Of the 17 West Virginia State Senate races to be decided Nov. 6, 16 are contested. The following is the first of 16 previews of each race brought to you by the MetroNews team in run-up to Election Day. Look for our previews on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays over the next six weeks.
HUNDRED, W.Va. — No other senate district in West Virginia can claim voters in as many counties as the state’s second senatorial district.
Long a Democratic stronghold featuring names like Jeff Kessler and Larry Edgell, the state’s de facto natural gas hub borders Ohio and Pennsylvania in multiple parts of the district — a place booming with potential due to the natural gas boom of the past decade.
But it isn’t a Democratic stronghold anymore — at least for the moment. Michael Maroney won the seat vacated by Kessler during the latter’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2016. Two years prior, it was Republican Kent Leonhardt — now the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture — who ousted Larry Edgell by a mere 676 votes. Edgell had been seeking his fifth term.
Leonhardt’s successful bid for Commissioner of Agriculture helps, in part, bring us to the upcoming race on Nov. 6, 2018. Charles Clements, the man appointed to fill Leonhardt’s unexpired term, will seek a full four-year term for the seat he once aspired to fill 20 years prior.
In 1998, fresh off of a short stint in the House of Delegates, Clements was defeated by then newcomer Larry Edgell by more than 2,500 votes.
Between the two candidates, the 75-year-old Clements offers the experience — two years in the House of Delegates at a time when Republicans were wildly outnumbered in the mid 1990’s — followed by these past two years finishing Leonhardt’s term.
“While I may have been a freshman in the Senate, I knew how the system worked,” he said. “I knew how everything worked. So I was able, really, to hit the ground running.”
That helped, Clements said, lead to the passage of S.B. 360, a bill he sponsored — designed to protect West Virginia’s mineral rights royalty owners from post-production cost deductions by extraction companies.
His opponent, Democrat Denny Longwell, offers no such experience in political office. Rather, the 71-year-old Longwell brings to the table his military experience as a Hospital Corpsman (though he regrets he did not serve overseas during Vietnam), an iron and steel worker, and an International Representative for the United Steelworkers Union from 1986 to 2004.
“Before I ever decided to get in this race, I got involved in the county Democratic Party because I wasn’t satisfied with the Democratic Party as we know it today,” Longwell said. “It’s not the Democrat Party I knew 30 or 40 years ago.”
Longwell, like Clements, is a native of New Martinsville — where he lives now. At first, there was no itch to run for office. Rather, the staunchly pro-union Longwell wanted to serve on the County Executive Committee — helping at a grassroots level to rebuild a party that he thought had lost its feel for what was once a Democratic stronghold — blue-collar union workers.
Democrats, he said, can no longer rely on simply ‘filling a ballot’ — whether in West Virginia or across the country — with a person who simply has some free time to commit and a vague understanding of civic duty.
“You need to go out and do your work and find qualified, capable, viable candidates to run,” Longwell said. “That restores the confidence and the faith in the party by people. There’s a lot of people who sit back and watch. They’re quiet. They never speak up or say anything, but they are watching every move.”
He continued: “And they develop a perception of the Democrats that, ‘They really don’t care. They’re just filling the ballot.’ Well, you see what that’s got them.”
What that’s got them, according to Longwell, is a mess. He said he reluctantly voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, but said he “loves” Bernie Sanders, “admires” Congressional candidates Kendra Fershee and Richard Ojeda, and describes his hero as the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat and labor stalwart who died in a plane crash in 2002.
“(Bernie Sanders) is saying the right things for America,” Longwell said. “Bridges, roads, infrastructure, water, education, health care. He’s saying all the things.”
Longwell also wants to model himself after Del. Dave Pethtel (D – Wetzel, 05) — who once lost to Charles Clements, in fact — and believes that working people need a voice in Charleston.
But in an era of political polarization — an era where all politics are tribal — you may be surprised to hear Longwell and Sen. Clements have some areas in common.
Striking a similar chord as Longwell on the topic of infrastructure, Clements has long been an advocate for an extension of I-68 further into the state’s major natural gas hub — an investment in West Virginia’s long-term future that he thinks most of his colleagues in Charleston don’t recognize.
“At one time we had a robust economy based on coal,” Clements said. “And coal sort of has, unfortunately, been sliding down on the ladder of what we can depend on to base our economy. But the gas industry coming in here — it’s not the gas industry. I want to see us develop what’s going to come from that gas industry.”
Failing to capitalize on downstream opportunities, Clements said, would be a monumental mistake.
“I want to see an economy grow,” he said. “I don’t want to see taxes grow. I want to see the revenue growth in our economy. Every revenue equation has two parts — you’ve got the tax rate and the tax base. Let’s grow the tax base and leave the rate where it is.”
Clements owned and operated a wholesale petroleum business in New Martinsville for more than three decades. When the doors closed in 2004, he moved onto a job with H&R Block. His world view has been shaped by those two roles — as he’s seen on both ends what he believes to be an inefficient tax structure that sometimes punishes entrepreneurs.
That leads us to one of the major points of contention in what appears to be an otherwise sanguine race — severance taxes.
“We get the people now who continually want to raise the severance tax on this natural gas, I go back and say, ‘We don’t have a monopoly on this natural gas,” Clements said. “You’re in business for only one reason, and that’s to make money. And they’re going to go put their investments where they can make the most money. If that means spending more time in Pennsylvania or more time in Ohio, that’s what they’re going to do.”
Conversely, Longwell sees potential in increasing gas severance taxes — particularly as it pertains to additional compensation for the state’s teachers and long-term fixes for the much maligned Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA).
“I don’t care what they do in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Timbuktu,” he said. “The severance tax being increased will help pay the PEIA — fund it.”
Longwell said Charleston’s Republican leadership “doesn’t have the right” to run a campaign — any campaign — on bringing an end to the historic teacher work stoppage earlier this year.
“For me to define ugly, I simply look back at what happened to the teachers from the majority party in the Legislature,” he said. “That was ugly. In that party, that same party was out campaigning now that they were responsible for getting that raise for the teachers. They voted against them 14 out of 15 times, and now to claim they got the raise for them? I don’t know any other way to put it, but it’s a blatant lie.”
That’s why Longwell supports additional raises for West Virginia’s teachers and school personnel. Meanwhile, Clements is preaching a modicum of patience as the PEIA Task Force — whose creation was a key component in ending the work stoppage — continues to work and gather data.
“The Governor appointed this PEIA Task Force to look at PEIA,” Clements said. “Then, the thing that sort of frightened me about it is when he said, ‘I’ve got my own plan for PEIA.’ And that makes me think, what are we doing? If we’ve got a task force to work on it, let’s see what they’re going to do.”
Clements added: “If you’ve got a plan Governor, don’t waste the people’s time on this task force.”
The second district stretches to the northwest corner of Marshall County, as far east as Ritchie County’s border with Wirt County, as far south as Calhoun County’s border with Clay County, and so far east it nearly hits Coopers Rock State Forest on the Monongalia County side of the border. No other district has such a reach — perhaps making it one of the most economically unique and diverse. A State Senator in this district can see the benefits and the risks associated with natural gas, the growth and economic impact West Virginia University has on the outlying region, and the interweaving of urban and rural communities — held together by plenty of trucking traffic and even more potholes.
It can also see the difficulty of industry drying up — like in Calhoun County. In total, the district features all of Wetzel, Tyler, Doddridge, Ritchie, and Calhoun counties. It also includes parts of Gilmer, Marion, Monongalia and Marshall counties.
That drying up of industry presents something of an interest for Clements — who wonders if improved economic conditions in West Virginia might help solve West Virginia’s largest health problems — particularly the opioid and prescription pain killer epidemic.
“I think one of the big problems we have in this state, truthfully, is the demise of the family,” Clements said. “We’ve lost our family. I’ve talked to people in Charleston that said she had nine students in a room and that only one of those nine was living with their natural parents. The rest of them were living with grandparents, living with single parents, or even with neighbors.”
Better economic conditions, he hopes, would solve that problem.
The race is, primarily, focused on two world views of economics. Clements is clear in his opinion on growth and taxation.
Meanwhile, Longwell said there are reasons to be skeptical that right-wing economics will ever help people who worked industrial jobs like he once did. When asked about the future of capitalism, he expressed concern and doubt — though he did have some hope in America’s long marriage to free-market principles.
“Capitalism has worked for a long, long time,” Longwell said. “What I hear the right saying — the majority party in the West Virginia legislature — they’re throwing that word socialism out there. Everybody blames Bernie Sanders about socialism, but you know what some of those social things are.”
“Social Security, your highways, your law enforcement, your firefighters — all those things are social issues. But, yet, we get this perception somehow that that’s bad.”
The race seems entirely focused on economics — supply, demand, human capital, other forms of capital and labor.
And, come Nov. 6, voters in parts of nine counties will have a decision to make on two candidates — both more than happy to criticize their own parties.
The choice will come down to the former small businessman, House Delegate, and now State Senator — or the staunchly pro-union steel worker, iron worker and county executive who only entered the race because he felt working people weren’t being represented.