makes that distance visible: he will pick up the pen to protect corporations from environmental advocates and climate-conscious shareholders, and to echo Ken Paxton’s anti-ESG crusade, but he put it down when it was time to protect hungry families in one of the most food-insecure states in America.

Twenty-three attorneys general from across the country looked at what is happening to hungry families and said “not on our watch.” West Virginia’s top law-enforcement officer looked at the same crisis and said nothing. That silence has a cost. And families across this state are the ones paying it.

Scott Will and the Machine Behind Them

If Patrick Morrisey and JB McCuskey are the faces, Scott Will is part of the wiring behind them.

Scott Will isn’t some random D.C. consultant. He managed Patrick Morrisey’s first successful campaign for attorney general in 2012, then followed him into the world of Republican attorneys general politics as Morrisey rose to chair the national Republican Attorneys General Association. That same world raises and spends millions of dollars to elect and protect Republican AGs—including here in West Virginia.

Now, Will’s name shows up on the boards of American Prosperity Group and West Virginia Prosperity Group and at SW2 Political—the small circle of consultants, media buyers, and compliance firms that keep popping up around West Virginia-branded PACs and 2026 Republican primaries. Different committee names, same people behind the curtain.

The money trail isn’t abstract. In one of the Republican Attorneys General Association’s 8872 IRS reports, there’s a line item for an expenditure to “Geraniums” at 1011 “Birdge” Road in Charleston—JB and Wendy McCuskey’s business address—with the purpose listed as “sunglasses” and a total of $4,287. Maybe they were branded merch for an event, maybe they were something else. What matters is the picture: a national Republican AG group can drop four grand on “sunglasses” at the attorney general’s side business while West Virginia is told there isn’t enough in the budget for children’s clothing vouchers or the Family Support Centers that keep people afloat.

Search for Forms 8871, 8872 and 990 filed with the IRS. Search by EIN: 46-4501717

You don’t have to memorize all the entities. What matters is the pattern: PACs with homey West Virginia names, money routed through out-of-state compliance shops, and the same handful of political pros—Scott Will among them—sitting on the boards, placing the ads, filing the reports, and benefiting from the spillover.

So while Morrisey is floating cuts to childcare and Family Support Centers to plug a TANF hole, and McCuskey can’t be bothered to sign a letter defending SNAP, there is a professional operation making sure the money keeps flowing for their races and their allies. Scott Will, who helped put Morrisey in office in the first place, is part of that operation—the connective tissue between national Republican AG politics and the local campaigns that keep this hunger-inducing status quo in place.

If this feels familiar, it should. “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore” explained the RAGA model at the highest level. “Your Help Really Makes a Difference” showed the donor culture around Patrick Morrisey. And the Sugar Maple PAC piece mapped the political-services plumbing—Scott Will, SW2, Matchstick, Bulldog, Red Curve, the boards, the filings, the Massachusetts addresses—that keeps the whole thing operational in West Virginia races. The names and entities shift, but the pattern does not: lawsuits, donor money, compliance infrastructure, and electoral strategy all braided together while ordinary people live with the consequences.

This Is a Choice

Here is what I want you to understand: this didn’t just happen. It was engineered.

Every budget is a moral document. When Congress decides to cut 186 billion dollars from food assistance while protecting tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, it is making a deliberate choice about whose lives matter. When West Virginia faces a 40 million dollar hole in TANF and the first items floated for cuts are children’s clothing allowances and community support centers—not executive salaries, not corporate subsidies—that is a choice.

Economists describe a growing K-shaped economy: higher earners are doing fine, productivity is up, wages are growing at the top—while lower-income Americans are quietly drowning in food costs, housing costs, healthcare costs, and a vanishing safety net. Research calls this “growing hardship across the board,” but it isn’t really across the board. It is concentrated, predictable, and falling hardest on the people who can least afford it—children, the elderly, low-income families, and working people who are already barely getting by.

Morrisey’s budget choices, McCuskey’s silence on SNAP, and the operation Scott Will helps keep humming around them are part of that larger story. The suffering is local. The wiring is national.

Back to the Question

Have you ever been hungry?

I don’t ask to make you feel guilty. I ask because I think it matters whether we’ve felt that particular kind of fear—the one where you don’t know when your next meal is coming, where you’re watching your kids and calculating what you have left, where dignity gets stripped away in the checkout line.

Some of us have felt it. Some of us are feeling it right now. And some of us are making the decisions that determine whether our neighbors feel it tomorrow.

The people writing these budgets and casting these votes will never miss a meal. For them, hunger lives in spreadsheets and talking points. For the rest of us, it lives in our bodies and our memories. That distance—that insulation from consequence—is exactly what makes it possible to vote yes on a 20 percent cut to food stamps, or shrug at a 40 million dollar gap in family assistance funding, or call removing people from SNAP a success.

It is not a success. It is a failure. A moral failure. A national disgrace. And the fact that it’s barely making front pages—that hunger has become background noise in American politics—might be the most disturbing part of all.

West Virginia’s families deserve better. American families deserve better. And we deserve lawmakers—and the people behind them—who act like they know what it feels like to be hungry.

If you’re new here and want the fuller pattern, read these three pieces together: “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore,” “Your Help Really Makes a Difference,” and the Sugar Maple PAC piece. They tell the same story from three angles—the lawsuit machine, the donor culture, and the political-services apparatus—and this article is where those threads meet the question of hunger.

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Today, we need to talk about one of the humans inside that machine.

Reader, meet Heather Honey — private investigator, voter‑roll auditor, Cyber Ninjas alumna, Pennsylvania election‑world celebrity, and, as of August 2025, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.

Yes, that’s a real title. No, it did not previously exist. No, you may not take the rest of the day off to process this.

Part One: A Star Is Born (In a Voting Line in Lebanon County)

Heather Honey’s personal mythology begins exactly where you’d expect it to: Election Day 2020, a polling place in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.

By her own account, she was standing in line when she watched an older woman get handed a provisional ballot. This, for Heather, was a Damascus moment. A call. A sign. Where most of us would think “huh, that’s a thing that happens sometimes,” Heather thought: I should spend the next several years of my life pursuing this.

And she did.

Before we go any further, understand that Honey is not a rogue Facebook warrior. She is a trained private investigator and supply‑chain auditor who ran a firm called Haystack Investigations. She knew how to find things. She knew how to build a case. The problem, as we will discuss at length and with increasing concern, is what she found — and what she did with it once she found it.

Part Two: The Claim That Launched a Thousand Headaches

Within weeks of her polling‑line awakening, Honey was knee‑deep in Pennsylvania voter data. She ran the numbers. She ran them again. And then she produced a figure: Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters.

This claim made its way up the food chain with the speed you’d expect from a claim that tells powerful people exactly what they want to hear. It was briefed to Republican state Rep. Frank Ryan. It was cited in legislative hearings. And then, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood on the Ellipse and screamed it into a microphone aimed at a crowd that was about to do something memorable.

The Department of Justice later called the figure false. The Pennsylvania Department of State explained the methodology with the patient, tired energy of a teacher on the last day before summer break: voter rolls are updated continuously after elections. You cannot take a snapshot of the rolls weeks later and compare it to election‑night results and call the difference fraud. You will always get a discrepancy. That is how voter rolls work. That is, in fact, the whole point of voter rolls.

But by then, the claim had done its job.

Part Three: Honey Goes to Arizona

Here is something that is real and actually happened: Heather Honey was a paid subcontractor for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to conduct a partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 presidential ballots.

For the uninitiated: Cyber Ninjas was a cybersecurity firm with no election experience, run by a man who had shared election conspiracy theories online, hired to audit an election they already believed was stolen. They searched ballots for traces of bamboo fiber, which they believed would prove ballots had been smuggled in from Asia. This is a true fact about the world we live in.

Honey served as a “manager” on the project and billed tens of thousands of dollars for her work.

The audit concluded in September 2021. It confirmed Biden’s win. In fact, it found Biden had won by slightly more than originally reported.

Honey did not slow down.

Part Four: Follow the Honey (CPI → FAIRE → Verity)

The money trail starts with the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the D.C. nonprofit that funds the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIRE), Mitchell’s shiny new election “research” vehicle. FAIRE pulled in roughly 3.9 million dollars in contributions in its first reported year and spent about 2.0 million on grants and other expenses. That’s a lot of concern about voter rolls.

Buried in FAIRE’s Form 990 is where it gets fun. FAIRE had to file Schedule L — the “Transactions with Interested Persons” schedule — because it paid Verity Vote LLC 121,284 dollars for “consulting,” and disclosed Verity as “an entity owned more than 35% by an officer.” Translation: one of FAIRE’s own officers owned the company FAIRE was paying.

Verity Vote LLC is not some mysterious, free‑floating election‑integrity start‑up. It’s owned by Heather Honey, who lists her address as 1451 Quentin Road, Lebanon, PA, the same address that appears for FAIRE‑related entities and in Pennsylvania open‑records documents. From that one mailbox, she also runs Haystack Investigations and the Election Research Institute, making 1451 Quentin Road the Mar‑a‑Lago of “just asking questions about elections.”

FAIRE’s 990 lists Honey as Vice President and Director, with zero dollars in compensation. On paper, she’s a selfless volunteer. In reality, she is simultaneously:

* A FAIRE officer (Vice President, officially paid nothing)

* Owner of Verity Vote LLC, which received 121,284 dollarsfrom FAIRE for “consulting”

* The Trump administration’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at DHS

The IRS forced FAIRE to disclose this on Schedule L because this is, in fact, self‑dealing: an officer steering nonprofit money to her own company while reporting zero personal compensation from the nonprofit itself. It’s like saying you’re volunteering at the bake sale while quietly sending all the receipts to your cousin’s cupcake LLC.

Part Five: Honey and L2 – When the Marketing File Becomes the Gospel

Honey’s research career is essentially one long exercise in asking, “What if the commercial marketing file is the truth and the official state rolls are the problem?”

Her method relied heavily on L2, a commercial voter‑data vendor that stitches together public records, credit bureau data, and telecom information into a master file. In Pennsylvania, Honey’s Verity Vote reports compared raw voter registration files — which election officials know can have missing or outdated ID fields — against L2’s file, then treated every discrepancy as evidence of fraud.

Common Cause flagged this in litigation as relying on “faulty sources of voter data” to justify removing voters from the rolls, rather than acknowledging that the commercial file is itself a stitched‑together best guess. Honey’s approach wasn’t “find the truth”; it was “trust the data broker.”

Those flawed comparisons were not just blog‑fodder. Trump’s team cited Honey’s work directly in their attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including the now‑famous “more votes than voters” claim in Pennsylvania that DOJ later said was false. When Trump told the country the rolls were riddled with illegal votes, he was, in part, reading from Heather Honey’s L2‑powered homework.

Part Six: Verity Vote, FAIRE, and the Professional Ecosystem of Concern

After Arizona, Honey kept moving. Under the Verity Votebrand, she cranked out reports on unverified overseas ballots, mail voting, and ERIC, while also working under FAIRE’s umbrella. She filed Right‑to‑Know requests for voter data across Pennsylvania, challenged thousands of mail‑ballot applications, and circulated draft election‑law language to state legislators.

At the same time, she became a fixture at the Election Integrity Network, rising to lead Pennsylvania’s state chapter, PA Fair Elections, the grassroots arm of the EIN apparatus. Recall from the EIN handbook how much ink they spill praising “citizen volunteers” as the backbone of election integrity. Heather Honey is one of those citizen volunteers. She is also, inconveniently for that narrative, a paid professional whose LLC is under contract with the very foundation singing her praises.

This is the dual‑role magic trick at the core of the operation: package yourself as grassroots, bill yourself as a consultant.

Part Seven: Honey, I Broke ERIC

ERIC — the Electronic Registration Information Center — is a bipartisan interstate compact that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate by comparing data across state lines. Election administrators, Republican and Democrat, tend to describe it as the best tool they have for maintaining clean rolls.

Honey wrote a 29‑page report claiming ERIC was broken, biased, and essentially a liberal plot.

Investigations by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that Honey had:

* Used a single year’s data out of twelve available

* Selected the one metric that supported her conclusion

* Ignored other findings that contradicted her thesis

In data analysis circles, this is called “cherry‑picking.” In private‑investigation circles, it’s called “building the case you want rather than the case the evidence supports.” In the EIN’s newsletter, it was called “groundbreaking research.”

The report ricocheted through Cleta Mitchell’s network and landed on the desks of Republican secretaries of state. Multiple states — including Texas, Virginia, Missouri, and Louisiana — subsequently withdrew from ERIC. Election experts say this made voter rolls less accurate, not more. The bamboo‑ballot energy had fully matured into a methodology.

Part Eight: From FOIA Fights to First‑Party Data

Back when she was just a very motivated private investigator, Honey had to FOIA and litigate her way into election records. In April 2026, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave her a major win in Honey v. Lycoming County Offices of Voter Services, ruling that cast vote records (CVRs) — granular digital records of how ballots were tabulated — are public records under the state Right‑to‑Know Law.

Democracy Docket described the decision as “a key win for election deniers and anti‑voting activists, who frequently seek access to raw election files in order to push conspiracy theories.” Election officials worry that releasing CVRs without context creates an open buffet for people eager to turn statistical noise into fraud claims. Honey’s supporters call it “transparency.” Everyone else calls it “please don’t do that.”

Seven weeks later, the same Heather Honey is sitting at DHS as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, with access not just to county CVRs she can sue for, but to federal‑level election data and DOJ‑collected voter files most researchers can only dream about. The woman who used to compare state rolls to L2 from her Lebanon office now has the real thing.

Part Nine: The DHS Contradiction (a.k.a. Honey vs. Her Own Department)

In March 2026, on a call with election officials from nearly every state, Honey reportedly told them that DHS was not using voter registration data collected by DOJ to remove noncitizens from the rolls.

A DHS spokesperson had previously told Democracy Docket the opposite — that voter data from DOJ was being shared with the department and used as part of a broader effort. An election official on the call, confronted with this mismatch, summed it up neatly: “I don’t know if she’s stupid or lying.”

Either way, it is less than ideal when the person in charge of “integrity” appears to contradict her own department’s public statements about how they are handling voter data.

Part Ten: The National Emergency Meeting

In early 2026, ProPublica reported that Honey had been present at a closed‑door meeting where senior Trump officials and election activists discussed a strategy to declare a “national emergency” — one that would expand presidential powers over elections and potentially allow a federal takeover of the 2026 midterms.

To be clear about what we are describing: the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security allegedly attended a meeting where participants strategized about using emergency powers to control the next election.

This is what separates Heather Honey from a random Telegram influencer with a spreadsheet. She is, at this writing, a federal official with a security clearance and a budget. The pipeline from “Lebanon County polling line” to “DHS conference room where people discuss emergency presidential powers over elections” is a short one, and Heather Honey is standing at both ends of it.

Part Eleven: The Full Thread (a.k.a. The Rube Goldberg Machine)

For readers who like their corruption with bullet points, here is the full chain:

* Cleta Mitchell founds FAIRE, funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, funded by donors who prefer the “dark” setting on their money.

* FAIRE pays Verity Vote LLC 121,284 dollars for “consulting” and has to disclose it on Schedule L because it’s a self‑dealing transaction with an officer‑owned company.

* Verity Vote LLC is owned by Heather Honey, who is also FAIRE’s Vice President, listed with zero salary on the 990.

* Honey’s voter‑data “research,” built on comparing state voter rolls to L2’s commercial file, is cited by Trump in his 2020 election challenges.

* Trump appoints Honey as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at DHS in August 2025.

* American Oversight sues DHS in October 2025 for records on her hiring and activities, pointing to her history of coordinating with Trump‑world to push unproven fraud claims.

* In April 2026, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court grants her a unanimous win giving her access to 2020 election records in Honey v. Lycoming County.

* Shortly afterward, she tells state election officials something about DOJ‑to‑DHS data sharing that contradicts what DHS itself has already told the public.

If you diagram that as a flow chart, it looks like this:

anonymous donors → CPI → FAIRE → Verity Vote → Trump’s talking points → DHS job → court‑ordered data access → DHS “clarifications”

The only people not in the loop are voters.

As a final twist, West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner is now refusing to provide voter data to DOJ on “federalism” grounds while continuing to share it with DHS. If you’re wondering which federal agency he trusts more with your voter file, the answer appears to be the one that employs Heather Honey.

The Honey in the Machine

Here’s the through‑line that connects my last article to this one.

The EIN’s Model Election Laws Handbook is a blueprint. It outlines ten principles, drafts model legislation for each one, and is designed to be exported to state legislatures across the country. The handbook is the factory. Heather Honey is what the factory produces — and then sends back into the government to run the factory from the inside.

She went from:

* Citizen volunteer (Lebanon County polling line, 2020)

* to grassroots organizer (PA Fair Elections, EIN state chapter leader)

* to paid researcher (Verity Vote, Cyber Ninjas, FAIRE)

* to federal official (DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, 2025)

The name “Honey” does a lot of work in this story. It’s warm. It’s domestic. It’s disarming. It conjures someone’s grandmother, not someone who has been a subcontractor on a bamboo‑ballot audit, owned the LLC paid by Cleta Mitchell’s foundation, attended meetings about presidential emergency powers over elections, and now sits inside DHS with access to the data she used to misread from Lebanon.

That, more than anything else, is worth understanding about how this network operates: it looks sweet. It sounds like concerned citizens at a school board meeting. It presents itself as a mom in line at a polling place who just had some questions.

And then one day, the mom is running “election integrity” for the Department of Homeland Security.

Oh, honey.

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Let’s be honest about what we’re doing here. Someone handed a bunch of out-of-state dark-money lawyers a whiteboard and a dream, and asked them to write a Model Election Laws Handbook that would turn West Virginia — and every other state willing to listen — into a laboratory for voting restrictions. The result is a 116-page document that dresses up activist wishcasting in the language of legislative drafting and calls it policy research.

After wading through their methodology and digging deep into the junk data — and I use the word “data” charitably, the way you’d call a gas station hot dog “cuisine”—here’s the thing that’s going to make you laugh: they played themselves.

The crown jewel of the entire handbook, the empirical foundation on which the whole thing rests, is a single poll. One poll, commissioned by their own allied fund, conducted by a pollster who has been rated as favoring Republican-aligned results fielded in a very specific window: January 17–21, 2025.

Let that sink in. They surveyed voters three days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration — at the precise peak of Republican voter enthusiasm, when Trump’s approval rating had climbed to 47%, its highest point of his second term before beginning a steady decline to 36% by late 2025. They captured Republicans at maximum victory-lap energy and Democrats at maximum “what just happened” shock, then used those results to claim that the American people overwhelmingly support citizenship purges of voter rolls.

It’s like polling fans leaving a stadium after their team won the Super Bowl and concluding that the country loves football and nothing else matters.

The poll they’re so proud of is a time-stamped artifact of a single partisan moment — and that moment has already passed. Trump’s approval among independents alone dropped 21 percentage points over the course of 2025. The handbook, meanwhile, is designed to be permanent law.

So buckle up. What follows? The short version: there’s less real data here than in a fortune cookie, and the fortune cookie at least tells you something true about your future.

But First: Who’s Holding the Whiteboard?

The Election Integrity Network isn’t a group of concerned West Virginians who got angry about election security and decided to write a handbook. It’s one of eight organizations launched in 2021 by the Conservative Partnership Institute — a Washington D.C. nonprofit at 300 Independence Ave SE.

In 2024, CPI paid Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, $871,853 in base compensation — plus $37,831 in additional benefits. Call it $909,000.

Not millions. Just under a million. From a charity. That collects tax-deductible donations from donors whose names appear nowhere on the public filing.

EIN is chaired by Cleta Mitchell, whose résumé includes a starring role on the January 2, 2021 phone call in which Donald Trump urged Georgia officials to “find 11,780 votes.” She resigned from her law firm when the call became public, testified before the January 6 Select Committee, and then did what any reasonable person would do next: built a 50-state election legislation network. The Model Election Laws Handbook is her flagship product.

Her law firm, Compass Legal Group, billed CPI $608,984 for “legal services” in 2024, also from 300 Independence Ave SE. Compass Professional Inc. billed $986,048 for “administrative services.” Conservative Partnership Campus Inc. billed $1,202,229 for “facility services.” All from the same address.

Four entities. One building. Nearly $3.2 million in related payments, routed through a 501(c)(3) charity that raised $32.3 million in anonymous contributions last year.

Meanwhile, in Mannington, West Virginia, a man named Ed Fisher runs Citizens for West Virginia Election Integrity. He volunteers his time. He submits public comments to the West Virginia Legislature on Sunday nights at 9:58 PM.

He is not paid. He is thanked in the dedication.

The dedication calls volunteers like Ed Fisher “tireless warriors” who are “the backbone of saving America.” It says EIN owes them “an enormous debt of gratitude.”

That is a beautiful thing to say to someone you’re not paying.

Mark Meadows gets $909,000. Ed Fisher gets called a warrior. Keep that in mind as you read everything that follows.

The Poll: Reading the Numbers They Don’t Want You to Read

Here is what EIN claims: that “Americans strongly support” the policies in the handbook, and that a poll confirms their reforms are “commonsense” and “desired by the voters.”

Here is what the poll actually shows — if you read past the summary slide.

The survey was commissioned by the FAIR Elections Fund, an organization in the same ideological orbit as CPI, and conducted by RMG Research Inc. — the firm founded by Scott Rasmussen, whose work has been repeatedly flagged for a pro‑Republican house effect.

The fieldwork dates: January 17–21, 2025. Inauguration week.

Just to be clear: the evidence that the American people demand these laws is a survey taken when Republican enthusiasm was at its cyclical peak and has been falling ever since. The same firm, polling Wisconsin just three months later in April 2025, found Trump’s approval had already flipped to 47% approve, 53% disapprove. The handbook was published in May 2026, citing the January 2025 numbers as though the intervening year hadn’t happened.

The questions themselves are engineered to produce high agreement. Consider the top result: “Requiring states to regularly clean voter rolls by removing people who have died, moved, or are not citizens” — 91% in favor.

Of course 91% of people favor that. Who would say they want dead people on the voter rolls?

But the question that produced that number reads: “Requiring states to regularly clean voter rolls by removing people who have died, moved, or are not citizens.” They bundled “or are not citizens” in with removing dead voters and people who moved away. Almost no one objects to removing deceased voters. The question conflates an uncontroversial housekeeping task with a highly contested policy — citizenship-based purges — then claims the combined support number as a mandate for both.

Another example: “Requiring voters to show photo ID that confirms citizenship before casting a ballot” — 87% in favor. Most Americans tell pollsters they support some form of voter ID. The citizenship‑confirmation requirement is smuggled into the middle of the phrase as if it were ordinary, then used to justify far more aggressive documentary proof-of-citizenship laws.

The poll is not neutral research. It is a guided tour of the conclusions EIN had already reached.

The poll they’re so proud of is a time-stamped snapshot of a single partisan moment — taken at maximum victory-lap energy — and the handbook is a blueprint for permanent law.

The mandate has already expired. The laws are designed to be permanent.

The Handbook: A Form Letter From Washington D.C.

This is the part where I show you the actual document.

Page 7 of the handbook explains how to use it: “Customize bracketed terms for your jurisdiction and coordinate with legislative counsel for proper integration.”

There are literal bracket symbols throughout the model legislation. [Chief Election Official]. [Title __, Chapter__ of the State Election Code]. [X]months. [Y]years.

West Virginia’s 2025 election laws are a fill-in-the-blank form. Here is where each blank came from:

* Principle I: Citizens-Only Voter Registration SB 486

* Principle II: Photo ID Confirming Citizenship HB 3016

* Principle IX: Stop "Billionaire-Concocted" Schemes SB 490 — Ban on Ranked Choice Voting

* Principle IV: Voter Roll Maintenance SB 487 — Inactive Voter Threshold Change from four to two years

* Election Consolidation SB 50 — Municipal Election Consolidation

Perhaps the most entertaining section of the handbook is Principle IX: “Stop Billionaire-Concocted Election Schemes.” It criticizes ranked-choice voting, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and private election funding, portraying them as tools of secretive wealthy individuals.

The irony is dense enough to cut with a knife.

They are warning West Virginia about billionaire election schemes. They are the billionaire election scheme.

EIN’s handbook was written by a network of organizations that collectively constitute one of the most sophisticated billionaire-funded model-legislation operations in American political history.

Assistant Majority Leader Senator Patricia Rucker sponsored three of those five bills. She is also the 2025 ALEC National Chair — the American Legislative Exchange Council, the organization where corporate lobbyists and state legislators meet to pass identical model legislation in fifty states at once. She is not a grassroots citizen. She is the national chair of the organization running this same playbook everywhere.

And the bills didn’t just come with a template. They came with professional lobbying.

On the night before the House Judiciary Committee heard HJR13, registered lobbyist Joe Reidy sent delegates a one-pager on behalf of Americans for Citizen Voting — a national organization — making the exact same arguments as Ed Fisher’s public comment, submitted that same Sunday evening. One was a grassroots citizen. One was a paid professional. Their documents were functionally identical.

That is not a coincidence. That is a coordinated operation with a volunteer face on it.

West Virginia’s Citizen Action Group (West Virginia advocacy group staffed by locals) Comments on HJR13

Now It’s Going on Your November 2026 Ballot

Five laws weren’t enough. This November, West Virginians will vote on Amendment 1 — the Citizenship Requirement to Vote in West Virginia Elections Amendment, born from Senate Joint Resolution 9.

SJR9 passed the West Virginia Senate 33-0 on March 3, 2026. It passed the House of Delegates 97-0 on March 13. The final amended version cleared the Senate 34-0 on the last day of session.

Not a single dissenting vote in either chamber.

The amendment would change the West Virginia Constitution from “Citizens of the state shall be entitled to vote” to “only citizens of the state who are citizens of the United States are entitled to vote.” Noncitizen voting in West Virginia state elections is already illegal. It has been illegal. There is no documented problem it solves.

What it does do is put EIN’s Principle I — the first item in the fill-in-the-blank handbook — directly into the West Virginia Constitution.

Charlie Kolean, state director of Americans for Citizen Voting — the same national organization whose lobbyist Joe Reidy emailed delegates the night before the HJR13 committee hearing — celebrated the Senate’s unanimous passage: “The West Virginia Senate’s unanimous 33-0 passage of SJR9 makes one thing unmistakably clear: there is broad agreement that only U.S. citizens should vote in West Virginia elections.”

West Virginia is the fourth state to put this amendment on the 2026 ballot. Arkansas, Kansas, and South Dakota are the others. It is also listed as part of ALEC’s 2026 Essential Policy Solutions — the same organization whose National Chair sponsored the original five bills.

The template is working exactly as designed. West Virginia didn’t write this amendment. West Virginia filled in the blank.

What These Laws Actually Do to West Virginians

Here’s where we stop talking about Washington D.C. and start talking about Marion County.

EIN’s handbook claims these laws are urgent because noncitizen voting is a serious threat. Even Governor Morrisey — who signed all five bills — acknowledged at the signing ceremony that voter fraud is not widespread in West Virginia. The bills’ own champion said there was no widespread problem to solve.

The handbook leans hard on the idea of a noncitizen voting crisis. Its own favorite sources don’t back that up. Heritage’s fraud database has turned up a few dozen noncitizen cases in more than forty years of elections, out of billions of ballots cast. Independent research consistently finds noncitizen voting to be statistically near zero. West Virginia’s laws — and now Amendment 1 — are solving a problem that doesn’t measurably exist here.

But the laws create real problems for real people:

SB 487 lowered the threshold for flagging voters as “inactive” from four years to two years. West Virginia has some of the highest poverty rates and most housing instability in the country. Two years is a short window. Seasonal workers, people dealing with housing crises, rural residents who move within the state — these are the voters most likely to be swept into “inactive” status and quietly removed from the rolls before they know it happened.

HB 3016 mandates government-issued photo ID at the polls. West Virginia’s most rural counties have limited DMV access. Elderly residents without cars, people who have never needed a passport, low-income voters who don’t drive — these are the people who face the highest barriers to getting the ID the law now requires.

SB 486 adds citizenship verification requirements that were already required by federal and state law. It’s redundant — except that it creates an additional bureaucratic layer, another checkpoint where a voter can be flagged, challenged, or simply delayed long enough to give up.

Amendment 1 (SJR9) cements all of it into the Constitution, making it harder to undo, and signaling to the next legislature that the template is still open for business.

None of these laws were demanded by West Virginians. C4WVEI’s Facebook page had 19 likes when it was lobbying the legislature. The model laws were written in a building on Independence Avenue. The lobbyists were registered agents of national organizations. The volunteers who provided the grassroots cover believed what they were told.

Just to be clear: the people who wrote these laws will never live under them. The people who will are the ones who got called “tireless warriors” and weren’t paid a dime.

The Full Pipeline

Here it is, from top to bottom.

$32.3 million in anonymous donations flow into the Conservative Partnership Institute, a 501(c)(3) charity in Washington D.C. Every dollar is tax-deductible. Not one donor is publicly named.

CPI pays its leadership generously. Mark Meadows: $909,000. Jim DeMint, founder: $608,034 in base pay. Edward Corrigan, CEO: $437,566. Wesley Denton, COO: $400,824. It also pays related firms at the same address nearly $3.2 million in service contracts.

CPI funds the Election Integrity Network, which produces the handbook, runs training summits, builds state coalitions, and tells volunteers like Ed Fisher what to believe and what to say.

Registered lobbyists from Heritage Action, Honest Elections Project Action, Americans for Prosperity, and the State Freedom Caucus Network are all listed in West Virginia’s lobbyist directory, all pushing the same bills. Paid professionals. National organizations. Already in the building.

Ed Fisher submits a public comment from a Gmail account on a Sunday night. His organization is not registered as a charity with the West Virginia Secretary of State.

Five bills pass. Governor Morrisey signs them. Amendment 1 goes on the November 2026 ballot. ALEC calls West Virginia a model state.

Every dollar that flowed through this pipeline from anonymous billionaires to the West Virginia legislature was tax-deductible. American taxpayers — including West Virginians — subsidized the operation that made it harder for West Virginians to vote. That is not an exaggeration. That is the tax code.

The Dedication, One More Time

Let’s end where the handbook begins.

“These tireless warriors for honest, transparent and accurate elections are the backbone of saving America’s broken election systems. Their collective efforts and expertise form the basis of everything contained in this Handbook. Without their hard work over the past five years, none of this would have been possible.”

Without Ed Fisher, none of this would have been possible.

Without the volunteers in every state who showed up, filed the comments, appeared on the podcasts, and genuinely believed they were protecting their neighbors — none of this would have been possible.

The poll was cherry-picked. The model laws were pre-written. The lobbyists were already in the building when Ed Fisher sent his email. And now the whole thing is going on your ballot in November.

He is the face of a $32 million operation that pays its leadership nearly a million dollars a year. He did it for free. And the laws passed in his name make it harder for the people he grew up with to vote.

That is the handbook. That is the con. And now you’ve read the fine print.

Methodology: How to Map a System

I’ve been reviewing these type of filings every month for over three years. When you do that consistently, you watch the pattern build in real time —the technical term is Longitudinal Document Review.

Here is the method:

Phase 1: Map the network, not the incident. Do not start with the scandal. Start with the power node. Who decides who holds this power? Trace the commission, the appointments, the affiliations, the funders. Find the connective tissue—shared addresses, shared board members, shared funding sources.

Phase 2: Follow the money backward. Standard reporting: Donor → Candidate → Favor. Systems reporting: Outcome → Who benefited? → Who funded the actors? → Where did the money originate?

Phase 3: Identify the feedback loop. Stop looking for a beginning and end. Look for the circle. The output of the system becomes the input for its next iteration.

Phase 4: Name the architecture. Do not describe corruption as moral failing. Describe it as legal framework. “These politicians are corrupt” invites outrage. “The combination of Citizens United, McCutcheon v. FEC, and AFP v. Bonita allows unlimited anonymous spending” identifies the levers that must be pulled.

Sources

If you want to check my work — and you should — all of it is publicly available. Here’s where to look:

Conservative Partnership Institute, Form 990 (2024)Filed with the IRS. Available via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. Salary figures, contractor payments, and revenue numbers all come directly from this filing.→ Search: “Conservative Partnership Institute 990 ProPublica”

EIN Model Election Laws Handbook, May 2026 EditionPublished by the Election Integrity Network. The bracketed template language is on page 7. The dedication is pages 3–4. The poll summary is page 8.→ Publicly available at electionintegritynetwork.org

FAIR Elections Fund / RMG Research Poll (Jan. 17–21, 2025)Conducted January 17–21, 2025. 1,000 registered voters. Commissioned by the FAIR Elections Fund, fieldwork by RMG Research Inc.→ Obtained through public records research.

RMG Research Wisconsin Poll (April 8–14, 2025)Conducted April 8–14, 2025. 800 registered voters. Same pollster, three months later, showing Trump at 53% disapproval among Wisconsin voters.→ Obtained through public records research.

West Virginia House Judiciary Committee Public Comments (Feb. 17, 2025)Ed Fisher’s public comment on HJR13, submitted February 16, 2025 at 9:58 PM on behalf of Citizens for West Virginia Election Integrity.→ Public legislative record, West Virginia Legislature.

West Virginia Lobbyist Directory (June 2026)Filed with the West Virginia Ethics Commission. Lists all registered lobbyists active during the 2025–2026 legislative sessions, including Americans for Citizen Voting, Heritage Action, Honest Elections Project Action, Americans for Prosperity, and the State Freedom Caucus Network. https://ethics.wv.gov/lobbyist-directories→ Public record, West Virginia Ethics Commission.

On Scott Rasmussen / RMG Research house effectFiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings and coverage in outlets like The Hillhave repeatedly noted a Republican-leaning house effect in Rasmussen‑branded polling.→ FiveThirtyEight Pollster Ratings; The Hill, September 2018.

On Cleta Mitchell and the January 2, 2021 phone callPrimary source is the recording and transcript of Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, first published by The Washington Post and used by the January 6 Select Committee.

Related links

https://www.prlog.org/13151906-west-virginia-leaders-announce-support-for-election-integrity-networks-model-election-laws-handbook.html

https://irp.cdn-website.com/bd6706c7/files/uploaded/EIN-Handbook2026-v3.pdf

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Quick Note: *I left you a metric ton of breadcrumbs at the bottom of this article…*

Let’s stop pretending this is normal.

For nearly a decade, West Virginia’s top election official, Mac Warner, used his office not to invite more of us into democracy, but to lock us out of it. He did it while parroting Donald Trump’s Big Lie. He did it while carrying water for one of the most notorious voter‑suppression strategists in America, Cleta Mitchell. And when he was done here, he carried that playbook straight to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This is not “election integrity.” It is a coordinated attack on West Virginia voters — and it’s time we name it for what it is.

“Cleaning” the rolls by erasing West Virginians

When Warner took office in 2017, he bragged that he was going to “clean up” our voter rolls. What he actually did was launch one of the most aggressive purge campaigns in our state’s history.

Tens of thousands of registrations disappeared in a matter of months. Within a few years, well over a hundred thousand names were gone — roughly one in every twelve registered voters in this state. That is not housekeeping. That is a political scrub.

And who gets wiped out when you swing a sledgehammer at the voter rolls?

* Older voters who don’t move much but don’t vote in every single election.

* Poor and working‑class people whose lives are chaotic enough without navigating red tape.

* Students, renters, and folks who move for work and get lost in the paperwork.

These are our people. Our neighbors. Warner turned them into rounding errors.

Independent experts warned that his purge machine was moving faster and hitting harder than the data justified. County clerks quietly removed jaw‑dropping percentages of their voters, and instead of hitting the brakes, Warner’s office trotted out press releases crowing about “the cleanest voter rolls in state history.”

Let’s be clear: in a state that already has no same‑day registration, no no‑excuse absentee voting, no drop boxes, and some of the lowest turnout in America, mass purges are not neutral. They are a deliberate choice to make voting a minefield.

Enter Cleta Mitchell, Patron Saint of Voter Suppression

While Warner was busy deleting voters at home, the national voter‑suppression machine was taking notes.

Cleta Mitchell’s name should be burned into our political memory. She was on the infamous call where Donald Trump begged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes. When that blew up, she didn’t slink away in shame. She built an empire.

Her Election Integrity Network is a slick, well‑funded operation designed to do one thing: shrink the electorate. They train activists to mass‑challenge registrations, cook up bogus “fraud” stories, and pressure Republican officials to follow their script. They wrap it all in patriotic language, but the goal is simple — fewer voters, especially the ones they think will vote against them.

And guess who she saw as a model state official? Mac Warner.

Public records show Warner and his lieutenants speaking at Mitchell’s voter‑rolls working groups and webinars, sharing how they were “cleaning up” West Virginia’s rolls. Mitchell personally emailed Warner’s office asking for the very databases and tools they were using so she could feed them into her national machine.

That’s not a casual connection. That is strategic coordination. West Virginia wasn’t just on her radar. We were a lab.

ERIC: From Boring Success to Convenient Scapegoat

Here’s the part that makes me angriest: we actually had a good system.

ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, was a bipartisan workhorse. It helped states flag people who moved, died, or were registered in multiple places, and it also helped identify eligible but unregistered citizens. In other words, it caught the rare cases of real fraud and helped more people vote.

So why blow it up?

Because the Big Lie machine needed a new villain. Mitchell and her allies started spreading lies about ERIC — calling it partisan, dangerous, corrupt. None of that held up to scrutiny. But it didn’t have to. It just had to scare enough Republican officials into pulling the plug.

Mac Warner did not stand up for West Virginians. He saluted and fell in line.

In March 2023, he yanked West Virginia out of ERIC, synchronizing the move with Florida and Missouri like they were coordinating a press conference, not gambling with our elections. Former Secretary of State Natalie Tennant called him out, warning that leaving ERIC would hurt election security and open the door to more sloppiness and more wrongful purges.

Warner didn’t care. What mattered was not whether ERIC worked — it did — but whether staying in it annoyed the national election‑denial crowd. He chose them over us.

EagleAI: Junk Science Aimed at Your Registration

ERIC was real infrastructure. Its replacements are junk.

One of the crown jewels of Mitchell’s network is EagleAI — a “voter fraud hunting” tool dreamed up by a retired doctor with no elections background. It hoovers up public data, spits out lists of “suspicious” voters, and hands them to right‑wing activists eager to challenge anyone who looks like the wrong kind of voter.

Election officials who’ve actually looked under the hood say EagleAI routinely misfires. It mis‑matches people, misreads records, and “finds” fraud where there is none. In other words, it’s a perfect weapon if your goal is not accuracy but intimidation.

And where was Mac Warner? His office was on the inside of those conversations.

Emails show his top lawyer requesting materials shared inside Cleta Mitchell’s voter‑rolls working group — including handouts from the founder of EagleAI. West Virginia’s election officials were not just watching from afar. They were plugged into a private pipeline built to spread this software and the mass‑challenge tactics that come with it.

Imagine being a student in Morgantown, a black voter in Martinsburg, or an elderly voter in Clay County, and knowing that some out‑of‑state “patriot” armed with a glitchy database can try to erase you from the rolls with a click.

That isn’t “integrity.” It’s high‑tech harassment aimed at the most vulnerable voters.

The Legislature Does the Dirty Work

While Warner was doing the quiet administrative damage, the Legislature was busy pouring concrete around our ballot box.

They turned more voting‑related mistakes into felonies, cranking up fear and confusion. They created vague new crimes about “interfering” with voters that could just as easily be used to target volunteers giving people rides as actual bad actors. They shortened the time it takes to brand you “inactive,” bringing us closer to a “use it or lose it” democracy where skipping a couple elections can cost you your registration.

Then came the strict photo ID regime — a barrier that falls heaviest on rural, older, poorer, and disabled voters, the very people least able to take off work, find transportation, and navigate paperwork to chase down documents.

Add it up: mass purges, no same‑day registration, no no‑excuse absentee, no drop boxes, harsher criminal penalties, and tighter ID rules. That is not a coincidence. That is an architecture.

From Stop the Steal to the DOJ

If this story ended with Warner slinking off into retirement, it would be bad enough. But in today’s upside‑down Republican Party, sabotaging democracy is a résumé booster.

Warner publicly insisted that the 2020 election was “stolen,” and even claimed the CIA was in on it. He showed up at “Stop the Steal” events. He backed legal efforts to throw out results in states that dared to vote for Joe Biden.

And what was his reward? A promotion.

After losing his run for governor, Warner was handed a powerful job at the U.S. Department of Justice, overseeing the very civil rights division that is supposed to protect your right to vote. From that perch, he helped push a sweeping demand that nearly every state hand over unredacted voter data — including sensitive personal information — all in the name of chasing phantom fraud.

Watchdogs now suspect that some of the same right‑wing operatives who shaped his work in West Virginia, including Cleta Mitchell, have the ear of senior DOJ officials too. The West Virginia model didn’t stay in West Virginia. It got exported.

Our state was the proving ground. The rest of the country is the next target.

What this really is: A Message

Strip away the legalese, the press releases, and the “integrity” branding, and the message to ordinary West Virginians is brutal and simple:

* If you don’t vote in every election, we might wipe you off the rolls.

* If you make a mistake, we might charge you with a felony.

* If you’re poor, disabled, a student, or working three jobs, we will make it as hard as possible to get your ballot counted.

* And if you dare to complain, we’ll tell you we’re just “protecting” your vote.

That’s not protection. That’s punishment.

The people who built this system are counting on us to be too tired, too broke, and too beaten down to fight back. They think West Virginia is the perfect place to experiment, because we’re rural, we’re small, and we’ve been written off as a red state that doesn’t matter.

They’re wrong — if we choose to prove them wrong.

What We Do Now

We can’t undo the damage overnight. But we can draw a line.

We can demand:

* No more backroom deals with Cleta Mitchell’s network. Any contact between state election officials and outside “integrity” groups should be disclosed and subject to public scrutiny — and frankly, cut off.

* Real, transparent tools instead of junk. Rejoin ERIC or build something just as strong out in the open, not in the shadows of far‑right Telegram channels.

* Automatic and same‑day registration, no‑excuse absentee voting, and drop boxes so that voting is a right, not an obstacle course.

* Strict rules on purges. Clear notice, simple ways to fix errors, and independent oversight so nobody gets quietly erased.

* A new culture of democracy in West Virginia where “election integrity” means helping every eligible voter cast a ballot, not hunting for excuses to keep them out.

Most of all, we can remember that this is our state. Not Mac Warner’s. Not Cleta Mitchell’s. Not Donald Trump’s.

They picked West Virginia because they thought we’d be easy to roll. They thought they could turn our home into a cautionary tale for the rest of the country.

I’m not willing to let them write that story. And if you’ve read this far, I don’t think you are either.

The question is not whether they’re coming for our votes. They already have.The question is whether we meet them at the door.

What I’m Reading

Elephant Wars: Why fight the Democrats when we have each other? By: Gary Abernathy (From the era of when current WV Secretary of State Kris Warner was WV GOP Chair)

What I’m Watching

The Dark Money Game

(After you watch Episode 1, read this: https://wvpublic.org/story/wvpb-news/power-failure-a-massive-bribery-scheme-could-change-the-ohio-valleys-energy-system/ Episode 2 will tell you more than enough about Leonard Leo. Check out this: https://fedsoc.org/chapters/WV/west-virginia-lawyer-chapter)

Unprecedented

(Explains how the Trump family was smart about building their base. It is quite genius.)

What I’m Listening To

Voter Roll Purges

* Brennan Center for Justice — West Virginia’s Large-Scale Purge Raises Concerns Among Voters (Oct. 2018) — brennancenter.org

* WV MetroNews — SOS Mac Warner, clerks purge voters rolls in WV (April 2017) — wvmetronews.com

* U.S. Senate Rules Committee — Written Bio: West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner(June 2024) — rules.senate.gov

West Virginia Structural Voting Barriers

* Center for Public Integrity — New West Virginia restrictions follow Republican playbook in other states (Oct. 2022) — publicintegrity.org

* American Progress — How West Virginia Elections Would Look Different if the Freedom to Vote Act Had Been Enacted (Oct. 2024) — americanprogress.org

* Bolts Magazine — West Virginia Adds to Election Deniers’ Ongoing Takeover of State Politics(March 2023) — boltsmag.org

Mac Warner’s Political Posture & Election Denial

* WV MetroNews — Gubernatorial candidate Mac Warner: “The election was stolen, and it was stolen by the CIA” (Dec. 2023) — wvmetronews.com

* News & Sentinel — Doubling Down: West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner accuses CIA of stealing election (Dec. 2023) — newsandsentinel.com

* CBS News Pittsburgh — West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner running for governor(Jan. 2023) — cbsnews.com

* WCHS TV — State settles lawsuits alleging illegal firing over politics (Nov. 2018) — wchstv.com

* WV Public Broadcasting — Ex-Secretary of State employees settle lawsuits over firings (Sept. 2018) — wvpublic.org

ERIC Withdrawal

* Democracy Docket — Three GOP States Withdraw from Voter Data Organization ERIC (Feb. 2024) — democracydocket.com

* Issue One — Withdrawals from ERIC are the result of politics that hurt the integrity of elections (Jan. 2024) — issueone.org

* Institute for Responsive Government — West Virginia should embrace ERIC, not refute it(May 2023) — responsivegov.org

* WV Public Broadcasting — Preventing Election Fraud In W.Va. (Oct. 2023) — wvpublic.org

* VoteBeat — States that left ERIC are struggling to maintain voter rolls (Dec. 2023) — votebeat.org

Cleta Mitchell & the Election Integrity Network

* Democracy Docket — Cleta Mitchell Couldn’t Overturn the 2020 Election, So Now She’s Suppressing Voters (July 2023) — democracydocket.com

* NPR — Election partnership ERIC: 5 takeaways from NPR’s investigation (June 2023) — npr.org

* NPR — The Sunday Story: How the far right is making voter fraud easier (June 2023) — npr.org

* New Republic — The Shadowy Right-Wing Group That’s Suppressing the 2024 Vote (Oct. 2024) — newrepublic.com

* Wikipedia — Cleta Mitchell — en.wikipedia.org

Mac Warner & Mitchell Direct Coordination / EagleAI

* American Oversight — Prominent Election Deniers’ Ties to ERIC Alternatives and Threats to Voting Rights in 2024 (Sept. 2024) — americanoversight.org

* American Oversight — West Virginia Secretary of State Records Regarding EagleAI (Oct. 2024) — americanoversight.org

* American Oversight — Inside Election Integrity Network Meetings (Oct. 2024) — americanoversight.org

* NBC News — Inside the right’s effort to build a voter fraud hunting tool (Aug. 2023) — nbcnews.com

* Truthout — Right-Wing Activists Are Pushing States to Use Their Voter Roll Purging Software (Nov. 2024) — truthout.org

West Virginia Legislation

* ACLU of West Virginia — Lawmakers hard at work restricting our voting rights: Five bills to watch closely (March 2025) — acluwv.org

* Governor of West Virginia — Governor Patrick Morrisey Signs Voter ID Bill Into Law (April 2025) — governor.wv.gov

* ALEC — West Virginia Leads the Charge in Securing Elections (Nov. 2025) — alec.org

* WV Public Broadcasting — Warner Testifies Before Congress, Opposes Election Reform Legislation (March 2021) — wvpublic.org

Warner at DOJ

* Bloomberg Law — Warner, Who Said CIA Stole Election, Now Leads DOJ Civil Rights (Feb. 2025) — bloomberglaw.com

* Democracy Docket — The DOJ Lawyer and Hardcore Election Denier Probing 2020 (Oct. 2025) — democracydocket.com

* Democracy Docket — West Virginia DOJ Voter Data Access Challenge (May 2026) — democracydocket.com

* Legal News Line — Bondi sues Warner over refusal to release W.Va. voter info (June 2026) — legalnewsline.com

* ACLU — United States v. Warner (April 2026) — aclu.org

* Democracy Forward — FOIA Complaint vs. DOJ (April 2026) — democracyforward.org

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When did I ever ask my Attorney General to file a multistate lawsuit?

I couldn’t remember a single time. Not once. Not in conversation with neighbors, not on a ballot question, not in any candidate forum I’d ever watched. I’ve thought plenty about consumer scams, about the opioid crisis, about whether my AG was protecting West Virginians from price-gouging or fraud. I have never once thought, “What I really need is for my Attorney General to be the lead plaintiff in a 23-state coalition lawsuit against an EPA rule.”

And yet that — the multistate lawsuit — has become the single most resource-intensive, nationally consequential, and politically rewarded activity of the modern Attorney General’s office. In West Virginia and across the country.

This is an article about how that happened, why it should bother you regardless of which party you vote for, and a concrete reform you can ask your delegate and senator to support. A form letter is at the bottom — copy, paste, fill in your district, send.

The Transformation Nobody Voted For

Until about 1999, state Attorneys General were mostly what you’d expect them to be: the state’s lawyers. They handled criminal appeals, defended state agencies, prosecuted consumer fraud, and occasionally joined a multistate effort when something genuinely national — tobacco litigation, antitrust cases — required it. The job was unglamorous and largely local.

Then Republicans founded the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) in 1999. Democrats responded with the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA)in 2002. Both are organized as 527 political committees. Both raise tens of millions of dollars per cycle from donor industries with direct financial stakes in litigation outcomes. Both function as case-selection committees, briefing-paper factories, and donor-access machines for their member AGs (Lipton, 2014).

The Marquette political scientist Paul Nolette documents the transformation in his 2015 book Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America* (Nolette, 2015). His finding, in short: the rise of RAGA and DAGA turned state AGs from low-profile law-enforcement officials into partisan policy entrepreneurs whose case selection is now driven by national party donors and ideological coalitions rather than by anything resembling state-specific harm.

In his follow-up work, Nolette (2017) calls them “agents of polarization.” The phrase is precise. The AG office became one of the most efficient mechanisms in American politics for converting donor priorities into nationally consequential litigation — all conducted under the seal of a state government and at substantial public expense.

How this Works in Practice

The pattern is the same regardless of which party is in power in Washington (Nolette, 2014, 2017).

When a Democrat is in the White House, Republican AGs file dozens of multistate lawsuits per year against federal rules on emissions, immigration, healthcare, education, finance, and ESG investing. The cases align — to a degree that is statistically very difficult to call coincidental — with the donor industries that fund RAGA: coal, oil, gas, pharmaceuticals, finance, for-profit education (Nolette, 2015).

When a Republican is in the White House, Democratic AGs file the mirror-image waves of multistate lawsuits against federal rules on environmental rollbacks, immigration enforcement, ACA sabotage, abortion access, and federal preemption of state climate laws. Those cases align with DAGA’s donor base: trial lawyers, technology firms, and organized labor (Konisky & Nolette, 2021).

A 2014 New York Times investigation by Eric Lipton — which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting — actually obtained the underlying communications: industry lobbyists drafting comment letters and lawsuit language that AGs filed under their own names with minimal modification (Lipton, 2014). The West Virginia AG’s office was named in connection with energy-industry communications in that investigation.

This isn’t a fringe critique. It’s the documented operating reality of the modern AG office, in both parties (Lemos & Quinn, 2015; Smith, 2023).

West Virginia’s Case Study: the Morrisey Era

Patrick Morrisey is one of the cleanest examples of the archetype Nolette describes. From his 2012 election as Attorney General through his 2024 election as Governor, he:

* Joined or led roughly 97 multistate lawsuits — the overwhelming majority against the Obama and Biden administrations

* Won West Virginia v. EPA at the Supreme Court in 2022, restructuring federal administrative law and gutting EPA authority to regulate power-plant emissions — entirely through litigation, with no corresponding legislative action in West Virginia or Congress

* Served as RAGA chairman in 2017–2018, the year RAGA pivoted from defense to offense and coordinated the Texas v. United States lawsuit seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act

* Was a first mover on the state anti-ESG strategy, building a “Restricted Financial Institutions List” targeting banks that limit financing to coal — coordinated with finance and energy donor priorities simultaneously

To be clear: some of this work produced real public benefits. The $1 billion-plus in opioid settlements his office secured for West Virginia is a genuine accomplishment. The Frontier broadband settlement helped real West Virginians. Consumer protection work continued throughout his tenure.

But the resource allocation of the office tilted dramatically toward national federalism litigation. A dedicated Solicitor General’s office was created — uncommon for a small state — and staffed from the Federalist Society network. The multistate coordination unit punched far above West Virginia’s weight class. The cases that defined Morrisey’s national profile were the cases his donor coalition wanted filed.

His successor, Attorney General JB McCuskey, has continued the pattern. The Vanguard ESG-antitrust settlement announced this past March was a Morrisey-era multistate case McCuskey closed out.

This isn’t a Morrisey problem specifically. It’s the structural problem the office now has (Smith, 2023).

Why this Should Bother You

Here is the part that I think gets lost in partisan framing:

You did not elect your Attorney General to do this work.When West Virginians vote for an AG, they vote on consumer protection, drug enforcement, fraud, and crime. Polling consistently shows those are the functions voters associate with the office. Multistate federalism litigation against Washington ranks near the bottom of public salience — when voters can identify it as their AG’s work at all.

You did not vote on the case selection. RAGA and DAGA decide, in private donor-aligned strategy meetings, which lawsuits get filed (Lipton, 2014). Your AG joins them. There is no statutory requirement that West Virginia’s participation in a multistate case correspond to any West Virginia-specific harm. There is no disclosure requirement identifying RAGA or DAGA as the coordinating entity.

You are paying for it. RAGA and DAGA dues are paid by the associations themselves, through private donations. But West Virginia taxpayers fund the staff time, senior attorney positions, communications infrastructure, and travel that make a small-state AG office a productive node in the national partisan litigation machine. Senior staff routinely travel to RAGA and DAGA donor retreats on state time (Lipton, 2014).

Neither party will reform this from the inside. Both parties’ AGs benefit from the current system. National profile, donor networks, future office. The reform has to come from the people who elect them — and from the state legislatures that appropriate their budgets (Lemos & Quinn, 2015).

What’s Already Accepted, and What Should Be Added

West Virginia already draws this line cleanly in other contexts. The state funds the National Governors Association — nonpartisan, all-50-state, focused on policy and training. The state does not fund the Republican Governors Association or the Democratic Governors Association, both of which are nakedly electoral organizations. The state funds the National Conference of State Legislatures. The state does not fund the Republican State Leadership Committee or the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

The Attorney General’s office is the gap. The state funds (and should continue funding) the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG, n.d.), founded in 1907, genuinely nonpartisan, responsible for the kind of bipartisan multistate work that has produced the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, the opioid settlements, and similar outcomes. NAAG does the work voters actually elected their AGs to do.

But the state currently allows the AG’s office to function as an extension of RAGA — or under a future Democratic AG, of DAGA — using public staff, public time, and public infrastructure for partisan electoral and policy operations. That is the gap a modest reform can close.

The Reform: Resource Separation And Disclosure

The cleanest proposal is two parts:

Part 1 — Resource separation. Prohibit use of state office resources — staff time, state-issued devices, state-funded travel, state communications infrastructure — for RAGA, DAGA, or any successor partisan AG association. AG participation in such organizations would have to be on personal time using personal or campaign funds. This is exactly the rule that already applies to most other elected officials’ partisan party activity. Continue full state funding for NAAG and for nonpartisan regional AG bodies.

Part 2 — Disclosure. Require the AG to publicly disclose every multistate case the office joins, identifying the coordinating entity, the lead state, the stated West Virginia interest, and the resources committed. Put it on a publicly searchable docket. Update quarterly.

This is on solid constitutional ground. The U.S. Supreme Court would likely strike down an outright ban on AG participation in RAGA or DAGA — First Amendment associational rights protect that. But the state has clear authority to decline to subsidize partisan activity, exactly as it already declines to subsidize candidates’ campaign work with state resources.

The reform is enactable, durable, and bipartisan in its logic. The next Democratic AG of West Virginia — whenever that happens — should be bound by the same rule as the current Republican one. That’s the point.

What You Can Do

If you’ve read this far and agree that this is a problem worth raising, the most concrete thing you can do is send a letter to your state delegate and senator. A form letter is below — copy it, fill in the bracketed fields, send it. You can find your delegate and senator at the here (https://wvlegislature.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=57f9e9f83109403887e15da991ff9234)

The 2027 legislative session begins in January. The interim committee period between now and then is when policy ideas get shaped. This is the window.

Form Letter to Your Delegate and Senator

Copy the text below into a new email, fill in the bracketed fields, and send it to both your delegate and your senator. Their contact information is at https://www.wvlegislature.gov/House/roster.cfm and https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Senate1/roster.cfm

Subject: Request to introduce legislation separating state Attorney General office resources from partisan AG association activity

Dear [Delegate / Senator Last Name],

I am a constituent in [your county] and a registered voter in your district. I am writing to ask you to introduce, or co-sponsor, legislation in the 2027 session that would prohibit the use of West Virginia state office resources for activities of partisan Attorneys General associations — specifically the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) and the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA) — while preserving full state support for genuinely nonpartisan bodies such as the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).

My concern is structural, not partisan. The same reform should apply regardless of which party holds the Attorney General’s office. The next Democratic Attorney General of West Virginia should be bound by the same rule as the current Republican one. That is the point of the proposal.

The problem: Over the past two decades, the Attorney General’s office in West Virginia and across the country has shifted significant public resources — staff time, senior attorney positions, travel, and communications infrastructure — toward multistate lawsuits coordinated through RAGA and DAGA. These partisan 527 organizations function as case-selection committees and donor-access vehicles funded by industries with direct financial stakes in litigation outcomes. Peer-reviewed academic research, including Marquette University political scientist Paul Nolette’s 2015 book Federalism on Trial (University Press of Kansas) and his 2017 article in Publius: The Journal of Federalism, documents that the substantive overlap between RAGA-coordinated lawsuits and RAGA donor-industry priorities is statistically significant and structural. The same pattern exists in mirror form for DAGA. The Pulitzer-winning 2014 New York Timesinvestigation by Eric Lipton (”Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General”) provided the underlying documentary evidence of industry lobbyists drafting AG comment letters and lawsuit language.

The taxpayer concern: While RAGA and DAGA dues are not paid from state funds directly, West Virginia taxpayers do fund the state staff time, infrastructure, and travel that make our AG office a productive node in these national partisan operations. There is currently no statutory requirement that our state’s participation in a multistate case correspond to a demonstrable West Virginia-specific interest, and no disclosure requirement identifying RAGA or DAGA as the coordinating entity behind cases West Virginia joins.

The existing precedent: West Virginia already draws this line cleanly elsewhere. State funds support the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures (both nonpartisan) but not the Republican or Democratic Governors Associations or the Republican State Leadership Committee or Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (all partisan). The Attorney General’s office is the gap. Closing that gap simply applies the same principle the Legislature already applies to other constitutional offices.

The specific proposal I am asking you to consider:

* Resource separation. Prohibit use of state office resources — including paid staff time during business hours, state-issued devices, state-funded travel, and state communications infrastructure — for any partisan Attorneys General association (defined as any 527 or comparable entity organized around party-aligned AG electoral or policy activity).

* Continued nonpartisan support. Explicitly authorize state funds to cover NAAG dues and support participation in nonpartisan AG bodies and regional groupings.

* Disclosure. Require quarterly public disclosure of every multistate case the AG office joins, identifying the coordinating entity, the lead state, the stated West Virginia interest, and the state resources committed.

* Enforcement. Designate the State Auditor as the enforcement body, with authority to recover state funds expended in violation.

This is on solid constitutional ground. The First Amendment likely prevents outright bans on AG participation in RAGA or DAGA, but the state has clear authority to decline to subsidize partisan activity with public resources — the same posture under which the state already prohibits use of state resources for campaign work.

I am asking you to do three things:

* Review the proposal and the underlying research (full reference list below).

* Discuss the proposal with the Legislature’s nonpartisan legal staff to refine drafting.

* Introduce or co-sponsor a bill in the 2027 regular session.

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further, in person or by phone, at your convenience.

Thank you for your time and for your service to our district.

Sincerely,

[Your full name][Your street address][City, WV, ZIP][Phone number][Email address]

References

Konisky, D. M., & Nolette, P. (2021). The state of American federalism, 2020–2021: Deepening partisanship amid tumultuous times. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 51(3), 327–364. https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjab015

Lemos, M. H., & Quinn, K. M. (2015). Litigating state interests: Attorneys general as amici. New York University Law Review, 90(4), 1229–1271. https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-90-number-4/litigating-state-interests/

Lipton, E. (2014, October 28). Lobbyists, bearing gifts, pursue attorneys general. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/us/lobbyists-bearing-gifts-pursue-attorneys-general.html

National Association of Attorneys General. (n.d.). About NAAG. Retrieved June 5, 2026, from https://www.naag.org/

Nolette, P. (2014). State litigation during the Obama administration: Diverging agendas in an era of polarized politics. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 44(3), 451–474. https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pju011

Nolette, P. (2015). Federalism on trial: State attorneys general and national policymaking in contemporary America. University Press of Kansas.

Nolette, P. (2017). The dual role of state attorneys general in American federalism: Conflict and cooperation in an era of partisan polarization. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 47(3), 342–377. https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjx036

Smith, M. (2023). Politicization of state attorneys general: How partisanship is changing the role for the worse [Note]. Cornell Law Review, 108(4). https://publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawreview/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/Smith-note-final-version.pdf

If you found this article useful, please share it with neighbors and consider subscribing. Future installments will cover the WV legislative calendar for 2026 interims, which legislators have shown openness to good-government reforms, and how to track multistate cases your AG office joins in real time.

UtilitySecrets.org obtained audio of that fundraiser, hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Morrisey was joined by his counterparts from Utah and Montana, Sean Reyes and Tim Fox. In remarks that run only a few minutes apiece, the three Republican AGs explained — in unusually plain language — what donors get in return for their generosity, and how they coordinate with one another and with the national organization that helps re-elect them.

The audio recording would be striking on its own. What gives it weight is that it lands inside a structural story that political scientists have been documenting in the peer-reviewed literature for years. In a 2017 study published through Marquette University, political scientist Paul Nolette argued that state attorneys general have become “a more entrenched part of the national policy landscape,” with “coalitions of mostly Republican AGs aggressively challeng[ing] Obama Administration initiatives such as the Clean Power Plan” and successfully “limited, delayed, or curtailed Obama’s regulatory agenda, particularly during his second term” (Nolette 2017).

The Greenbrier audio is, in effect, the campaign-finance correlate of the legal strategy Nolette describes. This post walks through both.

What Morrisey Told the Room

Speaking to a crowd that, by his own description, included representatives “in the financial services industries, healthcare, energy, across the board,” Morrisey framed his office as a turnaround story for industry:

“I think people used to look at West Virginia and maybe want to run in the opposite direction in terms of the business climate there, but through our office and some of the changes in the legislature, we’ve really been able to … start turn things around.”

He then ticked through his EPA-litigation résumé, anchored on the Clean Power Plan stay his coalition had won at the Supreme Court earlier that year:

“We helped lead the charge against the president’s Power Plan, obtaining the stay. In West Virginia, that’s as good as you can do. When you’re fighting for coal miners and their families … if you can get a stay of the President’s top initiative that matters. If you can get a stay of the Waters of the United States rule, that matters.”

And then came the ask. Not the kind of generic ask that surfaces in stump speeches, but a specific, transactional appeal aimed at the executives in the room:

“The only way I get to stay is through your incredible generosity, so thank you all for coming today. Thanks for your support and if you haven’t written a check, I’d be grateful if you could; if you have already maxed out, if you would consider talking to some of the executives and people that you know, I would be appreciative of it. … I do have a very rich opponent and while we match up very well on the issues, you know it helps to have a little bit more in the way of resources in order to counteract some of those TV buys. So your help really makes a difference.”

He closed by name-checking the rest of the RAGA roster on hand — “General Fox, General Reyes, and obviously you know about the great leadership of Chairman Schuette” — and thanked the room “for coming to the Greenbrier.”

The Pitch from Reyes and Fox: “You Won’t Go Broke”

Tim Fox, Montana’s then-AG, made the coordination explicit. The product on offer was not a single state’s legal docket. It was a 27-, 28-, 29-state coalition acting as one:

“When we collaborate and get together … with Patrick Morrisey and push back against the federal government, or get together and write a letter to the federal government or whatever it is, we make a difference when there is 27, 28, 29, 30 or more attorneys general; people listen, people watch, and it makes a difference. So thank you for supporting each of our attorneys general in RAGA, and thank you for supporting me. You won’t go broke, and it’ll be one of the best investments you’ll ever make.”

Sean Reyes, who later went on to become the subject of the CMD records lawsuit over his RAGA and Rule of Law Defense Fund correspondence, was more colorful — and more direct about who was holding the checks:

“If you have checks for us, I’m taking Missy to the Supreme Court but Alan will be here and Erica can help us out as well. … Just remember that when you are writing those big corporate checks, you’re standing there with me in the ring of a bunch of gangbangers from fifth grade, that’s how I feel with you.”

Three AGs. One coalition. One ask.

The Scholarly Backbone: Why “27, 28, 29” Wasn’t Bluster

Tim Fox’s coalition arithmetic is exactly the dynamic Nolette documents in his Marquette study. He calls it a shift from AGs as “state-focused actors largely disconnected from one another” to a polarized national operation in which “the shape of these partisan coalitions has become quite predictable and stable” (Nolette 2017).

Three findings from the paper directly underwrite the Greenbrier audio recording:

1. RAGA’s reason for being is fundraising and strategy — not litigation in the abstract. Nolette traces RAGA back to its 1999 founding, noting that the organization “focused initially on fundraising goals rather than litigation strategy.” When a Democrat reentered the White House in 2009, Republican AGs “essentially flipped the script” and went on offense; RAGA-coordinated multistate litigation against the Obama administration “entrenched Republican AGs as a strong force against federal regulatory expansion” (Nolette 2017).

2. The Clean Power Plan case was a coordinated, anticipatory partisan effort — and West Virginia led it.Nolette describes the litigation Morrisey was fundraising on as “emblematic of the partisan trends and coalitions among AGs.” Within days of the EPA’s June 2014 CPP rollout, Murray Energy filed in the D.C. Circuit. “A week later, West Virginia AG Patrick Morrissey and eleven other AGs filed an amicus curiae brief supporting Murray Energy’s positon.” The challenge was filed before the regulations were even finalized in the Federal Register, which Nolette flags as “particularly unusual” (Nolette 2017). The coordination wasn’t reactive. It was rehearsed.

3. The donor link to the litigation was a live issue at the time — and the numbers match. Nolette writes flatly: “Democratic AGs demanded that Republican AGs reveal their connections with industry groups during the West Virginia v. EPA litigation, and pointed out that Murray Energy had donated $250,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association shortly before the litigation began” (Nolette 2017). That figure is the same $250,000 the Center for Media and Democracy independently tallied in its 2015-onward review of fossil-fuel money flowing to RAGA. Two different sources, same number, same timing — and the recipient is the coalition Morrisey was thanking the Greenbrier audience for keeping in business.

Nolette also notes a detail that is easy to miss when you only watch the courtroom: “Republican AGs were already in conversations about how to challenge the CPP before even the proposed rules were announced.” That is the operational meaning of Fox’s line on the audio recording — “you won’t go broke, and it’ll be one of the best investments you’ll ever make.” Donors weren’t underwriting a particular case. They were underwriting an anticipatory, multi-year coalition that was already in motion before the rules existed.

What the Money Was Buying

RAGA’s own 2016 year-in-review reads less like a legal-office annual report and more like a customer success deck for the fossil-fuel and utility sectors. Per the association:

“Republican attorneys general led the fight against President Obama’s overreaching, illegal EPA regulations, resulting in the Supreme Court to halt implementation of Obama’s signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan.”

The same document lists wins on the EPA’s WOTUS rule, the mercury rule (Michigan v. EPA), BLM fracking rules, the prairie-chicken designation, Keystone XL, and the EPA’s “Sue and Settle” practice. Nearly every item maps onto a specific industry priority — and each of those wins is one Nolette documents inside the broader pattern of “kitchen sink” multistate strategy (Nolette 2017).

Documents previously obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy show how that alignment was produced. At an August 2015 RAGA summit in West Virginia — less than two weeks before GOP AGs petitioned federal courts to block the Clean Power Plan — Murray Energy and Southern Company paid for private meetings with the same attorneys general. The agenda included a panel called “The Dangerous Consequences of the Clean Power Plan & Other EPA Rules,” staffed by Mike Duncan of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Geoffrey Barnes of Murray Energy, and three AGs: Scott Pruitt, Ken Paxton, and Patrick Morrisey.

The attendee list from that summit, per CMD, included Koch Industries, AFPM, ACCCE, the American Chemistry Council, ANGA, Devon Energy, Edison Electric Institute, Georgia Power, the National Mining Association, NextEra Energy, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Peabody Energy, and the State Policy Network, among others.

CMD’s tally of what those interests were paying RAGA since 2015:

* ExxonMobil: at least $100,000

* Koch Industries: $350,000

* Southern Company: $85,000

* American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity:$378,250

* Murray Energy: $250,000

* Total from fossil fuel interests, utilities, and their trade groups: more than $2.25 million

Corporations can pay up to $125,000 in RAGA “premium” membership dues for the privilege of private briefings with AGs and their staff — alongside “a five-hour golf game, and a National Rifle Association-sponsored shooting tournament,” as CMD described the recreational programming.

The Utility Pattern: Heavy on the Right, Selective on the Left

The donor pattern is not random. Across governor-level association giving:

* American Electric Power, Duke Energy, and NextEra Resources contributed a combined $574,413 to the Republican Governors Association and $0 to the Democratic Governors Association.

* Eleven additional utilities donated to RGA and not DGA. So did Dominion CEO Thomas Farrell and AEP CEO Nick Akins, personally.

* Southern Company and the Edison Electric Institute gave to both committees — but at significantly different levels.

* Only PSEG gave more to DGA than RGA. Only Xcel split evenly. Only Puget Sound Energy gave to DGA alone.

At the AG level in the first six months of 2017, the top utility funders of RAGA — Southern Company, EEI, and NextEra — were each in at $50,000. EEI and NextEra gave the Democratic counterpart, DAGA, half that. Of eight additional utilities donating to RAGA, only Dominion also gave to DAGA.

That asymmetry has a logic. In most states, the governor appoints the public service commissioners who regulate utility rates and capital plans, and the AG litigates the federal rules that determine what those utilities have to spend on emissions controls. As Nolette puts it, AGs operate “largely independently from other state officials” and have used their offices “creative[ly]” to achieve “national public policy goals” — meaning a single elected AG can swing federal regulatory outcomes that no single state legislator or PSC commissioner can (Nolette 2017). Buying influence at both nodes — cheaply, by the standards of utility-scale capex — is a defensible line item for any company whose business model depends on coal, gas, or the pace of the energy transition.

Why This Still Matters in 2026

Three reasons the Greenbrier audio recording is not just a historical artifact.

1. The pitchman now runs the state. Morrisey was sworn in as West Virginia’s 37th governor on January 13, 2025, after defeating Huntington mayor Steve Williams in November 2024 (WV Encyclopedia). The official biography on governor.wv.gov leads with West Virginia v. EPA, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that grew out of exactly the EPA-litigation track he was fundraising on at the Greenbrier — the same case Nolette identified in 2017 as “emblematic of the partisan trends and coalitions among AGs” (Nolette 2017). The donors who helped keep him in the AG’s office in 2016 now have a direct line to the executive branch — and to the appointees who sit on the West Virginia Public Service Commission.

2. The coordination model is still operating, and still partly hidden. The Center for Media and Democracy sued Utah AG Sean Reyes over his refusal to turn over emails and other records detailing his dealings with RAGA and the Rule of Law Defense Fund — the same 501(c)(4) the CMD documents tied to Clean Power Plan strategy meetings in April 2016. Reyes is the same AG who, on audio recording at the Greenbrier, told corporate donors “if you have checks for us, I’m taking Missy to the Supreme Court.”

3. The governor’s chair is the next prize. A Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis at the time argued that meaningful U.S. climate action would require expanding the map of states actively curbing carbon pollution, naming New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan as critical 2018 contests. Several of those governorships have since flipped repeatedly. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed anti-rooftop-solar legislation; Maine Gov. Paul LePage vetoed pro-solar legislation; both moves were utility priorities. The Greenbrier audio recording is, in effect, a template — and the template scales beyond the AG office.

The Quote That Should Outlive the News Cycle

Strip away the legal posture, the panel agendas, and the donor totals, and what remains is one sentence from a Republican attorney general — now a sitting governor — to a room full of corporate executives:

“The only way I get to stay is through your incredible generosity.”

Nolette’s broader claim, drawn from years of multistate-AG data, is that the Obama-era legal battles “simply cannot be characterized as involving ‘the states versus the national government.’ Instead, these battles involve sharp conflicts among the states themselves, with some challenging and others defending the exercise of federal power” (Nolette 2017).

Translated out of academic language: the side a state ends up on is not a function of its geography, its economy, or even its voters. It is a function of who its attorney general is, which national coalition that AG belongs to, and who is funding the coalition. The Greenbrier audio is what that funding sounds like when it is happening in the room.

The customers, on that day at the Greenbrier in 2015, were the country’s largest utilities, fossil-fuel producers, and their trade associations. The product was the legal and political firepower of state attorneys general, coordinated through RAGA and the Rule of Law Defense Fund.

Ten years later, in West Virginia, the vendor is the governor.

Audio: UtilitySecrets.org. Underlying RAGA documents and corporate-donor totals: Center for Media and Democracy. Scholarly grounding on AG coalition behavior, RAGA’s origin, the West Virginia v. EPA litigation timeline, and the Murray Energy $250,000 RAGA donation: Paul Nolette, “The Dual Role of State Attorneys General in American Federalism: Conflict and Cooperation in an Era of Partisan Polarization,”Marquette University Political Science Faculty Research and Publications, July 2017.

*Disclaimer*

I wrote this to share my perspective regarding Senators Brian Helton and Rollan Roberts’ recent claims of fighting utility companies and advocating for clean water through Senate Concurrent Resolution 7 and Senate Resolution 32.

After months of observation, it has become clear that these actions may be more about influencing the primary election than achieving substantive change. I believe the public deserves to know the true intent behind these legislative efforts.

There are two things a legislature can do with a policy problem.

It can pass a law that allocates money, compels action, changes who is legally required to do what, and creates something you can measure later. Or it can pass something that looks like action, sounds like action, and gets covered as action — but doesn’t actually require anyone to do anything differently.

Political scientists have a name for the second thing. Murray Edelman called it symbolic policy in his 1964 book The Symbolic Uses of Politics — still the foundational text on why governments so often respond to problems with statements rather than solutions (Edelman, 1964). Edelman’s argument was that political systems produce two kinds of output: material outputs that reallocate resources and power, and symbolic outputs that reassure constituencies, signal values, and manage public anxiety without changing underlying conditions (Edelman, 1964).

West Virginia’s 2026 legislative session produced good examples of both, and some of the most instructive are also among the least discussed. Two resolutions — one on coal, one on drinking water — illustrate how symbolic policy works, why it’s more common in election years, and how to spot it before you confuse it for a win.

The Four Questions That Separate Action From Announcement

Before getting to the examples, here is the evaluative framework. When you see a bill, resolution, or legislative action, ask four questions:

1. Is there money behind it?Did the Legislature actually appropriate funds for implementation, create a dedicated revenue stream, or attach a binding fiscal mechanism? Authorization without appropriation is a hallmark of symbolic policy. A Legislature can “establish” a program, “create” a fund, or “support” an initiative without spending a dollar.

2. Does it say “shall” or “may”?Binding policy uses mandatory language: shall, must, is required to. Symbolic policy uses discretionary language: may, encourages, supports, affirms, requests, recognizes. That single word — “may” versus “shall” — is often the difference between a policy that changes behavior and one that expresses a preference.

3. Does anyone have to do anything differently?Who is the target actor — an agency, a utility, a provider, a school, an employer — and does the measure require that actor to change its conduct? If the answer is no, the policy is communicating a value, not mandating a result.

4. Can you measure it later?Does the measure include a deadline, a reporting requirement, a compliance threshold, a penalty, or any mechanism that lets the public determine whether it worked? Policy without accountability is policy that cannot fail — because there is no standard against which to judge it.

You can score these on an 8-point scale (0–2 per criterion). A score of 0–2 is symbolic. A score of 7–8 is substantive. Most legislation lands somewhere in between, which is why you need to look provision by provision rather than judging a bill by its title.

Senate Resolution 32: “Protecting West Virginia Coal Jobs, Coal Power, And Coal Families”

SR 32 was adopted by the Senate on February 18, 2026 (Senate Resolution 32, 2026). Sponsored by senators Rose, Chapman, Taylor, Roberts, Barnhart, Hamilton, Phillips, Garcia, Hart, Oliverio, Z. Maynard, Thorne, Charnock, Clements, Rucker, Bartlett, Tarr, and Helton. The title alone generates a headline.

The resolution declares that coal miners, coal-fired power plants, and coal communities are “vital to West Virginia’s economy, energy security, and way of life”. It says coal plants should operate at a minimum 69 percent annual capacity factor. It states that the Senate “affirms” six commitments — to protect coal operations, defend coal jobs, guarantee coal remains in the energy mix, put West Virginians first, prioritize local jobs, and stand with coal families. It “commits to supporting legislation, regulation, and oversight” that serves these ends.

Now run it through the four questions.

Is there money behind it? No. SR 32 appropriates nothing, creates no fund, and attaches no fiscal mechanism to any of its six commitments.

Does it say “shall”? No. Every operative verb is expressive: affirms, commits, defends, stands with, opposes, prioritizes. There is no enforceable command directed at any utility, regulator, or agency.

Does anyone have to do anything differently? No. Appalachian Power does not have to change its dispatch decisions. The PSC does not have to alter a rate case. No mine owner, no energy company, no federal agency is legally bound by anything in this resolution.

Can you measure it later? No. The 69 percent capacity factor is named but unenforceable. There is no deadline, no report, no compliance mechanism, and no penalty for ignoring it.

That does not mean the resolution is meaningless politically. It means something very specific: it reassures coal workers, coal families, and coal-adjacent voters that the Senate is on their side — without obligating the Senate to do anything that costs money or generates opposition. Every senator who voted for it can run a campaign ad saying they “voted to protect coal jobs,” and every word of that sentence is technically accurate.

Edelman would recognize this immediately (Edelman, 1964). The resolution converts a real and painful economic anxiety — the future of coal employment in communities that have no economic alternative — into a formal legislative statement. The anxiety is real. The response is symbolic. The political benefit is captured at zero fiscal cost.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 7: “Requesting A Study Of The Water Crisis In Southern West Virginia”

SCR 7 is a different animal, and the contrast is instructive.

The resolution was reported from the Senate Workforce Committee on March 9, 2026 (Senate Concurrent Resolution 7, 2026). It was sponsored by Senators Roberts, Fuller, Hamilton, Tarr, Thorne, Weld, and Woodrum. It addresses the drinking water crisis in McDowell and Wyoming Counties — contaminated water, discolored water, service interruptions, aging infrastructure, and a January 2026 PCB contamination event in the Town of Wayne and Clear Fork that made national news. It requests that the Joint Committee on Government and Finance conduct a formal study, report findings to the 2027 Legislature, include draft legislation with the report, and pay study expenses from legislative appropriations.

Now run it through the four questions.

Is there money behind it? Partially. Study expenses are covered from legislative appropriations. But there is no infrastructure funding, no emergency repair allocation, no capital investment for treatment facilities or distribution systems.

Does it say “shall”? Partially. The Joint Committee is directed to conduct the study and produce a report. But utilities, the DEP, water authorities, and other relevant agencies are not required to take any remedial action.

Does anyone have to do anything differently? Partially. The Joint Committee must study and report. But the utilities serving McDowell and Wyoming Counties are not required to repair anything, test anything, or change any operational practice as a result of this resolution.

Can you measure it later? Yes — to a degree. There is a deadline: the 2027 regular legislative session. There is a deliverable: a report with findings, conclusions, recommendations, and draft legislation.

SCR 7 is meaningfully more substantive than SR 32. It creates a process, assigns it to a specific body, sets a deadline, and authorizes payment. Those are real procedural commitments. But notice what it does not do: it does not fix one pipe, test one water sample, repair one treatment facility, or require the DEP to take any enforcement action.

For communities that have been asking for clean water for decades — Mountain State Spotlight reported in March 2026 that clean water was a top issue in McDowell County in the 2024 election and remained unresolved two years later (Mountain State Spotlight, 2026) — a study resolution is cold comfort. The residents of McDowell County already know there is a crisis. They don’t need a study to confirm it. They need pipes, funding, and regulatory enforcement.

What SCR 7 does is create an official record that the Legislature knows about the problem and has directed someone to look at it. That is not nothing. It creates a political accountability trail. The 2027 Legislature will receive a report, and at that point, voting against action will be much harder to explain. But the resolution’s substantive value is entirely contingent on what the 2027 Legislature does with the study — which is to say, it is deferred and uncertain.

Why This Is More Common In Election Years

Both of these resolutions were passed in a session that ran through March 2026 — about ten weeks before West Virginia’s May 12 primary election and eight months before the November 3 general election (West Virginia Secretary of State, 2026; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2025).

That timing is not a coincidence.

David Mayhew, in Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974), argued that the primary motivation of legislators is reelection, and that this motivation shapes their behavior through three activities: advertising (building name recognition), credit claiming (associating themselves with good outcomes), and position taking (going on record on politically salient issues regardless of outcome) (Mayhew, 1974). Symbolic resolutions are almost perfectly designed for position taking. They are low-cost because they require no appropriation and generate no fiscal opposition. They are low-risk because they cannot fail in any observable way — no implementation means no accountability. They are high-visibility because they produce a vote record, a press release, and a headline. And they are infinitely adaptable to whatever the dominant constituent anxiety happens to be.

In West Virginia’s 2026 session, coal insecurity and water contamination were both dominant constituent anxieties. SR 32 addressed the first with six affirmations and zero dollars. SCR 7 addressed the second with a study request and no repair funding. Both generated positive coverage for their sponsors. Neither changed a material condition in the state.

This pattern is not unique to West Virginia or to either political party. It is structural. When elections are near, the cost-benefit calculation of substantive policy worsens. Substantive policy requires picking winners and losers — funding one county’s water system over another, imposing costs on utilities to keep coal plants running, raising taxes to expand childcare access. Each of those choices generates organized opposition. Symbolic policy generates only organized support, because the constituency for the declared value benefits without anyone bearing a cost (Mayhew, 1974).

The result is a predictable election-year pattern: more resolutions, more “support” bills, more “study” mandates, and fewer measures with actual teeth. The legislative calendar fills up with position taking. The structural problems — water infrastructure, workforce development, childcare access, coal community transition — get another twelve-month deferral.

How To Read Resolutions Before You Share Them

The most practical takeaway is this: when you see a legislative action, read the “Resolved” clauses, not the “Whereas” clauses.

The “Whereas” section tells you the political story the bill is telling. It names the problem, identifies the victims, establishes the stakes, and frames the urgency. It is often accurate and sometimes moving. But it does not tell you what the legislation actually does.

The “Resolved” section tells you what the Legislature is actually doing. If the resolved clauses use “affirms,” “commits,” “stands with,” “supports,” or “requests,” the Legislature is making a statement. If they use “shall,” “must,” “is appropriated,” “is required to,” and “by [date],” the Legislature is making a commitment.

SR 32’s resolved clauses: the Senate “affirms” six commitments and “commits to supporting” future action. No command. No funding. No target (Senate Resolution 32, 2026).

SCR 7’s resolved clauses: the Legislature “requests” a study, effectively directs a report to the 2027 session, and authorizes expense payment. Procedurally binding, but no remediation (Senate Concurrent Resolution 7, 2026).

The severity of the problem named in the “Whereas” section is irrelevant to the classification. Coal employment is a serious issue. Drinking water contamination is a serious public health issue. The question is not whether the problem is real. The question is whether the policy instrument is capable of changing it.

When the answer is no — when the Resolved section says, in various phrasings, “we agree this is bad” — that is symbolic policy. And when symbolic policy is reported as a win, the public loses the ability to hold lawmakers accountable for the gap between what was said and what was done.

A Note On The Right Use Of Symbolic Policy

None of this means symbolic policy is always wrong. Study resolutions that actually lead to funded legislation — like SCR 7, if the 2027 Legislature follows through — are legitimate precursors to substantive policy. Resolutions that name an injustice for the first time create official records that advocates, courts, and future legislatures can cite. Sometimes the symbolic act of recognition is itself meaningful to a community that has been ignored.

The problem is not symbolic policy per se. The problem is symbolic policy that is presented as if it were substantive — as if “protecting coal families” through a resolution means coal families are protected, or as if “requesting a water study” means southern West Virginia will get clean water. When that substitution happens, it displaces the accountability demand that would otherwise follow a real problem left unsolved.

The four-question framework is not a cynicism machine. It is a clarity tool. It helps you ask, specifically and without rhetoric: what does this actually require, who is required to do it, when must it happen, and what happens if they don’t?

If you can answer those questions, you have substantive policy. If you can’t, you have a statement — and you should keep asking for the real thing.

References

Edelman, M. (1964). The symbolic uses of politics. University of Illinois Press.

Mayhew, D. R. (1974). Congress: The electoral connection. Yale University Press.

Mountain State Spotlight. (2026, March 28). Two years on, water still an issue in McDowell. Mountain State Spotlight. https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2026/03/29/clean-water-mcdowell/

National Conference of State Legislatures. (2025, December 7). 2026 state primary election dates. https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/2026-state-primary-election-dates

Senate Concurrent Resolution 7, West Virginia Legislature, Regular Session (2026). https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=scr7%20org.htm&yr=2026&sesstype=RS&i=7&houseorig=S&billtype=CR

Senate Resolution 32, West Virginia Legislature, Regular Session (2026). https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=sr32%20intr.htm&yr=2026&sesstype=RS&i=32&houseorig=s&billtype=r

West Virginia Secretary of State. (2026). 2026 elections calendar. https://sos.wv.gov/media/467/download?inline=

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You built an economy that depended on people having no better options—and then congratulated yourselves for offering them one. You paid wages just high enough to keep people tethered, in places where opportunity had already been stripped bare. And when those wages cycled right back out—through debt, through company towns, through economic structures you controlled—you called it prosperity.

It wasn’t prosperity. It was containment.

You want credit for jobs. But you never want to talk about the conditions attached to them—the safety shortcuts, the long-term health consequences, the poisoned water, the flattened communities, the regulatory capture that made all of it possible. You wrapped it all in the language of heritage and pride, while lobbying to keep enforcement weak and oversight toothless.

And when things went wrong—as they inevitably did—you called it tragedy. Not policy failure. Not negligence. Not the predictable outcome of decisions made in boardrooms and backrooms.

Tragedy.

You’ve spent decades cultivating the idea that questioning this system is an attack on West Virginia itself. That criticizing the industry is somehow disrespecting the people who worked in it. That demanding accountability is equivalent to betrayal.

It’s a convenient narrative. It’s also a dishonest one.

Because the truth is, the people of this state were never the priority. The resource was.

And when the resource changed—when coal became chemical, when extraction became more mechanized, when fewer workers were needed—you didn’t pivot toward protecting communities. You doubled down on extraction. You fought regulations. You fought diversification. You fought anything that threatened the control you had built.

Then you turned around and asked the rest of us to celebrate it.

“Friends of Coal” isn’t a grassroots movement. It’s a message discipline strategy. It’s a shield. It’s a way to blur the line between an industry and a people—so that any criticism of one feels like an attack on the other.

But they are not the same.

West Virginians are not a brand. They are not a mascot for your lobbying campaigns. They are not props in your legislative testimony. And they are not obligated to keep sacrificing their health, their land, and their future so your balance sheets stay intact.

And let’s be clear about something else: this didn’t happen in a vacuum.

It happened with the full cooperation of elected officials who wrote the laws you wanted, ignored the violations you committed, and repeated your talking points back to the people they were supposed to represent. It happened because political power in this state has too often been aligned with industry interests instead of public ones.

That’s not heritage. That’s a system.

And systems can be dismantled.

So no, this isn’t about being “anti-coal” or “anti-industry.” It’s about being honest. It’s about rejecting the idea that exploitation—no matter how long it’s been normalized—is something we owe loyalty to.

You can keep the slogans. You can keep the billboards. You can keep the coordinated messaging campaigns.

But you don’t get to keep rewriting the story.

And on a day when we’re told to honor sacrifice, let’s be clear about the difference between service and exploitation. One is given freely. The other is extracted and repackaged as pride.

If we are going to invoke freedom, then let it mean more than a slogan on a bumper sticker or a decal on the back of a pickup paid for by a trade association. Let it mean freedom from companies and politicians who think our people are disposable, freedom from an industry PR machine that confuses loyalty with silence, and freedom from the idea that our children’s futures must be collateral damage for somebody else’s profit.

So let freedom ring—not as background noise to another corporate marketing campaign, but as a reckoning. Let it ring in the boardrooms and at the Capitol, in every office where decisions are made about our land and our lives. Let it ring until it drowns out the PR, outlasts the billboards, and breaks the grip of the “Friends of Coal” myth once and for all.

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On May 1, 2026, Jason Huffman — the West Virginia state director of Americans for Prosperity — logged on to X and wrote this, in his own words, under his own verified handle, about sitting State Senator Dr. Tom Takubo:

“For the record, @AFPWV isn’t involved in @DrTomTakubo’s race — as he seems to suggest in this interview. But our grassroots activists and staff across the state are deeply involved in defending our policy champions against the slate of center-left candidates Takubo recruited on behalf of the Hospital Cartels and their newly bought front group, the democrat-run @WVaChamber.

Ultimately, Team Takubo will fail to stop principled lawmakers from repealing the CON laws Hospital Monopolies use to keep competition out at the expense of better health care for WV families.”

Those are his words. Hospital Cartels. Hospital Monopolies. Aimed at the nonprofit, community-based, critical-access hospitals that serve the sickest, poorest, most rural population in the country. Eleven days before a primary in which $5.6 million of out-of-state money was poured into our state to remove specific lawmakers from office.

I would like to take Mr. Huffman seriously. I would like to hand him the dictionary definition of the word he keeps using, and ask him, in good faith, whether he has ever actually met one. Because I have. I collected ninety-four of them.

And before we go a step further, let me tell you who I am, because the political class in this state has spent two decades assuming people like me do not exist. I am a millennial parent. I have a daughter who graduates high school next week with high honors and the West Virginia Promise Scholarship. And I have spent the last twenty years watching the people who run this state lie to my face about what they were doing and why.

We are a different generation of parents, Mr. Huffman. We are not the audience your consultants imagine. We are not going to be tricked, we are not going to be focus-grouped, and we are not going to be talked out of what we can see with our own eyes. We have full information, full agency, and full control over our children’s futures — and we are exercising all three. That is the part you should be worried about. Not Tom Takubo, Greg Thomas, the “guy from Wheeling”.

What a Political Cartel Actually Looks Like

A cartel is a group of separate entities that coordinate spending, share resources, and act in concert to control a market they could not control alone, while maintaining the appearance of being independent. That is the definition. It is the definition Mr. Huffman uses when he points at hospitals. Let us apply it to his own organization.

I am not guessing at these numbers. They are on file with the West Virginia Secretary of State

* Americans for Prosperity, West Virginia chapter: $759,715

* Sugar Maple PAC: $1,177,676

* School Freedom Fund: $1,174,224

* Mountaineer Conservative Action: $539,910

* Make Liberty Win: $400,027

If coordinated, multi-entity spending designed to control a market while maintaining the appearance of independence is a cartel when hospitals do it, Mr. Huffman, it is a cartel when this does it. The mirror is right there.

The Hit List

If you want to know what the cartel was buying, the filings make it plain. They wanted four sitting Republicans gone before the next session:

* Vernon Criss, House Finance Committee chairman — $90,277 in opposition spending from Sugar Maple PAC alone, plus AFP, School Freedom Fund, and Make Liberty Win. His sin: proposing a $5,250 cap on the Hope Scholarship voucher to save the state $20 million.

* Clay Riley, House Finance Committee vice chairman — $35,524 from Sugar Maple, plus four other groups. Same sin.

* Scot Heckert — $86,246 from Sugar Maple, plus four other groups. Same sin.

* Tom Takubo, a sitting state senator and practicing pulmonologist. We will come back to him in a moment. His was the single most expensive head on the wall.

This is the part the “hospital cartel” rhetoric is supposed to obscure: the political cartel running the rhetoric is itself a coordinated, multi-entity operation buying state legislators wholesale, in cash, while accusing the people who treat sick West Virginians of being the real monopolists.

What is the biggest problem for a coal company but the best friend of a coal miner? A pulmonologist in the State Senate with significant leadership power.

Senator Dr. Tom Takubo, is a practicing pulmonologist at WVU Medicine. He treats lungs. In West Virginia, that means he treats coal miners.

Through the day before the primary, the cartel spent $438,000 opposing him across 36 separate independent expenditures, from four coordinated out-of-state-funded PACs: Sugar Maple PAC, Mountaineer Conservative Action, Make Liberty Win, and School Freedom Fund. It is, by a comfortable margin, the most expensive opposition spend against any sitting lawmaker in the 2026 West Virginia primary.

And here is where Mr. Huffman’s May 1st tweet and May 7th interview becomes evidence rather than rhetoric. He wrote, on the record, that “AFPWV isn’t involved in @DrTomTakubo’s race.” That is technically accurate as a single-entity statement — AFP-WV did not file a single independent expenditure naming Takubo, even as it spent $759,716 on other races in the same primary cycle. Which is, structurally, exactly how this kind of operation works. You do not need your own logo on the mailers when allied PACs in the same network are already running them. You issue press releases. You publish op-eds. You hold rallies. You call sitting senators front men for “Hospital Cartels” on X eleven days before the election. And then you point at the disclosure filings and say, with a perfectly straight face, that you were not involved.

That is the cartel structure I see. Whether or not the lawyers can find a coordination violation is somebody else’s problem. The pattern is the pattern. I do not need a subpoena to read it. I just need eyes.

The mailers they paid for did not mention coal. They did not mention lungs. They did not mention silica, or dust, or black lung, or the federal safety rule that died six weeks before the primary.

This is the video and mailer that gives the entire game away — quoted Takubo directly from a 2023 Charleston Gazette-Mail article.

The quote they printed as proof of his guilt reads:

“We, as a Legislative body, I feel are taking a dramatic overreach when we’re stepping into a field of medicine.”

That is not a politician pandering. That is a physician, on the floor of the West Virginia Senate, under his own name, telling the legislature they are practicing medicine without a license. It is one of the most honorable things a doctor-legislator can say. And four out-of-state PACs spent over $438,000 to punish him for saying it.

Why?

Look at the timing.

* April 11, 2025: The Eighth Circuit stays the federal MSHA Silica Rule — the rule that would have cut permissible silica dust exposure in half for coal miners.

* April 9, 2026: Federal regulators indefinitely delay the rule altogether.

* April–May 2026: The cartel network spends $357,000 to remove a pulmonologist from the West Virginia Senate.

NIOSH and the University of Illinois School of Public Health have confirmed a 900% increase in progressive massive fibrosis — the severe form of black lung — since 2000, driven by silica dust. Miners are getting sick younger. They are dying younger. And the cartel decided that the worst possible person to have in the state senate, six weeks after the federal silica rule was killed, was the one man in the chamber who can explain in clinical detail what coal dust does to a lung.

You do not run culture war mailers against a pulmonologist because you are worried about girls’ sports. You run them because you cannot run the actual mailer, which would read: “Tom Takubo knows too much about what coal dust does to a man’s lungs, and we need him gone before next session.”

That mailer would not poll well. So they ran the trans athlete and puberty blockers mailers instead, and they trusted that nobody would connect the dots

Protecting coal miners from black lung disease is deeply personal to me.

My grandfather — we called him Jiggs — had black lung. I will not forget the sound of him trying to breathe at the end of his life. It is not a sound any West Virginia family forgets, because there are tens of thousands of us who have heard it, going back four generations. The donors funding the Takubo mailers have never heard that sound. They never will. To them, the lungs of West Virginia miners are line items on a profit-and-loss statement, and a pulmonologist in the state senate is a cost on that statement. $438,000 to remove him is a bargain.

The Pattern, Across Every Issue

Once you see the cartel, you see it everywhere.

On vouchers: AFP demanded the legislature kill a $5,250 Hope Scholarship cap that would have saved the state $20 million, while Pennsylvania’s nearly identical voucher pipeline has funneled over $30 million in tax credits to firms tied to a single Republican megadonor, Jeff Yass (Jacobin, Washington Post). The same Yass who pours tens of millions into the same national “school choice” network AFP exists to advance. Meanwhile the West Virginia Promise Scholarship — the merit-based award designed to keep our own kids here — has been quietly eroded from full tuition in 2002 down to a flat $5,500 today, covering roughly a third of WVU tuition (CFWV). The cartel will fight to the death for vouchers that subsidize private religious schools and route profits to Pennsylvania. It will let the program that actually retains West Virginia kids wither on the vine.

On healthcare: AFP wants to repeal Certificate of Need so out-of-state, for-profit operators can cherry-pick the highest-margin procedures, cannibalize our nonprofit hospitals, and route West Virginia patients across state lines for complex care (West Virginia Hospital Association). The 21 critical-access hospitals that serve our rural counties would lose the cross-subsidy that keeps them open. Maternity wards close. Mental health services close. And the cartel calls that“freedom.”

On worker safety: Silica rule dead. Pulmonologist targeted for removal. No further questions.

The throughline is identical in every case. Public dollars and public protections are recategorized as “cartels” and “monopolies” and “captured markets” so they can be dismantled, and the savings — every time, without exception — accrue to a small number of out-of-state donors whose names appear on the disclosure filings of the PACs running the mailers.

That is a cartel. That has always been a cartel. And the political class that funds it has spent twenty years training West Virginians to look at the wrong building.

What the Political Cartel Forgot About Millennial Parents

Here is the thing the cartel did not budget for, and it is the reason this primary cycle is going to be studied for a long time.

This generation of parents already finished the math.

We are the first American generation to come of age while the credibility of every major institution collapsed in public, with documentation. We watched the Iraq War lies, the 2008 crash, Flint, the Sacklers, Enron, the Catholic Church, 81 million opioid pills shipped to a single county of 25,000 people in southern West Virginia. We watched DuPont poison the Ohio Valley with C8 and pay a settlement that worked out to pennies per affected resident. We watched the Elk River turn the tap water of 300,000 West Virginians into something you could smell from the street.

By the time we became parents, the pattern was not a theory. It was a data set.

You cannot focus-group your way out of a generation that has watched the receipts pile up for thirty years. The trust is not low. The trust is gone. And once trust is gone, ninety mailers in a single mailbox stop being persuasion and start being evidence — evidence that the money exists, evidence that the donors do not live here, evidence that the primary winner will not work for us, evidence that our vote is decorative, and evidence that the only remaining lever we control over our child’s future is the one no consultant has figured out how to buy: the decision about where she lives.

That is the part the cartel never priced in. Millennial parents have agency. We have control. We have a level of access to public records, comparative data, and lived-experience evidence that our parents and grandparents never had. We sit at our kitchen tables on a Saturday night and open the Secretary of State’s spreadsheet, and we do not need a press release to interpret it. We see the donor addresses. We see the vendor names. We see the dollar amounts. We see which lawmakers were targeted and which were defended, and we draw the conclusions ourselves — without focus groups, without consultants, without permission, and without apology.

My daughter graduates next week with high honors and the Promise Scholarship. She is leaving for the University of Kentucky pre-dental program in the fall. We are paying the premium over in-state tuition voluntarily, because the in-state institutions can no longer credibly promise her a future inside this state’s borders. Her best friends are running the same calculation. Thousands of West Virginia families ran this math at their kitchen tables this spring and arrived at the same answer.

That is school choice, Mr. Huffman. That is a parent with full information, full agency, and full control over her child’s life, making a deliberate, expensive, deeply-considered decision to send her child to a state where the institutions still function, the silica rules are enforced, the hospitals stay open, and the elections are not for sale.

You wanted a market verdict on West Virginia governance? Here it is. The verdict is Lexington. The verdict is Columbus. The verdict is Pittsburgh and Raleigh and Nashville. The verdict is a U-Haul rental and a change-of-address form. The cartel network can buy every state senate seat in the building, and it will still lose the only ballot it has not figured out how to purchase: the one cast at the closing table on an out-of-state house, by a millennial parent who finally has the receipts and the resolve to use them.

Final Words for the Class of 2026

To my daughter, and every kid leaving this fall: you did not fail this state. This state failed you, and a generation of us watched it happen, and we are sending you somewhere with a future because that is what parents do.

Go. Build. Become a remarkable dentist. Raise your kids wherever the water is clean and the elections are decided by the people who actually live there.

Come home for Thanksgiving. Bring the grandkids. Show them the mountains. Teach them the music. Tell them about Jiggs.

And do not, for one second, feel guilty about the address on your driver’s license. The guilt belongs to the political cartel that mailed me ninety pieces of cardstock and not one functioning idea for the place we raised you in.

We love you. We are proud of you.

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The Real Story Behind the Mailers: Dr. Tom Takubo and Dr. Mike Maroney vs Mark Maynard’s Lobbyist Talking Points

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We like to talk about independence in this country as if it’s the highest form of strength. We celebrate self-reliance, grit, and the idea that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough. But beneath all of that is a quieter, less comfortable truth: none of us actually make it alone. Not really.

Every success story has invisible scaffolding. Teachers. Roads. Healthcare workers. Neighbors. Family. Even strangers who made small decisions that made your life a little easier without ever knowing your name. A functioning society is not a backdrop—it’s an active, ongoing collaboration.

And yet, we often treat care for one another like it’s optional. Like it’s charity instead of infrastructure.

We debate whether people deserve help, as if dignity should be conditional. We draw lines between “us” and “them,” between the “hardworking” and the “undeserving,” between those who made good choices and those who didn’t. But life doesn’t sort people that neatly. Hardship isn’t a moral failure. And prosperity isn’t always proof of virtue.

A prosperous society doesn’t just happen—it’s built. And it’s built on the idea that when one part of the community struggles, it eventually touches all of us.

There’s a reason people say a rising tide lifts all boats. It’s not just a nice metaphor—it’s a practical one. When people have access to healthcare, they stay healthier and miss fewer days of work. When children have stable homes and good schools, they grow into adults who contribute more fully to the world around them. When people aren’t constantly on the edge of crisis, they have the space to create, innovate, and participate.

Care isn’t just compassionate. It’s efficient. It’s stabilizing. It’s smart.

But more than that, it’s human.

What does it say about us if we build systems that only work for some? If we accept preventable suffering as the cost of doing business? If we measure success purely in individual terms, while ignoring the conditions that made that success possible in the first place?

Taking care of each other doesn’t mean erasing personal responsibility. It means recognizing that responsibility runs both ways—individual and collective. It means understanding that the health of a society isn’t measured by its highest achievers, but by how it treats its most vulnerable.

Because at some point, vulnerability comes for all of us. Illness, job loss, aging, unexpected crises—these aren’t rare exceptions. They’re part of the human experience.

And when that moment comes, the question won’t be whether we deserved help.

The question will be whether help is there.

So maybe the real question isn’t whether we can afford to take care of each other.

It’s whether we can afford not to.

If you found yourself watching ads, flipping through mailers, or scrolling past campaign videos thinking, none of this actually sounds like me, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong for feeling that way.

There’s a certain hollowness that sets in after a while—when every candidate starts to sound the same, when every message feels prepackaged, when every sentence feels like it was written somewhere far away from the realities of your day-to-day life. That feeling? That’s not cynicism. That’s recognition.

Because your life is not a slogan.

You are dealing with things that don’t fit on a yard sign. You’re thinking about grocery bills that keep creeping up, rent or mortgages that don’t get easier, child care that’s hard to find or harder to afford, jobs that may or may not feel stable, health care that’s confusing or out of reach, and a general sense that everything just takes more effort than it should. You’re balancing responsibilities, making tradeoffs, figuring things out as you go.

You are already doing your own kind of fighting every single day.

Which is why it feels so disconnected to hear the same two phrases repeated over and over again:

“West Virginia values.”

“I’m going to fight for you.”

Let’s start with “West Virginia values.”

What does that actually mean?

Because when you hear it, does it make you feel understood—or does it feel like someone is trying to define you without ever asking you anything?

West Virginia is not one story. It’s not one belief system, one political identity, or one way of living. It’s people with different priorities, different struggles, different hopes for what this state could be. And yet, every election cycle, that complexity gets flattened into a phrase that’s vague enough to mean anything—and specific enough to make it sound like it means something.

But a slogan is not a substitute for an explanation.

When someone says, “West Virginia values,” what they’re often doing is skipping the harder part—telling you exactly what they believe, what they’ll do, and who those choices will actually impact.

And then there’s the other phrase:

“I’m going to fight.”

Fight who?

Fight what?

Fight how?

At some point, it starts to feel like the word “fight” is doing a lot of work to avoid saying anything concrete. Because governing isn’t a campaign ad. It’s not a constant showdown. It’s reading bills, understanding budgets, sitting through long meetings, making tradeoffs, and sometimes telling people things they don’t want to hear.

It’s work.

And when everything is framed as a fight, it raises a fair question: is this about solving problems—or just sounding tough?

Especially when you’re already dealing with enough in your own life.

So as we move past the primary and toward the next phase of this election cycle, I think it’s worth asking a little more of the people asking for your vote.

Not more noise. More clarity.

When you hear these phrases again—and you will—try asking:

* What do you actually mean by “West Virginia values,” specifically?

* What exactly are you planning to “fight,” and what does that look like in policy?

* Who is funding your campaign, and what do they want in return?

Because you deserve more than a message that’s designed to sound good.

You deserve answers.

That’s what this publication is here to keep pushing for—not just what candidates say, but what’s behind it. Not just the slogans, but the structure. Not just the promises, but the money that makes those promises possible.

Because if you want to understand what’s really driving the message, you have to look at who paid for it.

Follow the money.

— Carrie Clendening

A day for family. A day for gratitude. A day when the noise can wait.

But today, a dear friend of mine had her Mother’s Day interrupted by a political attack text. And when she told me about it—when I saw what had been pushed onto her phone—it ruined mine too.

The message opened with a line so cynical it’s hard to believe someone typed it and hit send:

“Sorry to interrupt Mother’s Day.”

Then it did exactly that.

It went on to say “Breaking News,” accused State Senator Tom Takubo of “LYING” about an endorsement, urged people to “reject Tom Takubo” in the May 12 primary, and linked to an article on National File. The image attached to the message was worse—dark, dramatic, and branded with the words:

“THE FRAUD.”

“He said Trump endorsed him… He lied.”

“The West Virginia Deception.”

That is what someone decided to blast out to West Virginia mothers on Mother’s Day.

Not a policy argument. Not a serious disagreement. A smear.

The source matters. At the bottom of the message was the citation: “Source: National File, 5/9/26.”

Let’s be clear: National File is widely flagged by independent media-rating organizations as unreliable or low-credibility. Ad Fontes Media rates National File as “Unreliable/Problematic” and hyper-partisan. Media Bias/Fact Check rates it “Low Credibility” and categorizes it as conspiracy/pseudoscience.

So when a political organization bases its “breaking news” on a source that watchdogs have already warned the public about, that should raise a red flag for every voter—no matter who you support.

I’m Tired of the lies about Tom Takubo! I’m not saying elected officials should never be criticized. They should. Their votes, their statements, their record—all of it is fair game.

But what’s happening here isn’t accountability. It’s character assassination.

Tom Takubo is a pulmonologist—a lung doctor—and a longtime public servant. In West Virginia, lung disease isn’t theoretical. It’s real. It’s generational. It’s tied to our families and our history. And that kind of medical experience matters.

You can disagree with Tom Takubo. You can vote against him. That’s democracy.

But branding a man “THE FRAUD” in a Mother’s Day text—sourced to a low-credibility website—isn’t debate. It’s cruelty dressed up as campaigning.

This Was Personal—Because They Made It Personal.

My friend didn’t ask for this. She didn’t opt-in to spend Mother’s Day reading a smear on her phone.

And I didn’t ask to spend Mother’s Day hearing about it—feeling that familiar sinking anger that comes from watching politics stomp into private life and wreck what should be a peaceful day.

Nothing is sacred if this is what we’ve accepted as normal.

To My Friend—and to Anyone Who Got That Text: I’m sorry they did that to you. You deserved a quiet Mother’s Day.

And to Mountaineer Conservative Action: stop hijacking our holidays to spread ugly, last-minute attacks built on unreliable sourcing. West Virginians deserve better than that.

I’m tired of the lies being spread about Tom Takubo.

He is a decent man.

And I’m done staying quiet when political operatives decide Mother’s Day is just another target.

Note: I am not sharing the image or website because I refuse to lend credibility to such an outrageous claim.

Even the names tell a story. West Virginia’s official state tree is the sugar maple, its official state animal is the black bear, its official state colors are old gold and blue, and it entered the Union as the 35th state. So when PACs and committees show up with names like Sugar Maple PAC, Black Bear PAC, Blue and Gold PAC, and 35th Inc., it is hard not to see the branding strategy: wrap the money in the state’s symbols and hope voters mistake symbolism for homegrown authenticity.

I can’t wait to see which symbolic object of West Virginia they name the next new PAC after.

Everybody is talking about Sugar Maple PAC’s spending, and they should be. The reports show a surge of money for digital and print advertising, including six-figure payments to vendors like Acquire Digital LLC and Matchstick Media, along with contributions from Jeff Yass, Richard UiHlein, and Thomas Klingenstein. That is the loud part of the story. The quieter part is the infrastructure behind it: the consultants, compliance firms, media shops, and nonprofit board members who keep turning up across the same political ecosystem.

Everybody is counting Sugar Maple’s money. Fewer people are counting the men who keep showing up to route it, report it, buy the ads, and sit on the nonprofit boards.

Blue and Gold PAC helps make that point plain. In the West Virginia campaign finance filings, Blue and Gold PAC appears not only as a donor to Republican legislative candidates, but also as a committee that paid Red Curve Solutions and made a payment to Team Morrisey. The same filings show candidates receiving contributions from Blue and Gold PAC using a Beverly, Massachusetts address tied to Red Curve Solutions. So the story is not simply that outside money exists. The story is that the same political-services infrastructure shows up on both sides of the ledger — taking payments as a vendor and sending contributions as part of the pipeline.

Once you look past the PAC names and into the people behind the entities, the pattern gets clearer. IRS 990 tax filings indicate that American Prosperity Group has included Scott Will, D.J. Eckert, Trevor Vessels, and Charles Gantt as board members, while West Virginia Prosperity Group has included Scott Will, Charlie Bailey, Rob Cornelius, and Charles Gantt. Those overlaps matter because Will and Bailey are tied to SW2 Political, Eckert and Vessels are tied to Matchstick Media, and Gantt is tied to Bulldog Compliance.

That is not a random collection of names. It is a small professional class of Republican political operatives appearing across strategy, advertising, compliance, and nonprofit-style governance. If somebody set out to build an apparatus that could raise money, route money, spend money, buy ads, file reports, and keep the whole operation looking tidy on paper, it might look an awful lot like this.

None of that, by itself, proves some grand illegal conspiracy. It does not need to. The point is simpler: voters are being sold a story about grassroots West Virginia politics while the plumbing looks highly professionalized, increasingly national, and populated by the same repeat players.

Bulldog Compliance and Red Curve Solutions sit near the heart of that plumbing. Bulldog markets compliance, bookkeeping, and reporting services for campaigns and committees, and it operates within Red Curve Solutions, a larger Republican political finance operation. In practical terms, that means treasurer work, disclosure reports, reconciliations, and the kind of paperwork handling that helps political money move without tripping over its own shoelaces.

That is why the compliance story matters. The public is trained to notice the ad, not the accountant; the television spot, not the treasurer; the loud independent expenditure, not the person who helps make it look orderly on paper. But if you want to understand who is really shaping a political operation, you had better pay attention to the people who keep the money moving as much as the people who keep the cameras rolling.

Federal records help explain why. In Federal Election Commission (FEC) Matter Under Review (MUR) 8002, the Commission sent formal notice in 2022 to an entity using Bulldog Compliance’s Beverly address in connection with a campaign-finance complaint, including instructions to preserve records. That does not prove every allegation in that matter, but it does puncture the fairy tale that polished compliance firms somehow sit above scrutiny.

And MUR 8002 is hardly the only time these names have surfaced in federal campaign-finance files. Charles Gantt appears as treasurer in MUR 7994 involving Make America Great Again, Again! Inc., and in MUR 8002 involving 34N22, Inc. Bradley Crate appears even more frequently in FEC matters tied to Trump-aligned committees and Red Curve’s world, including MUR 7094 involving Make America Great Again PAC, MUR 7339 involving Trump Victory, MUR 7540 involving Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., MUR 8139 involving Never Surrender Inc., and MUR 8251 and 8260, which directly named Red Curve Solutions, LLC and Bradley T. Crate in connection with reporting and contribution allegations involving Trump-affiliated committees.

An MUR is not a conviction, and not every one ends the same way. Some are dismissed, some end in settlement, and some simply record that the FEC thought a matter serious enough to open a file and notify the respondents. But by now the larger point is hard to miss: Bradley Crate, Charles Gantt, Red Curve, and the Bulldog compliance orbit are not occasional names in the federal record. They are recurring figures in the treasurer-and-compliance machinery behind major Republican political committees.

MUR 7886 makes that point even more forcefully because it involved the pharmaceutical industry and because Black Bear PAC was part of the factual record. The respondent was Astellas Pharma U.S., Inc., a major drug company operating in a heavily regulated business and holding a Federal Supply Schedule contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The FEC found reason to believe Astellas violated the federal contractor contribution ban by making a $50,000 contribution to Senate Leadership Fund and two separate $5,000 contributions to Black Bear PAC in 2019 and 2020.

That Black Bear detail matters here. FEC records identify Black Bear PAC, Inc. as a super PAC using Bulldog Compliance’s Beverly address with Charles Gantt as treasurer, which places a Gantt/Bulldog-linked committee directly inside the MUR 7886 fact pattern. In the conciliation materials, Astellas agreed to seek disgorgement of the $10,000 in Black Bear PAC contributions to the U.S. Treasury if the contributions were returned.

So MUR 7886 is not just a generic example about compliance. It shows that a major pharmaceutical company with lawyers, contracts, compliance personnel, and every institutional reason to know the rules still wound up in an enforcement matter that included contributions to a PAC tied to Charles Gantt and Bulldog’s Beverly address. In other words, all the polish in the world — all the compliance language, all the expensive stationery, all the institutional sophistication — does not guarantee clean political conduct when the facts run the wrong way.

The federal pattern also reaches back into Patrick Morrisey’s own 2018 Senate run. OpenSecrets reports that 35th Inc., a single-candidate super PAC supporting Morrisey, received $15,000 from Global Energy Producers in 2018. And MUR 7196 sits inside the broader FEC scrutiny of the Global Energy Producers / Lev Parnas / Igor Fruman network, where the Commission addressed allegations involving foreign-national money and related solicitation activity. That does not mean every recipient was charged the same way or knew the same facts. It does mean a PAC supporting Morrisey was operating in the same donor ecosystem that later drew serious federal attention.

Then there is the media side. Sugar Maple’s spending has understandably drawn attention to who is buying and placing the ads, but the American Prosperity Group overlap points toward Matchstick-linked figures too. Public reporting has already tied D.J. Eckert to Morrisey-aligned outside spending, while Trevor Vessels is publicly identified as a founding partner at Matchstick Media Strategies. So again, the point is not just that one PAC spent a lot of money. It is that the same names keep surfacing across different stages of the process — strategy, media, governance, compliance.

The SW2 Political overlap adds another piece to the picture, and it matters even more once you look at the résumés. During his tenure as West Virginia attorney general, Patrick Morrisey rose to chair the Republican Attorneys General Association, the national group that helps Republican AGs raise money and coordinate legal and political strategy. Scott Will, who now shows up both at SW2 Political and on the Prosperity Group side of the fence, previously served in RAGA leadership before moving into the consulting world. Charlie Bailey, another SW2 figure linked to West Virginia Prosperity Group, comes out of that same broader Republican political orbit.

In other words, the network now linking SW2, the Prosperity entities, and West Virginia races did not spring up overnight. It looks like an outgrowth of the same national Republican attorney-general world Morrisey helped lead. Taken together with the Matchstick and Bulldog overlaps, that makes the whole arrangement look less like a loose alliance of friendly conservatives and more like an interlocking political-services network with different men handling different parts of the same enterprise.

If Governor Patrick Morrisey wants “fresh faces” in the Legislature, that is his right as a politician. But when the money around those races runs through Beverly, Massachusetts addresses, compliance firms tied to Charles Gantt, strategists tied to SW2, ad-buying figures tied to Matchstick, and boards populated by the same small set of operatives, voters are entitled to ask how fresh the operation really is. Fresh faces are one thing. Old wiring is another.

That is where the story stops being gossip and starts becoming public interest. A voter can shrug at outside spending and say that is just how politics works now. But no voter should be asked to pretend that this is merely a spontaneous uprising of local neighbors passing the hat around for a few worthy candidates.

The records point to something much more structured than that. Blue and Gold PAC sends money to candidates and to Team Morrisey while paying Red Curve. Sugar Maple PAC pours extraordinary sums into advertising. American Prosperity Group and West Virginia Prosperity Group include overlapping figures tied to SW2 Political, Matchstick Media, and Bulldog Compliance. The picture that emerges is not of one noisy PAC, but of a managed ecosystem — one capable of raising, routing, spending, and justifying money through a tight circle of professionals.

That is why the compliance story is the part the public and media should not skip over. If you only watch the ads, you miss the apparatus. If you only count Sugar Maple’s checks, you miss the men who keep appearing behind them. And if you miss the apparatus, you miss how power is actually being organized in West Virginia right now.

So yes, by all means, keep talking about Sugar Maple PAC. The spending is enormous, and it deserves scrutiny. But stop there and you miss the more durable truth: the real story is not just who paid for the noise. It is who built the system that makes the noise possible, who sits on the boards, who places the media, who handles the compliance, and why the same names keep turning up whenever you follow the paper trail long enough.

That is not cynicism. That is just reading the receipts.

He said the coal miners of West Virginia were treated like property. That they were bought and sold, worked until they broke, and discarded when they had nothing left to give. And then he said something harder: that nobody cares about their suffering the way they care about others’.

It was a controversial comparison—miners to slaves—and I bristled at it. But sitting with his words over the years, I’ve come to understand something important. He wasn’t making a historical argument. He was articulating a feeling—a sense of erasure that runs bone-deep in Appalachian communities. The feeling that your family’s pain doesn’t count. That it doesn’t make the history books. That nobody’s coming to tell your story.

This essay is my attempt to tell it.

The Disconnect Isn’t About Policy. It’s About Pain.

If you want to understand the socio-political landscape of West Virginia, you have to stop thinking about policy and start thinking about wounds.

The white coal miner’s perception of being treated as property isn’t historically equivalent to chattel slavery—but the feeling of being used up, discarded, and forgotten is real. And that feeling has been deliberately exploited.

Here’s the dark irony: the coal companies themselves benefit from this resentment. By fostering competition between different groups over whose suffering matters more, they divert attention from their own practices. While miners argue about recognition, nobody’s looking at the company books. Nobody’s asking why the people who did the dying stayed poor while the people who owned the mines built dynasties.

It’s psychological warfare dressed up as culture war.

This Isn’t Ancient History

There’s a comforting myth that the worst abuses of coal mining are relics of a distant past—grainy photographs of child laborers, stories from the 1920s.

My grandfather, Jiggs McKnight, worked the mines from the 1950s to the late 1980s.

That’s not the distant past. That’s within living memory. That’s the man who bounced me on his knee.

The family moved between Fayette, Wyoming, and Jackson counties, chasing work. That instability—the constant uprooting, the chase for the next seam of coal—defined generations. You went where the work was. You took what they gave you. You kept your mouth shut about the rest.

In 1984, Jiggs survived a mine collapse.

Physically, he recovered. Psychologically, he carried it until the day he died. And he made one thing clear to his son, my father Bill: Don’t go into the mines.

That’s the real inheritance. Not pride in coal country. Fear of it.

The “Friends of Coal” Fantasy

You’ve seen the bumper stickers. Friends of Coal.Coal Keeps the Lights On. There’s a whole mythology built around the brotherhood of miners, the dignity of the work, the pride of Appalachian identity.

And look—there is something real there. The solidarity of men who trust each other with their lives underground. The skill and courage the work demands. I’m not here to mock that.

But for families like mine, the reality was different. It was fear when the men went down. It was injuries that never fully healed. It was lungs that gave out decades later. It was widows left with a folded flag and a settlement check that wouldn’t cover the funeral.

The “Friends of Coal” narrative is a story the industry tells about itself. It’s not the story the miners’ families lived.

Defending Your Abuser

My grandmother Carrie lived in Skelton Coal Camp in Raleigh County.

She defended the coal company until her dying day. They provided the house. They provided the store. They provided the doctor. How could she speak against them?

I used to find this baffling. Now I understand it as survival.

If Carrie admitted that the company was exploiting her family—that the company store was a debt trap, that the housing kept them dependent, that the whole system was designed to extract maximum labor for minimum cost—then she’d have to admit something unbearable: that she had no control. That her whole life had been lived inside a cage she couldn’t see.

It’s easier to believe your captor is your benefactor. Psychologists call it Stockholm Syndrome. Prisoners call it institutionalization. In coal country, we just called it life.

The Generational Toll

My great-great-grandfather died of typhoid.

That might sound like ancient history too—but typhoid doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes from contaminated water. From poor sanitation. From the conditions the coal camps provided for their workers and their families.

The company didn’t pull the trigger. They just built the conditions where disease could thrive, and then expressed condolences when it did.

Generation after generation, the pattern repeated. Men died underground or died slowly above it, their lungs full of dust. Women were left to raise children alone, to stretch nothing into something, to mourn without support.

What did the widows get? A folded flag, if they were lucky. A settlement that wouldn’t last the year. And the expectation that they’d be grateful.

The Insult of the Hall of Fame

West Virginia University has a Coal Hall of Fame.

Take a guess who’s in it.

It’s not the miners. It’s not the men who went down into the dark and didn’t come back. It’s not the widows who held families together with nothing.

It’s the coal barons. The owners. The executives. The men who got rich while other men got buried.

This is institutional memory laid bare. This is who we’ve decided to honor. And every time someone romanticizes the “coal rush”—every time there’s a cute game or a nostalgic exhibit—it lands differently for families who lived the reality.

You want to honor coal miners? Tell the truth about what happened to them.

What Was Really Stolen

The coal companies took a lot from West Virginia. They took the wealth buried in the mountains and shipped it out of state. They took the health of generations of workers. They took fathers and husbands and sons.

But they also took something harder to name: they took the narrative.

They convinced families like Carrie’s that the company was their protector. They convinced miners that their enemy was other workers—other races, other regions—anyone but the men signing their paychecks. They convinced a whole culture that exploitation was tradition, that suffering was heritage, that questioning any of it was betrayal.

And then they built a Hall of Fame for themselves.

Breaking the Cycle

I don’t know how to fix West Virginia’s economy. I don’t have a policy platform or a five-point plan.

But I know this: healing starts with honesty.

It starts with refusing to romanticize abuse. It starts with naming what happened—not as ancient history, but as recent trauma that still echoes in families today. It starts with recognizing that the resentment so many feel isn’t irrational; it’s the predictable result of being exploited and then erased.

My father’s anger wasn’t crazy. It was the inheritance of generations of men who were used up and thrown away. The tragedy is that his anger was pointed at the wrong targets—at other suffering people instead of at the systems that created the suffering.

The coal companies won when they got us fighting each other. They win every time we compete over whose pain matters more.

The only way to break the cycle is to see it clearly. To tell the truth about who did what to whom. To stop defending our abusers and start defending each other.

That’s the inheritance I want to leave.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be grateful if you’d share it. These stories don’t get told enough

Now, don’t go thinking this is some organic, homegrown outrage from your neighbors down the road. What you’re looking at is the field program of a national libertarian network using our primaries to whip any Republican who refuses to wear their particular brand of tinfoil hat. If you’re experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu looking at these mailers, you aren’t crazy. We’ve seen this exact dog-and-pony show before.

Let’s rewind the tape to the 2024 primary and look under the hood of this operation.

Who Is Make Liberty Win?

If you squint at the fine print on these mailers, you’ll see they’re paid for by Make Liberty Win. It sounds like something you’d buy at a roadside fireworks stand, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t a local grassroots club.

Make Liberty Win is a federal super PAC acting as the campaign arm of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a libertarian outfit headquartered down in Austin, Texas. YAL operates as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit—which in Washington-speak means they don’t have to tell you whose money they’re spending. They just shovel it into Make Liberty Win, which then drops millions into state-level primaries across the country.

Their own branding calls them “the only no‑compromise conservative force on the campaign trail” out to “seize control of state legislatures.” In plain English, honey: they exist to purge any Republican caught trying to actually govern, replacing them with a cadre of ideologically vetted “liberty” loyalists who care more about culture wars than fixing potholes.

The West Virginia “Liberty” Bench

These folks aren’t just lobbing bombs over the border; they’ve set up camp. Young Americans for Liberty has been quietly buying up real estate in the West Virginia Legislature for years. Mountain State Spotlight reported they dropped roughly $46,000 a few cycles back to boost delegates like Chris Pritt and Todd Kirby—the same folks who love picking fights over vaccine mandates while ignoring the actual business of the state.

Their model is slicker than a greased pig: recruit college kids, train them as field staff, and parachute them into our districts to run independent expenditure campaigns.

Lord, we aren’t even guessing about this connection anymore. Just look at Delegate Chris Anders. When Anders ran for his seat in 2024, he didn’t even try to hide it—his official state ethics disclosure listed his actual, honest-to-God employer as Young Americans for Liberty. This isn’t just a PAC endorsing folks; this is a national outfit putting their own paid employees on the West Virginia state payroll to run their agenda.

The Craig Blair Experiment (2024)

The 2024 primary against Senate President Craig Blair was their test run to see just how much West Virginians would swallow. Every piece of mail flooded into the Eastern Panhandle followed the exact same cynical formula:

1. Character Assassination as Brand: Blair wasn’t just a guy they disagreed with; he was “Slimy Craig.” One card literally photoshopped him sitting on stacks of cash in front of a ruined street. Another accused him of pushing “environmental extremism” because he supported economic development for Form Energy.

2. Trans Panic and Nazi Imagery: The nastiest mailers went after Blair on HB 2007. One piece claimed he “voted to trans our children,” complete with a lurid stock photo of a gloved hand and a medical mask. Another explicitly compared treating transgender youth to “chemical castration methods used by Nazi Germany.” Bless their twisted little hearts, they really went there.

3. Socialism and Medicaid: A separate mailer blasted Blair for voting to expand Medicaid (HB 2266). The visual? Blair photoshopped into a blood‑spattered doctor’s coat in an abandoned hospital, demanding voters “say no to socialism.”

4. One Return Address: Every single one of these postcards traced back to the exact same mailbox: “Make Liberty Win, 204 8th St Ste 201, PMB 74615, Marlinton, WV.” And, let me remind you PMB stands for Private Mail Box. Might as well be a P.O. Box.

It was a full‑scale, scorched-earth campaign to redefine a conservative Senate President as a corrupt, pro‑trans, pro‑socialist traitor. And heaven help us, it worked.

Running the Same Play on Tom Takubo (2026)

Fast‑forward to today, and these boys haven’t even bothered to write a new script. Lay the mailers side by side. They just hit ‘find and replace’ on their keyboards.

1. Same Villain, Different Name: Where Blair was “Slimy Craig,” Takubo is “Sellout Tom Takubo.” They even tried out the nickname “Tom ‘Trans the Tots’ Takubo,” which is so downright nasty it’d make a sailor blush. The mailers ask, “Do you know who owns your state senator? Follow the money!”

2. Puberty Blockers as the New Form Energy: With Blair, they fused green energy and gender identity. With Takubo, it’s puberty blockers. The visual language is identical: stark black backgrounds, distressed fonts, and blood-red warnings to “defend the defenseless.”

3. HOSPAC as the New Boogeyman: Instead of Form Energy, the West Virginia Hospital Association (HOSPAC) is the villain du jour. Make Liberty Win takes a real medical policy dispute—the balance between a legislature’s bans and a doctor’s discretion—and uses it to accuse a practicing physician of selling out kids to special interests.

4. Sports and Gender: Another Takubo postcard attacks him on HB 3293, framing a complex vote as a refusal to protect “young women in harm’s way.” It’s the exact same architecture: erase the details of the actual bill, frame the incumbent as a literal danger to children, and dare him to defend himself two weeks before an election.

5. Same Address, Same Operation: Look at the disclosure block. “204 8th St Ste 201, Marlinton, WV.” It’s a different PMB number, but it’s the exact same storefront running the exact same grift.

Now, there are plenty of honest, tough arguments to have about Medicaid, hospital lobbyists, and how we handle transgender health care. Those are debates we ought to be having in committee rooms and town halls, where West Virginians can look their representatives in the eye.

But what Make Liberty Win is doing is something else entirely. They are importing a national, dark-money-funded holy war into our Republican primaries.

When a handful of out-of-state groups can buy up our mailboxes and redefine long‑serving, pragmatic Republicans as “Nazi‑style chemical castrators” or “sellouts,” the message to every other lawmaker in Charleston is crystal clear: Cross us, and we will destroy you. If a bunch of libertarian activists down in Texas, funded by millionaires we never get to see, can dictate who represents Kanawha County, then “local control” is just a bumper sticker. If the only politicians who feel safe are the ones taking marching orders from YAL, our government is going to get a whole lot meaner, a whole lot more extreme, and a whole lot more useless.

Early voting starts April 29th, and Election Day is Tuesday, May 12th. They bought themselves a state senate seat with this snake oil back in 2024. Let’s not be foolish enough to let them buy another one in 2026.

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Their project is a multi-layered, affordable filtration and monitoring setup meant for real families in Hanover and the surrounding hollers, not a hypothetical lab. It’s a science project on the rubric and an indictment on the adults in charge.

These kids turned their classroom into an emergency engineering lab because Governor Patrick Morrisey and the Republican supermajority in Charleston have other priorities—and none of them are clean water in the coalfields.

The Competition

The Award Ceremony

Start with the Kids, then Follow the Cowards

A team of 6th–8th graders at Huff Consolidated became one of just ten national finalists in Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow competition and the only West Virginia school in that top tier. They then won Community Choice on the strength of a project their families could actually plug into their sinks.

Their teacher, Brittany Baker, told West Virginia Public Broadcasting the idea came straight from what her students see every day: bright orange streams, discolored tap water, and neighbors who can’t afford to just “switch brands” of water.

“We have a lot of acid mine drainage and alkali drainage, and we have an area that is a poverty-stricken area and that they just don’t have access to clean drinking water,” Baker said. “So this was not only a good opportunity to learn about environmental issues, but also to give back and help the community.”

So: Brittany Baker’s students are building the thing the state of West Virginia, the West Virginia Water Development Authority, and a long line of governors could not be bothered to deliver.

It’s inspiring as hell. It’s also a humiliation for every official whose nameplate has ever sat in front of a committee microphone and then voted “no.”

They Don’t Care About Us

Every time I watch another press conference where Governor Patrick Morrisey brags about tax cuts while kids in Wyoming County haul jugs from tanker trucks, Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care About Us starts to feel less like a song and more like state policy.

Let’s name who’s in this cast:

* Governor Patrick Morrisey, who had no trouble signing $230 million in annual tax cuts while the water in the southern coalfields runs black and orange.

* House Republican leadership, who let coalfield water bills die quietly in House Energy rather than risk a recorded vote.

* The 47 delegates who voted to kill Delegate Adam Vance’s last-ditch attempt to force a vote on clean water for his own constituents.

Meanwhile, Brittany Baker’s students did what these grown men and women would not: they treated poisoned water like an emergency instead of an inconvenience.

The Crisis Huff Kids are Patching Over

Wyoming County’s water mess didn’t fall from the sky. It’s tied to decades of coal extraction and neglect, including contamination associated with the former Pinnacle Mining Complex, where residents have reported discolored water, bacterial growth, and methane venting into their systems.

Courts issued two preliminary injunctions in 2023 to force corrective action. Neither order has been fully enforced.

In 2025, State Senator Brian Helton called a meeting in Charleston with more than 40 officials to talk Wyoming County water. The numbers presented there were staggering: over $209 million in state and federal money allocated or spent on water projects in the county over the last thirty years.

And yet, here we are—still telling families to boil water, add filters, or just cross their fingers and drink it. More than $209 million later, the 6th graders at Huff have the most coherent plan on the table.

This March, after an oil-related incident near R.D. Bailey Dam, the state Department of Health told downstream water systems to add activated carbon “as a precaution” while they waited for lab results. That’s bureaucrat for “we don’t know how bad this is, good luck.”

What Patrick Morrisey and Friends did Instead

At the start of the 2026 session, lawmakers talked up an idea to set aside $250 million from the Rainy Day Fund for coalfield drinking water—the so‑called Coalfield Clean Water push championed by clergy, residents, and groups like From Below.

Then reality set in:

* The $250 million vision shrank to a $20 million concept, then got carved down into competing $10 million bills from Delegate. David Green (McDowell) and Delegate. Adam Vance (Wyoming).

* Both bills were quietly killed in the House Energy Committee, where leadership could keep the blood off the floor votes.

* On the 50th day of session, “crossover day,” Vance tried one last move—he successfully discharged his bill from House Energy to the floor by a 52–41 vote and asked the House to suspend the three-readings rule so it could pass in time.

* That emergency motion failed 46–47. One vote short. Forty‑seven delegates looked at burning skin and brown water in southern West Virginia and said: let’s not rush.

Over in the Governor’s wing, Patrick Morrisey was busy signing two bills that together deliver more than $230 million a year in tax cuts, heavily tilted toward higher earners, and congratulating himself on “fiscally responsible policies.”

As Rev. Caitlin Ware, who’s been hauling jars of dirty water to the Capitol, told Mountain State Spotlight:

“I find it fascinating that we are debating tax cuts when our water screams anything but tax cuts. I mean, black tap water does not exactly scream ‘cut my taxes,’ you know?”

Black tap water in McDowell and Wyoming.Orange streams near Pinnacle.A Community Choice award for kids designing filtration systems.

But sure, tell me again how the real emergency is cutting another 5% off the income tax.

Ending a Potential Life, on Purpose

There’s a line I saw the other day that sums this up better than any legislative talking point:

“Y’all love to say abortion ends a potential life... So does refusing to fund healthcare, education, housing, and gun safety. But I don’t see y’all foaming at the mouth about that.”

Let’s go ahead and carve clean drinking water right into that sentence.

The same politicians who parade around the Capitol talking about “protecting life” are perfectly comfortable letting real children in Wyoming, McDowell, Boone, Logan, Mingo, Lincoln, Mercer, Fayette, and Raleigh grow up on contaminated water and crumbling pipes. They will fight like hell to subsidize private Christian schools with public dollars, to deregulate data centers that gulp down millions of gallons, and to shave a few bucks off the tax bill of someone in Morgantown or Martinsburg.

But when it comes to guaranteeing that a kid in Hanover can turn on the tap without risking a rash or a stomach bug? Suddenly, it’s all “process concerns” and “we need more study.”

Refusing to fund basic, life-sustaining infrastructure kills potential just as surely as any choice made in a doctor’s office. It just does it slowly, quietly, under the polite cover of committee schedules and budget spreadsheets.

Where the Courage Actually Lives

If you want to see courage and moral clarity in West Virginia right now, don’t look at the signing ceremony where Patrick Morrisey pats himself on the back for aligning with the Trump tax cuts.

Go to Huff Consolidated Elementary and Middle School, where Brittany Baker’s students took the bright orange creeks and black tap water the adults have normalized and turned them into a national‑award‑winning plan to protect their neighbors.

Michael Jackson had it right: they don’t care about us.

The kids at Huff do. And that’s the story.

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Sources

Huff Consolidated & Samsung Solve for Tomorrow

* WVDE – official release on Huff win and Community Choice:https://wvde.us/articles/wyoming-county-students-win-100000-prize-samsung-solve-tomorrow-national-competition

* WOAY – contest winners (top three + Community Choice, >$100K prize):https://woay.com/solve-for-tomorrow-contest-winners/?amp

* MetroNews – Huff students rank among top three nationally:https://wvmetronews.com/2026/04/14/huff-students-rank-among-top-three-in-samsung-solve-for-tomorrow-challenge/

* WVNews – “Wyoming County students win $110K in Samsung competition”:https://www.wvnews.com/news/wvnews/wyoming-county-students-win-110k-in-samsung-solve-for-tomorrow-national-competition/article_1

* Samsung Solve for Tomorrow program page:https://www.samsung.com/us/solvefortomorrow/

* Samsung press release with National Finalists (includes Huff description):https://news.samsung.com/us/samsung-announces-10-finalist-classrooms-advancing-national-solve-for-tomorrow-stem-competition

* WVDE Facebook post celebrating Huff’s national achievement and Community Choice:https://www.facebook.com/wveducation/photos/celebrating-national-achievement-join-us-in-congratulating-the-student-team-from/1354973663163497/

Wyoming County water crisis and context

* Mountain State Spotlight – coal toxins and Pinnacle contamination:https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2024/03/25/wyoming-county-coal-mines-cause-polluted-water/

* WOAY – court orders and “official silence”:https://woay.com/official-silence-and-ignored-court-orders-wyoming-county-water-crisis/

* WOAY – $209M in water project spending over 30 years:https://woay.com/state-senators-lead-first-major-meeting-on-wyoming-county-water-crisis/

* WVOW – DOH advisory on mineral oil / R.D. Bailey:https://www.wvowradio.com/post/west-virginia-department-of-health-issues-update-on-wyoming-county-oil-spill

Coalfield clean water legislation & politics

* WV Highlands Conservancy – Coalfield Clean Water Act explainer:https://www.wvhighlands.org/article/decades-without-clean-water-how-the-coalfield-clean-water-act-aims-to-address-southern-west-virginias-water-crisis/

* WV Environmental Council – coalfield communities demand action:https://wvecouncil.org/coalfield-communities-demand-action-and-funding-for-clean-water-this-legislative-session/

* Appalachian Voices – clean water rally and HB 5525 (Southern WV Clean Water Fund Act):https://appvoices.org/2026/02/16/wv-clean-water-rally/

* Mountain State Spotlight – “Lawmakers sideline funds for clean drinking water”:https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2026/03/04/southern-wv-water/

Budget, tax cuts, and priorities

* Governor’s Office – $230M tax cut announcement:https://governor.wv.gov/article/governor-morrisey-signs-230-million-worth-tax-cuts

* WV Tax Division – 2026 income tax rate cut details:https://tax.wv.gov/Individuals/Pages/PersonalIncomeTaxReductionBill.aspx

* Mountain State Spotlight – 2026–27 budget and tax cut impacts:https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2026/03/16/west-virginia-2026-budget/

I’m writing to you from twenty-two years in the future, from a life you can’t yet imagine. You’re sitting in Dr. DiClerico’s American Presidency class right now, probably taking notes while Katherine Smith mutters something about Scooby-Doo being a better presidential candidate than George W. Bush. You’re serious about politics in a way that makes you feel grown-up and purposeful. You believe in things. You’re about to drive all the way from Morgantown back to Fayetteville to cast a vote for George W. Bush, and you feel like that drive means something.

I need to tell you: it doesn’t. Not in the way you think.

But before you close this letter, hear me out.

The drive itself isn’t the problem. The problem is what you’re carrying with you when you make it. You’re carrying your father’s politics like a birthright, likesomething that came with your name. You haven’t really examined it yet—you’ve inherited it, the way you might inherit your mother’s eyes or your father’s stubbornness. That feels like conviction, but it’s not. It’s momentum. And you won’t know the difference until life cracks you open.

That crack is coming. It’s going to be messy and painful and nothing like what you expect.

You’re going to become a single mom. You’re going to have two abortions. And in those moments—especially in those moments—you’re going to remember sitting in that classroom while politicians and protesters fought over stem cells like they were abstract ideas, like they were theirs to fight over. You’ll realize that the people who talk about “babies” the loudest have never had to make the actual decision about what a pregnancy means when you’re alone, terrified, and broke. You’ll understand that the political rhetoric you inherited doesn’t map onto your real life. It can’t. Because your real life is too specific, too painful, too yours to fit neatly into a party platform.

That’s when everything changes.

You’ll leave the Republican Party, not because you’ll suddenly become a Democrat, but because you’ll stop believing that any party has your actual interests in mind. You’ll register with no party affiliation for a while because your job demands it. Then in 2022, West Virginia will pass an abortion ban, and you’ll be so angry and heartbroken that you’ll join the Democrats out of pure fury. And then you’ll watch the Democratic Party fumble and fail and disappoint you in ways that feel almost personal, and you’ll leave them too.

Here’s what I need you to know: that journey isn’t a failure. It’s an education.

By the time you’re in your forties, you won’t hate politics because you’re cynical. You’ll hate all the major political parties because you’ve actually looked at how they work. You’ll spend years following money through campaign finance databases. You’ll map networks of dark money and PACs and shell organizations. You’ll see how elections become vendors’ profit centers, how investment firms get rich off campaign funds, how the machinery is designed to serve itself, not people. You’ll learn that “everyone’s full of s**t” isn’t pessimism—it’s pattern recognition.

And you’ll also learn something harder: that disillusionment, real disillusionment, is the only honest starting point for actual engagement.

So here’s my advice to you, the advice I wish someone had given me at nineteen: Be your own person. Trust your gut more than you trust a party label. Don’t drive across the state because you think you’re supposed to. Drive across the state because you’ve decided that’s what matters. Look deeply into who a candidate actually is—not what they promise, but who they are when nobody’s watching, where their money comes from, who they owe favors to. Vote for the person, not the party. And pay attention to local elections. That’s where power actually lives. That’s where your vote actually matters.

The Electoral College will make your 2004 drive feel like a waste of time. The twenty-year war will make you regret voting for Bush. But the real regret—the one that will sit with you—is that you didn’t yet know how to think for yourself. You’ll spend two decades learning. You’ll lose your innocence. You’ll gain your independence. It’s a fair trade, though you won’t think so at the time.

One more thing: your mother never registered to vote. Your father handed you his politics like a gift. You’re going to spend your adult life finding a third way—not opting out like your mother, but not blindly accepting inherited beliefs like you almost did. You’re going to become someone who pays fierce attention to how power works, who won’t take anyone’s word for it, who trusts her own judgment.

That person is worth becoming.

Drive home if you want to. Vote if you want to. But do it because you’ve decided to, not because you think you’re supposed to. That’s the whole lesson, really. Everything else flows from there.

You’ve got this.

Love,

40-year-old Carrie

For West Virginia civic engagement, this means the state’s closed primary system (where the Republican Party now restricts participation to registered members) operates within constitutional bounds, while all registered voters retain their fundamental right to participate in November’s general elections regardless of party affiliation.

The Supreme Court’s Clear Protection For Party Nomination Rights

The constitutional foundation for party control over primaries rests on First Amendment freedom of association. In California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000), the Supreme Court struck down California’s blanket primary in a 7-2 decision, holding that forcing parties to include non-members in their nomination process imposed the heaviest possible burden on associational freedom.

Justice Scalia’s majority opinion established that “in no area is the political association’s right to exclude more important than in the process of selecting its nominee.” The Court reasoned that candidate selection “often determines the party’s positions on significant public policy issues, and it is the nominee who is the party’s ambassador charged with winning the general electorate over to its views.” The First Amendment, Scalia wrote, “reserves a special place, and accords a special protection, for that process.” (Full opinion text via Cornell Law Institute)

The decision built upon Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut(1986), where the Court held that states cannot prevent parties from opening their primaries to independents when parties wish to do so. Justice Marshall’s majority opinion declared that “a State, or a court, may not constitutionally substitute its own judgment for that of the Party” regarding membership and nomination decisions. The party’s determination of “the boundaries of its own association, and of the structure which best allows it to pursue its political goals, is protected by the Constitution.” (Full opinion text via Cornell Law Institute)

Additional cases reinforced this doctrine:

* Eu v. San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee (1989)unanimously struck down California laws prohibiting party endorsements in primaries and regulating party governance structures (Oyez case summary)

* Democratic Party v. Wisconsin ex rel. La Follette (1981) held states cannot compel national parties to seat delegates chosen through processes violating party rules (Full opinion text via Cornell Law Institute)

* Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party (1997) established that not all election regulations impose severe burdens—fusion bans were upheld as minimally intrusive (Oyez case summary)

The consistent principle: parties function as private associations exercising constitutional rights when selecting their nominees.

Constitutional Protections Make General Elections Fundamentally Different

While parties control nominations, the Constitution establishes general elections as the mechanism through which citizens exercise sovereignty. The 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause treats voting as a fundamental right subject to heightened constitutional protection.

Reynolds v. Sims (1964) established the foundational principle: “Undeniably the Constitution of the United States protects the right of all qualified citizens to vote, in state as well as in federal elections.” Chief Justice Warren declared that “the right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” (Oyez case summary)

Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966) reinforced this by striking down poll taxes: “The right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.” The Court held that once the franchise is granted, “lines may not be drawn which are inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause.” (Oyez case summary)

The 15th Amendment and Voting Rights Act of 1965 provide additional structural protections. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure” that results in denial or abridgment of voting rights—applying to “political processes leading to nomination or election.”

Critically, Smith v. Allwright (1944) established that constitutional protections extend to primaries when they become integral to the electoral process. The Court held that “the United States is a constitutional democracy” whose “organic law grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any state.” This protection, however, addresses racial discrimination—not party membership requirements in nomination processes. (Oyez case summary)

Legal Scholarship Articulates A Two-Tier Constitutional System

Constitutional scholars have developed a comprehensive framework distinguishing primaries from general elections based on differing constitutional foundations.

The “party function” versus “public function” dichotomy emerged from the white primary cases. In Terry v. Adams (1953), the Court applied a “functional standard” recognizing that when private organizations effectively control electoral outcomes, their actions become state action subject to constitutional scrutiny. Legal scholar Ronald Rotunda explained this as recognizing that “all integral steps in an election for public office are public functions and therefore state action subject to some judicial scrutiny.” (Encyclopedia.com: Political Parties in Constitutional Law; “Constitutional and Statutory Restrictions on Political Parties in the Wake of Cousins v. Wigoda,” 53 Tex. L. Rev. 935 (1975))

The Jones decision reconciled these principles by clarifying that white primary cases “held not that party affairs are public affairs, free of First Amendment protections... but only that, when a State prescribes an election process that gives a special role to political parties, the parties’ discriminatory action becomes state action under the Fifteenth Amendment.” (California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U.S. 567 (2000))

Academic literature, including analyses in the Michigan Law Review, Houston Law Review, and Columbia Law Review, identifies this constitutional structure:

TIER 1 (Primaries): Protected by First Amendment freedom of association. Parties may determine membership requirements, choose nomination procedures, and exclude non-members—subject to Fifteenth Amendment prohibitions on racial discrimination.

TIER 2 (General Elections): Protected as public functions under the 14th and 15th Amendments. States must ensure universal suffrage, prohibit discrimination, and provide equal access to all eligible voters.

The National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan organization chartered by Congress, summarizes: parties were historically considered “private organizations” that could “determine for themselves eligibility and membership requirements,” while general elections must be open because “primaries are an integral component of general elections and the democratic process.”

West Virginia’s Closed Primary System Operates Within This Framework

West Virginia uses a party-controlled primary system codified in W. Va. Code § 3-2-31(a), which permits “political parties, through the official action of their state executive committees, to determine whether unaffiliated voters or voters of other parties shall be allowed to vote that party’s primary election ballot.” (Ballotpedia: Primary Elections in West Virginia)

Current party rules (effective 2026):

* Republican Party: Closed—only registered Republicans may participate

* Democratic Party: Semi-closed—allows unaffiliated voters

* Libertarian, Mountain, and Constitutional Parties: Open to unaffiliated voters

This represents constitutional exercise of party associational rights under the Jones and Tashjian framework. The key voter deadline is 21 days before the primary for registration or party affiliation changes (W. Va. Code § 3-2-6).

Article IV of the West Virginia Constitution governs elections, with Section 1 establishing that “citizens of the state shall be entitled to vote at all elections held within the counties in which they respectively reside.” (Full text of the West Virginia Constitution) No West Virginia state or federal court has successfully challenged the constitutionality of party-controlled primary participation rules.

Legislative activity reflects ongoing debate. SB 564 (2025) would make all primaries closed statewide by removing party discretion over unaffiliated voter participation. (LegiScan: WV SB564) The Republican Executive Committee’s January 2026 decision to close primaries affected approximately 300,000+ unaffiliated West Virginia voters who previously participated in Republican primaries.

The Founders Designed Elections Without Any Role For Parties

The Constitution contains no provision for political parties—a deliberate design choice. The Founders considered partisan factions dangerous to republican government.

Article I, Section 2 established what the National Constitution Centercalls “revolutionary” for 1787: direct election of House members “by the People of the several States.” James Madison argued this was “essential to every plan of free government” because without it, “the people would be lost sight of altogether.” (National Constitution Center: Interpretation of Article I, Section 2)

Federalist No. 52 declared that “frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured.” (Avalon Project, Yale Law School: Federalist No. 52)

Federalist No. 57 specified that electors should be “the great body of the people of the United States”—”not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than the ignorant.” (Library of Congress: Federalist Papers Text)

The Founders actively warned against parties:

* George Washington (Farewell Address, 1796): Political parties “serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party” (Mount Vernon Digital Library)

* John Adams (Letter to Jonathan Jackson, 1780): “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties... This is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution” (Founders Online, National Archives)

* Alexander Hamilton: Called parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments (HISTORY)

Primary elections did not exist until over 100 years after ratification. They emerged during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) as reforms to combat party boss corruption.

Wisconsin implemented the first statewide primary system in 1906. (Wisconsin Historical Society; EBSCO Research Starters) The purpose was to “steer control away from political machines” and “return power to the voters in the nomination process”—but within party structures, not as replacements for general elections.

AA Constitutionally Grounded Civic Message

The phrase “May is for the Parties, November is for the People” accurately captures a constitutional distinction affirmed by Supreme Court jurisprudence across seven decades. Political parties possess robust First Amendment rights to define their membership and control their nomination processes—rights that West Virginia’s statutory framework respects by allowing each party to determine primary participation rules.

General elections, by constitutional design and judicial interpretation, serve as the protected mechanism through which all citizens exercise democratic sovereignty. The 14th and 15th Amendments, reinforced by the Voting Rights Act, ensure that no voter can be excluded from the November ballot based on party affiliation.

For West Virginia’s approximately 300,000 unaffiliated voters, this framework carries practical implications: while the Republican Party’s 2026 decision to close its primaries is constitutionally permissible, every registered voter retains their fundamental right to participate in general elections where the ultimate choice of representatives occurs. The civic engagement message—educating voters about registration deadlines, party affiliation requirements, and the distinction between party nomination processes and constitutionally protected general elections—rests on solid legal ground.

U.S. Supreme Court Cases

* California Democratic Party v. Jones

* Tashjian v. Republican Party of CT

* Eu v. SF County Democratic Central Committee

* Democratic Party v. Wisconsin ex rel. La Follett

* Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party

* Reynolds v. Sims

* Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections

* Smith v. Allwright

* Terry v. Adams

West Virginia Law

* W. Va. Code § 3-2-31(a)

* W. Va. Code § 3-2-6

* SB 564 (2025)

* Article IV, WV Constitution

Founders and Historical Sources

* Washington’s Farewell Address

* John Adams letter — Founders Online, National Archives

* Federalist No. 52

* Federalist No. 57

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The Cardinal Institute also commissioned a 765-person registered voter poll through Targoz Market Research (October–November 2023, MOE ±3.47%) to support the project’s framework. The topline findings were selectively featured in the Dignity Project’s public materials. But the full dataset — the marginals and party crosstabs — tells a substantially different story than the one the Cardinal Institute chose to tell.

This article examines both the project’s policy arguments and the full polling data behind them.

What the Project Claims

The Dignity Project builds its case on a stark data point: West Virginia’s labor force participation rate (LFPR) sits below 55%, compared to a national average above 62%. Federal data confirms this — FRED data from the St. Louis Fed showed the state’s LFPR at 54.6% as of December 2025, and the Joint Economic Committee ranked it last among all states.

The project links this gap to a cascade of social outcomes — overdose deaths leading the nation, over 35,000 children raised by grandparents, and diabetes and COPD mortality rates exceeding the national average by more than 50%. These statistics check out:

* CDC mortality data records West Virginia’s drug overdose death rate at 81.9 per 100,000 — the highest in the country, though KFF analysis notes opioid death rates fell 46% between 2023 and 2024.

* WVSU Healthy Grandfamilies documents over 35,000 children living in the primary custody of grandparents, with some estimates as high as 43,000.

* America’s Health Rankings placed West Virginia 46th overall in its 2025 report, with only 38.3% of adults reporting their health as “very good or excellent” — the lowest in the nation.

The project attributes the LFPR gap to three categories of policy failure:

* Occupational licensing and credentialing barriers that prevent willing workers — particularly those with criminal records — from entering professions

* Overly generous material assistance that creates disincentives to seek employment

* Benefit cliffs and program fragmentation where income gains are outstripped by losses in assistance, and where safety net and workforce programs operate in silos

Where the Analysis Holds Up

Several of the project’s supply-side observations are well-supported in the policy literature.

* Occupational licensing reform has bipartisan backing nationally. A Brookings Institution study found that licensing has significant effects on wages, employment, and prices, and that less restrictive alternatives often achieve the same public safety goals. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has similarly documented how excessive licensing disproportionately burdens low-income workers and those with criminal records.

* Benefit cliffs are real and measurable. A worker earning $15/hour who loses Medicaid, childcare subsidies, and SNAP simultaneously upon crossing an income threshold can face an effective marginal tax rate exceeding 80%. The Cardinal Institute’s own poll found 56% of voters support efforts to address the benefits cliff, 82% support a gradual benefits reduction model, and 79% support a grace period to smooth transitions off assistance.

* Program fragmentation is a known barrier. When workforce development, TANF, SNAP, and Medicaid operate on separate eligibility tracks with no shared case management, individuals fall through gaps. A “One Door” model drawn from Utah’s approach earned 83% support in the poll.

These are areas where the Dignity Project contributes constructively to the conversation.

What Their Own Poll Actually Found

This is where the project’s credibility fractures. The Cardinal Institute highlights the findings that support its thesis. The full dataset undermines it.

West Virginians Don’t Blame the Safety Net

The poll asked respondents to evaluate nine potential factors contributing to the state’s low LFPR. The Dignity Project centers its argument on safety net disincentives. But “generous welfare or unemployment benefits” ranked 5th out of 9 factors — behind substance abuse, lack of good jobs, childcare costs, and discouraged workers:

The top three factors voters identified — substance abuse, job scarcity, and childcare — are structural, demand-side problems. The Dignity Project’s framework addresses none of them as primary concerns.

Voters Want More Assistance, Not Less

The Dignity Project describes programs as offering “overly generous material assistance, providing a clear disincentive for work”. The poll asked voters directly whether the government provides too much or too little:

* 42% — Should provide more assistance

* 21% — About the right amount

* 18% — Should provide less

* 19% — Not sure

More than twice as many voters want increased assistance as want reductions. The “overly generous” characterization reflects the view of fewer than 1 in 5 West Virginians surveyed — in the Cardinal Institute’s own research.

The Majority Says Benefits Help

The project implies assistance creates dependency. The poll says otherwise:

* 51% say benefits “give poor people a chance to stand on their own two feet and get started again”

* 38% say benefits “make poor people dependent and encourage them to stay poor”

* 11% not sure

The majority view, by 13 points, is that public assistance helps people rather than trapping them. Separately, 79% agree that West Virginia should offer public assistance programs to residents, with only 12% disagreeing.

Recipients Say Assistance Is Crucial, Not Cushy

Among the 54% of respondents who had personally received public assistance in the past three years:

* 85% agree “the assistance was crucial to my family’s well-being”

* 69% were satisfied with the support provided

* Only 61% found the application process “straightforward” — 33% found it difficult to access

The people actually using these programs aren’t describing a hammock. They’re describing a lifeline that’s hard to reach.

Occupational Licensing: Their Own Voters Are Skeptical

Occupational licensing reform is a pillar of the Dignity Project. But when voters were asked whether licensing requirements contribute to people remaining on public assistance:

* 41% — Major or Moderate role

* 49% — Minor or No role

* 10% — Not sure

A plurality of the Cardinal Institute’s own respondents reject the premise that occupational licensing is a significant driver of people staying on public assistance.

The Partisan Lens

The party crosstabs reveal that the Dignity Project’s framing tracks closely with Republican and conservative opinion — not the electorate as a whole:

Even among Republicans, only 26% want less assistance, while 34% want more. The “overly generous” framing doesn’t even command majority support within the Cardinal Institute’s natural constituency.

What Voters Actually Prioritize

When asked to choose their top three proposals for improving public assistance — a forced ranking that reveals real priorities — voters spread their choices broadly:

One Door leads, but the 2nd, 5th, and 6th most popular proposals involve maintaining or increasing benefits — individualized assessment, grace periods, and inflation indexing. Voters want a smarter safety net. The Dignity Project highlights the reforms that imply dependency while burying the ones that imply inadequacy.

The Economic Backdrop the Project Ignores

The poll captured a portrait of structural economic distress that supply-side policy tweaks cannot solve:

* 50% rate local economic opportunities as poor or very poor

* 55% say opportunities are worse than 10 years ago

* 60% say it is difficult to find a job that pays a living wage

* 57% say they are economically worse off than a year ago

* Only 13% rate economic opportunities as excellent or good

These are the Cardinal Institute’s own respondents describing an economy that doesn’t have enough good jobs — the very demand-side crisis the Dignity Project declines to address.

Where the Analysis Falls Short

Beyond the polling disconnect, three structural gaps weaken the project’s policy framework.

Demand-Side Silence

The Dignity Project is almost entirely a supply-side document. It asks why people aren’t working. It does not seriously ask whether adequate work exists where they live.

West Virginia’s coal mining sector employed approximately 64,000 people in the 1970s; by 2021 that figure had fallen below 12,000 — the fewest since 1890. TIME’s reportingdocumented that the state now produces 60% of the coal it did a decade ago, with communities losing not just jobs but the tax revenue that funded local services. The WV Center on Budget and Policy’s 2025 report showed that prime-age workers (25–54) actually participate at 78.3% — it is older workers at 29.4% who drag down the state average, suggesting age and disability matter more than motivation.

Rural counties across the southern coalfields face employer deserts. West Virginia’s broadband plan acknowledged that approximately 27% of rural residents lacked access to basic broadband as recently as 2019, though the state has since received $224 million in BEAD funding to begin closing that gap.

Causation Reversal on Health Outcomes

The project presents health crises as “downstream effects” of low LFPR. The evidence runs the other direction. CDC provisional data still puts West Virginia among the highest overdose death rates nationally. The BLS’s 2025 alternative measures report found West Virginia’s broadest labor underutilization measure (U-6) at 7.1% — actually below the national 8.0% — suggesting that among those in the labor market, the state’s workers are less underutilized than the country as a whole. The problem isn’t lazy workers. It’s people who can’t enter the market at all.

The “Overly Generous” Claim Without Evidence

West Virginia’s TANF cash benefit for a family of three maxes out at $542 per month — just 25% of the federal poverty level, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. A 50-state NCCP comparison places this near the national median. Benefits are limited to 60 months by both federal and state law. The project asserts generosity without providing the data to support it — and its own poll shows 42% of voters want more assistance.

Recommendations for a More Honest Framework

A workforce strategy built on the Cardinal Institute’s fulldataset — not just the convenient parts — would look different:

* Retain supply-side reforms where the data supports them. Continue licensing reform, benefit cliff smoothing, and One Door coordination. These have genuine bipartisan support.

* Lead with what voters actually identified. Substance abuse (81%), job scarcity (75%), and childcare (73%) are the top three causes voters named. Policy should follow.

* Add demand-side investment. Target infrastructure, broadband (BEAD deployment is a start), and economic development to counties where 60% of residents say a living-wage job is hard to find.

* Sequence health before work. Expand addiction treatment capacity, fund rural primary care, and maintain Medicaid coverage. America’s Health Rankings data shows the scale of what we’re dealing with.

* Adopt the reforms voters actually prioritize. Individual circumstances adjustments (42%), grace periods (38%), and inflation indexing (37%) all polled within striking distance of One Door (48%). These are benefit-protective reforms — include them.

* Measure honestly. Track not just LFPR movement but job quality, wage levels, health outcomes, and family stability. A person pushed off benefits into a $10/hour job with no insurance has not gained dignity.

The Cardinal Institute commissioned a rigorous, well-designed poll — then built a policy framework around its 5th-ranked finding while burying the top three. It describes benefits as “overly generous” when 42% of its own respondents want more and only 18% want less. It makes occupational licensing a centerpiece when 49% of its respondents say it plays a minor or no role. It wraps these selective readings in the language of moral urgency — “rekindling a sense of purpose within our people” — and presents a partisan interpretation of the data as though it were consensus.

The full data makes a stronger case for investment, health intervention, and job creation than it does for the safety-net-skeptical framework the Dignity Project advances. West Virginians told the Cardinal Institute exactly what they believe. The Cardinal Institute chose not to listen.

West Virginians have never needed a think tank to locate their dignity. What they need is policy that matches the complexity of their reality — and research institutions willing to follow their own data wherever it leads.

The polling data cited throughout comes from the Cardinal Institute’s own commissioned research, conducted by Targoz Market Research among 765 registered West Virginia voters (Oct.–Nov. 2023, MOE ±3.47%).

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