CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The Democratic race isn’t over–at least not yet–and in West Virginia it appears that the state’s Democratic voters intend to break with what a majority of Democratic voters nationwide have decided they want: a Hillary Clinton nomination.
To date, Hillary Clinton has won 24 of the 43 nominating contests–including 57.2 percent of all Democratic voters. She has won ten closed primaries and 61.7 percent of the voters in those thirteen primaries. Clinton has won 14 open or semi-closed primaries out of 24 and 54.7 percent of the voters in those primaries. In the six Democratic caucuses, she has won just once.
This has amounted to a pledged delegate lead that is nearly insurmountable in the primary contest. Although Senator Bernie Sanders has vowed to fight on towards the Democratic National Convention, he would need to win 65 percent of the remaining voters simply to overtake Clinton in pledged delegates. It is mathematically impossible for Sanders to clinch the nomination with just pledged delegates before the Democratic National Convention. 20 percent of the party’s delegates are uncommitted super delegates who can choose whomever they want. Historically, they have never chosen the candidate with fewer pledged delegates.
The race includes five more closed primary contests in Kentucky, Oregon, New Jersey, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia. The remaining open contests are in Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, California, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia.
In West Virginia, it’s highly unlikely the numbers will matter to Democratic voters. If 2016 is the year of chaos and anti-establishment success, the Mountain State is at the forefront of that movement. As a state, this is perhaps the most ardent pro-Donald Trump state in the entire Union. On the Democratic side, limited polling has shown Sanders winning, but by significant margins outside the polling margin of error.
In short, the former attorney, First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, U.S. Senator from New York, and Secretary of State is a lot less popular in West Virginia then she was eight years ago.
The most qualified candidate and the baggage that comes with that
Hillary Clinton has worn an awful lot of hats during her decades in the public eye. Typically, she has drawn the most ire–both fair and unfair–from the GOP and conservative voters. But for the second time in her career, the early front runner for the Democratic nomination has faced a mounting insurgency. Unlike in 2008, Clinton seems poised to defeat it.
Eight years ago, Democratic voters were looking for a breath of fresh air following eight years of George W. Bush in the White House. They found that in the popular, eloquent young Senator from Illinois–Barack Obama. His soaring rhetoric and positive vision for America captured Democratic voters in a way that nobody could have predicted. Still war-weary, voters chose the U.S. Senator that hadn’t cast a vote to invade Iraq.
“She’s capable of making bad decisions just like you and I are capable of making bad decisions,” Greg Noone, Fairmont State Political Science and Law Professor and Director of the FSU National Security Intelligence Program said. “That’s something that she’s going to have to deal with and voters are going to have to assess.”
At least on the Democratic side, enough voters have come to terms with Clinton’s past to make her the presumptive nominee for the party.
In fact, Clinton’s experience mentioned above–sometimes an anchor in 2008–is now what seems to be attracting supporters.
“The primary thing that I like is her qualifications and her experience, and I think that tends to be a common theme among her supporters,” Nathan Wright, a Fairmont native, WVU graduate, and coal miner’s son who is supporting Clinton said.
“She’s probably the most experienced person who will be a major party’s nominee probably since George H.W. Bush,” Noone said.
Despite decades of experience fighting for and crafting public policy, Clinton has taken hits in the primary from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party–a voice that has been magnified by her opponent. Clinton has been attacked for her foreign policy–where she is described as hawkish and to willing to intervene in overseas conflicts by dovish, progressive opponents.
She’s also been attacked for questions over her integrity–looming questions about the personal e-mail server, past questions about Benghazi, her role in the “Tough on Crime” 1990s that led to the much ballyhooed and disproportionate mass incarceration rates that are tearing apart minority communities, the role of the Clinton Family Foundation, and cozy ties to Wall Street that drove the most progressive, left-wing voters inside the Democratic Party and outside the party to vote for Bernie Sanders in open primaries.
And that, seemingly, is just the criticism from her own side of the aisle. Her opponents in the GOP have long harped on Clinton’s shortcomings related to the numerous scandals that surrounded former President Bill Clinton in the late 1980s and 1990s.
“A lot of the criticism comes from the fact that she’s been in pubic life for so long,” Noone said. “Really, she’s been under attack since 1991-1992. That’s a long time to be continually roasted over the coal.”
But perhaps most of all, in a year that has seen anti-establishment candidates in Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders win state after state, she is the ultimate Washington insider.
“That’s where Trump and Sanders really strike that note in two very different ways, but they really strike that note,” Noone said. “The ‘I’m with you. I understand what’s going on. You guys are getting screwed, and I understand that.'”
Fight for the White House and Clinton’s evolution
Despite the baggage that has come with a Clinton candidacy–a slight departure for Democratic voters who felt much more comfortable electing and re-electing Barack Obama–she has proven resilient, well-funded, and seems willing to stick to her brand of neoliberal politics–or pragmatic, incremental progressivism as she calls it–that blends sometimes centrist Wall Street friendly economic policy with socially liberal viewpoints.
The arrival of Senator Sanders changed some of that though. While the former Secretary of State has made climate change, immigration reform, equal pay for equal work, and student debt a hallmark in her campaign, Sanders’s popularity has forced her to move to the left on some of those issues. It also forced her campaign to reconcile with issues of mass incarceration, widespread income inequality, minimum wage hikes, and how her tax plan would address the aforementioned issues.
“As far as Clinton’s plan goes or as far as generally Democratic plans go or liberal plans go in general, there’s not just a question of is this policy going to increase growth?” John Deskins, the Director of the West Virginia University Bureau of Business & Economic Research said. “But there’s a question of how this policy is going to affect the distribution of income.”
According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, Hillary Clinton’s tax plan raises taxes almost entirely on the wealthiest five percent of Americans. It brings in more than one trillion dollars of new revenues in over a ten year period, but does not outline any new spending.
Deskins said if new spending includes massive investments in infrastructure, that could offset some of the growth losses that usually come with tax increases.
“Education, infrastructure, national defense, research and development to some extent,” he said. “These things can all help improve growth as well. We have to think on the margin. If we raises taxes by one more point, how much growth is that going to limit?”
Wright considers Clinton’s plans pragmatic and forward thinking–in spite of the fact that she isn’t always ideologically pure. He said Clinton’s evolution on certain issues over time doesn’t bother him. He’s glad she’s arrived at the right conclusions in 2016 and not concerned with where she may have stood in the past.
“Over time, as new facts come in, as society changes, it’s very important for the country to be able to react,” Wright said. “Also for it’s leaders to take in new information and make better decisions based on that. I think it’s important that she shows she can change over time. When confronted with a new situation she’ll be able to make good decisions even if they weren’t always the same decisions she made.”
In particular, Wright said he is ready to move on from the story about Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server as Secretary of State. While a federal investigation remains ongoing, an indictment appears unlikely.
“They’re just distractions,” Wright said. “Unfair? It seems like all of the candidates have unfair attacks against them. Again, I just think that they’re distracts to distract from her resume to distract from experience and to distract from the policies that she has clearly laid out for what she is going to do as President.”
Clinton has been criticized over accepting speaking fees to speak to large financial institutions on Wall Street, but now she believes Wall Street “excess” needs to be reigned in. Often, she cites her support and her desire to further implement the Dodd-Frank Act in the battle to end “too big to fail” banks–the kind that precipitated the financial crisis in 2008 and the bailouts of those banks (other than Lehman Brothers) that followed.
“The issue of how close Hillary is to Wall Street compared to Bernie, she’s going to have to thread that needle,” Greg Noone said. “She’s going to have to come out with policy initiatives that talk about how we’re going to reign in Wall Street.”
One way or the other, Clinton will need to defeat a factional, anti-establishment insurgent, but most experts would have thought that’s the type of battle you see in a primary–not in a general election. Enter billionaire real estate tycoon Donald Trump.
“There will be a lot of kissing and making up,” Noone said before Indiana’s results on Tuesday. “There will be some mumbling under their breath as they mark their ‘X’ next to Hillary Clinton, but the Sanders people are not going to stay home and watch Ted Cruz or Donald Trump become President.”
Wright is confident–and based on the current polling data he can afford a little bit of it–that Clinton can defeat Donald Trump. But Greg Noone said from May until November is a lifetime in politics–and anything can happen. That’s precisely what Wright is afraid of.
“My fear is that Democrats will let their guard down, and we could end up waking up with a Trump Presidency in November,” Wright said.
Wright’s message for Democratic voters who are even considering staying home on November 8th: this election is far from over.
“This is not a joke,” Wright said. “This is not a reality TV show. It’s time to get serious because we are electing a leader–someone who is going to define the future of this country and define us as a people.”
Clinton’s relationship to West Virginia
In case you missed the MetroNews coverage of the recent visits by the Clintons to West Virginia, it wasn’t exactly a comfortable visit for the candidate. An out-of-work coal miner gave Clinton a piece of his mind. It was an especially unsurprising turn of events after one of Clinton’s biggest gaffes of the campaign came during a Town Hall event in Michigan when she talked about “putting coal miners out of work.”
“Those are all unforced errors,” Greg Noone said. “Those are things she shouldn’t have done and yet she did them. Now she’s opened herself up to criticism.”
But Clinton, if elected, said she would propose a $30 billion dollar plan to revitalize coal communities in Appalachia. The plan apparently invests in the communities and helps them move away from coal, which she sees as a benefit in combating man-made climate change. Clinton’s plan also includes a guarantee that coal miners do not lose the benefits they were promised.
“I have noticed that Hillary has been a supporter of coal communities,” Wright, who comes from a coal mining family, said. “She has called out the need to revitalize coal communities to make sure that coal miners’ pensions are paid and to make sure that there is opportunity in the future.”
As Noone said earlier about Clinton and Wall Street, for Clinton to make any head way in the Mountain State or Appalachia as a whole (Kentucky has yet to vote either) she must “thread the needle.”
It may not be enough come May 10th.
The significance of Clinton
Clinton is considered the heavy favorite to win the general election in November, but a lot can change. Still, if all else remains equal, U.S. voters would be electing their first woman President in the nation’s history. Greg Noone said that won’t be a major factor for voters–on both sides of the aisle–who have real concerns moving forward. He did say that in a contest against Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton will have a decided advantage among women (who made up 52 percent of the electorate in 2012).
“The biggest demographic that will decide this election are single females, and single females at the end of the day are going to line up behind Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump who has had his own problems in talking about women,” Noone said.
And it’s worth noting, some Clinton supporters have written at length about wanting to raise their daughters in a world where the most powerful person in the world is a woman. Their children would grow up in a world where the glass ceiling for women is finally broken.
Nathan Wright sees a few other concerns: namely the U.S. Supreme Court’s current vacancy and the number of potential future vacancies.
“Considering that we already have one vacancy that might not even be filled for the next year, that’s real,” Wright said. “That’s important. Considering that it could be up to three people that could be potentially nominated by Donald Trump is terrifying, and so that does create a sense of urgency considering the next President will be filling positions that will be filled for life.”
Additionally, Clinton would hypothetically enter the White House having beaten one of the weakest, most unpopular general election candidates in U.S. history. Would voters give her the same shot at re-election in 2020 they gave Barack Obama in 2012?
That answer could come down to how a Clinton Administration handles the wildly growing income distribution gap.
“If the transfer leads to a more even income distribution, if the money is going to low-income households, then some people could argue that a smaller GDP–at least to some extent–that’s distributed more evenly is better than a larger GDP that’s distributed less evenly,” John Deskins said (Note: Deskins said he was speaking hypothetically).
Wright thinks Clinton has been overlooked because her campaign doesn’t make the same type of controversial headlines that Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders make.
“I find it to be frustrating that there seems to be this image that her supporters aren’t energetic,” he said. “I’ve even seen it as some of the primary results have come in. She’s gotten the majority of votes of any candidate, and some of her supporters aren’t incredibly vocal. They’re just going about their lives. Hillary Clinton is the candidate for them.”
Whether or not that energy Wright feels for Clinton will translate into a general election victory may depend on just how much back-and-forth Clinton and Trump’s poor unfavorable numbers go, how likely the #BernieOrBust movement sticks to it’s principles, and whether or not Donald Trump’s unorthodox campaign can break the Democratic hold on Rust Belt states like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
But, at least in West Virginia, Clinton knows this: it’s not 2008 anymore.
For more, read our previous stories on the other: Bernie Sanders, John Kasich (suspended campaign), and Donald Trump.