West Virginia Democrats Face an Uneasy Time

From The New York Times:

Although Democrats have owned West Virginia’s two Senate seats since the Eisenhower administration, Republicans are eyeing this state as one of their best bets as they seek to win a Senate majority next year.

An accelerating rightward tilt here was reflected recently in an awkward two-step by the Democratic nominee for an open seat, Natalie Tennant, as she distanced herself from the White House after a fund-raising trip to New York.
      

In a Sheraton ballroom, Ms. Tennant, West Virginia’s secretary of state, listened to Michelle Obama urge donors to write “a big old fat check” to her and other women running for the Senate.

      

But back home, where President Obama is deeply unpopular, Ms. Tennant’s campaign quickly sought to wriggle out of the embrace of the White House, insisting to the local news media that “what the first lady said is not an endorsement.”

      

Mr. Obama lost all 55 of West Virginia’s counties in 2012 despite a two-to-one registration edge for Democrats, who are increasingly estranged from the national party over issues like guns, immigration and environmental regulations.

      

“I think there’s a dam ready to break here,” said Chris Hansen, the campaign manager for Ms. Tennant’s opponent, Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican congresswoman in her seventh term.

      

Both Ms. Tennant and Ms. Capito seek to succeed the departing Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Standard Oil heir who came to the state in 1964 to work with the rural poor as a Vista volunteer, just a few years after John F. Kennedy cemented his presidential nomination by winning the West Virginia primary.

      

Neighboring Virginia has leaned leftward in recent years because of the growth and diversity of its Washington suburbs. But the Appalachian region of West Virginia and parts of Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, which had stayed faithfully Democratic even as Southern whites abandoned the party, have more recently been defecting over issues that are as much cultural as economic.

      

Many of the poorest counties in West Virginia, which are among the most dependent in the nation on food stamps, unemployment insurance and other federal benefits, voted most heavily for Mitt Romney in 2012.

      

“The state that first elected Jay Rockefeller in 1976 as governor is not the same state today,” said Lane Bailey, a former chief of staff to Mr. Rockefeller. Rural West Virginians feel culturally adrift from Washington, said Mr. Bailey, the son of a coal miner. “They are more and more angry, more and more turning inward, because they have become untrusting of a government that they feel has forgotten them.”

      

Voters have generally remained faithful to their party heritage in statewide races, choosing a Democratic governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, and senator, Joe Manchin III, in 2012. But there is uneasiness this time around, reflected in the Tennant campaign’s efforts to distance itself from the Obamas. Before Ms. Tennant stepped forward in September, more than a half-dozen prominent Democrats declined to run.

      

“Republicans will have so many pictures of Obama, it’ll be comical and laughable,” said Kent Carper, a Democrat who is the president of the Kanawha County Commission, which includes Charleston, the capital. “I would hope the state party and national party can explain to voters he is not on the ballot. If you want to vote against him, you really need to wait until he runs for school board in Illinois.”

      

In an interview, Ms. Tennant even seemed to downgrade the president’s title. “I don’t answer to Senator Obama,” she said. “I answer to the people of West Virginia.” (A spokeswoman later said that was an unintentional slip of the tongue.)

      

Democratic leaders were relieved when Ms. Tennant, who turned 46 on Wednesday, finally entered the race, and they have promised millions of dollars to help her run competitively. She is well known and popular from previous campaigns and, before entering politics, from her time as a co-anchor of “Good Morning, West Virginia” on Charleston television with her husband, Erik Wells, who is now a state senator.

 

Some also remember her from her days as the first woman to serve as the Mountaineer, the buckskin-wearing, rifle-toting mascot of West Virginia University. It was a first that made some people unhappy. “Go back to the kitchen and make babies,” Ms. Tennant recalled people yelling. She was spat on during an outing with sorority sisters.

      

“It shaped who I am today,” she said. “A lot of people ask, ‘Is she tough enough?’ West Virginians know me as someone who can stand up for what is right.”

      

After leaving her office in the State Capitol last week to pick up her 11-year-old daughter from school, Ms. Tennant sat for a quiet-voices interview in the children’s section of the main branch of Charleston’s public library, while her daughter studied for a test.

      

She framed her candidacy as a contrast with “the dysfunction that Congresswoman Capito has continued to perpetuate” in Washington, citing the government shutdown in October.

      

Ms. Capito, 60, the daughter of a former governor here, said in an interview that she had opposed the shutdown and that she voted for the recent budget compromise that Tea Party-leaning Republicans rejected.

      

“I’ve been known as someone who reaches across the aisle,” she said. She spoke by phone from her home in Charleston, where she was readying an office Christmas party for her husband, Charles, an investment manager of Wells Fargo bank.

      

Ms. Capito is well liked by leaders of both parties in a small state where most people in public life know one another. Polls show her winning up to one in three Democratic votes. “I couldn’t be elected without Democrats,” she said.

 

More than in any other state, deep ties to King Coal expose Democrats’ vulnerability in West Virginia because of the national party’s stances on climate change and renewable energy. Both Ms. Tennant and Ms. Capito diverge sharply from the Obama administration on its coal policy, an issue that is often more emotional than economic in Appalachia, where jobs are being lost to cheaper natural gas as much as to environmental regulation.

      

Ms. Tennant denounced the president’s order to the Environmental Protection Agency in June to limit carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants. “I think he has not fairly looked at what’s taking place with West Virginia,” she said. “A policy like that hurts jobs for the people of this state.”

 

She dodged when asked whether she would have voted for the president’s health care law. “If I were in office in 2010, I certainly would have brought West Virginia values to it,” Ms. Tennant said. She would not say whether she would have voted yes or no.

      

Ms. Capito, for her part, called the Affordable Care Act “a huge overreach,” but declined to second-guess the decision of state officials to expand Medicaid under the law. “We are where we are now, and we have to figure out how to go forward,” she said.

      

Ms. Capito voted with Republicans in the House 94.6 percent of the time, according to the website OpenCongress.

      

Ms. Tennant said Ms. Capito supported House Republicans’ staunch opposition to raising the minimum wage. Ms. Capito countered that she voted for the last federal increase in 2007. “We need to look at ramifications of what raising the minimum wage would mean to the whole economy,” she said.

      

Mr. Carper, the county commission president, promised a tight race. “This is a small state,” he said. “When a potato spud hits the ground at a potato festival, these two women will be there. They’ll eat more ramps than anyone at the ramp festivals in July. They will be everywhere.”