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      Republican states pull out of voter rolls program amid false claims of bias

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      Republican states pull out of voter rolls program amid false claims of biasThree states announce end of Eric membership citing unfounded concerns over security and political leaning of organizationThree Republican states announced this week that they would be terminating their membership with a prominent, multi-state consortium that shares voter rolls data to keep their lists up to date. The moves come amid unfounded rightwing conspiracies about the security and partisan leaning of the organization.Florida, West Virginia and Missouri said this week that they are leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center (Eric), a group of roughly 30 states on both sides of the aisle that assist one another in voter roll maintenance. The group matches member states’ voter rolls to each other to flag registrations of duplicate voters or people who have moved or died. The more states that are involved, the more accurate Eric’s services can be.Georgia Republicans race to pass laws to restrict and challenge votesRead moreIn a statement announcing its decision on Monday, Florida’s Republican secretary of state, Cord Byrd, said he is withdrawing to protect the data privacy of state residents.“As secretary of state, I have an obligation to protect the personal information of Florida’s citizens, which the Eric agreement requires us to share,” he said. “Florida has tried to back reforms to increase protections, but these protections were refused. Therefore, we have lost confidence in Eric.”Earlier this year, Alabama and Louisiana also pulled out of Eric, citing similar concerns. Alabama’s new secretary of state has denied the results of the 2020 election and supported a lawsuit brought by Texas against four other states for election “irregularities” that allegedly caused Trump’s loss.Eric has been supported by its member states, including many GOP-controlled states, since it launched in 2012 as a way to supplement the insufficient national voter registration database. It was not until last year, when rightwing conspiracy theories began to spread, that the organization began to be viewed as partisan and states began to question their membership.Far-right groups and websites, which were already actively spreading election misinformation and sowing doubt in election administration, began describing Eric as left-leaning and falsely tied the organization to liberal billionaire George Soros. The rightwing website Gateway Pundit published a series of baseless blog posts claiming that Eric was a liberal plot to inflate voter rolls and that it could allow private voter data to become public.Republican states have also begun to take issue with the governance of the organization. In his statement announcing West Virginia’s departure, the secretary of state, Mac Warner, said the Eric board of directors rejected recommended changes during a recent meeting which he claimed would have prevented partisan, non-state actors from having influence over the organization.“It truly is a shame that an organization founded on the principle of nonpartisanship would allow the opportunity for partisanship to stray the organization from the equally important principle of upholding the public’s confidence,” he said.Politico reported that the withdrawing secretaries of state also took issue with Eric’s requirement that state election officials contact eligible but unregistered voters at least every two years to see if they would like to register.Top state officials push to make spread of US election misinformation illegalRead moreIn his letter announcing Missouri’s withdrawal, the secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, wrote that “Eric focuses on adding names to voters rolls by requiring a solicitation to individuals who already had an opportunity to register to vote and made the conscious decision not to be registered.”Trump has called for more Republican states to withdraw, falsely claiming that Eric is inflating the rolls for Democrats.Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs with the Election Center, said that Eric had benefited for more than a decade from state and local officials from both sides of the aisle working together to serve the electorate.“The weaponizing of any election administration function is problematic – particularly when it is not based on factual evidence to appease a particular faction or is done under partisan pressures,” she said. “Voter list maintenance and registering voters in as efficient a manner as possible should not be viewed as partisan when done properly.”TopicsUS politicsThe fight for democracyRepublicansFloridaWest VirginiaMissourinewsReuse this content More

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      G.O.P. States Abandon Group That Helps Fight Voter Fraud

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      Five red states have severed ties since last year with the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that helps maintain accurate voter rolls.First to leave was Louisiana, followed by Alabama.Then, in one fell swoop, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced on Monday that they would drop out of a bipartisan network of about 30 states that helps maintain accurate voter rolls, one that has faced intensifying attacks from election deniers and right-wing media.Ohio may not be far behind, according to a letter sent to the group Monday from the state’s chief election official, Frank LaRose. Mr. LaRose and his counterparts in the five states that left the group are all Republicans.For more than a year, the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit organization known as ERIC, has been hit with false claims from allies of former President Donald J. Trump who say it is a voter registration vehicle for Democrats that received money from George Soros, the liberal billionaire and philanthropist, when it was created in 2012.Mr. Trump even chimed in on Monday, urging all Republican governors to sever ties with the group, baselessly claiming in a Truth Social media post that it “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.The Republicans who announced their states were leaving the group cited complaints about governance issues, chiefly that it mails newly eligible voters who have not registered ahead of federal elections. They also accused the group of opening itself up to a partisan influence.In an interview on Tuesday, Jay Ashcroft, a Republican who is Missouri’s secretary of state, said that the group had balked at his state’s calls for reforms, some of which were expected to be weighed by the group’s board of directors at a meeting on March 17. He denied that the decision to pull out was fueled by what the organization and its defenders have described as a right-wing smear campaign.“It’s not like I was antagonistic toward cleaning our voter rolls,” Mr. Ashcroft said.Shane Hamlin, the group’s executive director, did not comment about particular complaints of the states in an email on Tuesday, but referred to an open letter that he wrote on March 2 saying that the organization had been the subject of substantial misinformation regarding the nature of its work and who has access to voter lists.Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, withdrew the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center in January, a day after he was sworn in.Butch Dill/Associated PressDefenders of the group lamented the departures, saying they would weaken the group’s information-sharing efforts and undermine it financially because of lost dues. And, they said, the defections conflict with the election integrity mantra that has motivated Republicans since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020.Republicans haven’t always been so sour about the work of the coalition, which Louisiana left in 2022.It was just last year that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mentioned the group’s benefit to his state, which he described as useful for checking voter rolls during a news conference announcing the highly contentious arrests of about 20 people on voter fraud charges. He was joined then by Cord Byrd, Florida’s secretary of state, a fellow Republican who, on Monday, was expressing a much different opinion. In an announcement that Florida was leaving the group, Mr. Byrd said that the state’s concerns about data security and “partisan tendencies” had not been addressed.“Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC,” Mr. Byrd said.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis, who is considering a Republican run for president, did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. LaRose, in Ohio, also had a stark shift in tone: After recently describing the group to reporters as imperfect but still “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” by Monday he was also calling for reforms and put the group on notice.“Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to and including our withdrawal from membership,” Mr. LaRose wrote. “I implore you to do the right thing.”The complaints about partisanship seem centered on David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped develop the group and is a nonvoting board member. Mr. Ashcroft said he didn’t think that Mr. Becker, a former director of the elections program at the Pew Charitable Trusts who has vocally debunked election fraud claims, including disputing Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, should be on the board.Mr. Becker is the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, another nonpartisan group that has been attacked by election deniers.“There’s truth and there’s lies,” Mr. Becker said on a video call with reporters on Tuesday. “I will continue to stand for the truth.”Mr. Hamlin vowed that the organization would “continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”While some Republican states are ending their relationship with the group, California, the nation’s most populous state, could potentially join its ranks under a bill proposed by a Democratic state lawmaker. But in Texas, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill with the opposite intention.Still, Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Texas’s Republican secretary of state, said in an email on Tuesday that “We are not currently aware of any system comparable to ERIC, but are open to learning about other potentially viable, cost-effective alternatives.”New York, another heavily populated state, is also not a member of the group.Seven states started the organization more than a decade ago. It charges new members a one-time fee of $25,000 and annual dues that are partly based on the citizen voting age population in each state. The Pew Charitable Trusts provided seed funding to the group, but that money was separate from donations that it had received from Mr. Soros, according to the website PolitiFact.Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is Maine’s secretary of state, said in an interview on Tuesday that the group had been particularly helpful in identifying voters who have died or may no longer live in the state, which became a member in 2021.“We have a lot of Mainers who retire to Florida for example,” Ms. Bellows said.Ms. Bellows called the recent defections “tragic” and said that her office had received several inquiries from residents who had read criticism of the group online.“Unfortunately, this move by our colleagues in Florida and elsewhere to leave ERIC in part because of misinformation being spread by election deniers deprives all of us of the ability to effectively clean our voter rolls and fight voter fraud,” she said. More

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      Joe Manchin hails expansive bill he finally agrees to as ‘great for America’

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      Joe Manchin hails expansive bill he finally agrees to as ‘great for America’Rewritten $739bn bill, now called the Inflation Reduction Act, that tackles US debt and the climate crisis could pass Senate this week West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin on Sunday hailed the legislation he almost killed off, calling the rewritten $739bn bill he agreed to last week to pay down US debt and tackle the climate crisis “great for America”.Manchin, on a tour of all five Sunday morning TV politics talk shows, told CBS’s Face the Nation that the energy and climate deal he’s now supporting will tackle inflation because it will be “aggressively producing more energy, to get more supply, to get the prices down”.Republicans charge that the deal would in fact add to inflation, currently running at a 40-year-high.But the centrist Democrat said he hoped his Senate colleagues would “take a good look at the bill”, which also controversially boosts planet-heating fossil fuels, an industry that has made Manchin very wealthy.“They wanted more energy, I want more energy, we’re going to be producing more energy. There’s an agreement that we’re going to be drilling and doing more than we can to bring more energy to the market that reduces prices. They like that,” he said of Republicans.Manchin reiterated to Fox News that he believes the bill would not raise inflation, while saying that previous Biden spending packages he’d supported, including last year’s $1.9tn American Rescue Plan, had done just that.“I’ll make sure I don’t make that mistake again,” Manchin said.He once again declined to say if he’d back Joe Biden for re-election in 2024.“Everybody’s worried about the election. That’s the problem. It’s the 2022 election, 2024 election. I’m not getting involved in that,” Manchin told ABC’s This Week. “Whoever is the president, that’s my president. Joe Biden is my president right now,” he added.Manchin agreed on a deal with Senate majority leader and fellow Democrat Chuck Schumer last Wednesday, announcing an expansive $739bn package, that had eluded them for months, that addresses healthcare and the climate crisis, raising taxes on high earners and corporations and reducing federal debt.The bill replaces the $3.5tn Build Back Better flagship infrastructure and social support legislation that Manchin crushed last fall and the reduced $1.75tn version that he rejected in December, then was renegotiating, then caused to suffer a near-death experience just weeks ago when he turned away from that too.The new legislation, now called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, could pass the Senate this week, although it is not a done deal and Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has not yet committed. “Senator Sinema is my dear friend…She has an awful lot in this piece of legislation, the way it’s been designed as far as…letting Medicare go ahead and negotiate for lower drug prices,” Manchin said, referring to the government health insurance program for older Americans and people with disabilities.“Also, basically, when she said … ‘we’re not going to raise taxes,’ I agree with that,” he added.As a budget-related bill, Democrats aim to be able to use the so-called reconciliation process to pass it with a simple majority in the Senate, which would need all 50 Democratic senators in the 100-seat chamber and the swing vote of US vice-president Kamala Harris to pass.“I sure hope so,” Manchin told CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday morning, when asked if the Senate would vote to approve the bill before they go on summer recess at the end of the week.It’s “a great opportunity. It’s not a Democrat bill, it’s not a Republican bill, it’s definitely not a ‘green’ bill, it’s a red, white and blue bill,” he told host Jake Tapper.Manchin appeared to walk away from the legislation earlier this month on inflation concerns, enraging supporters of climate action and his own colleagues on Capitol Hill. He has repeatedly thwarted his own party and was seen as jeopardizing world climate goals and, at home, Democratic political fortunes, while himself making millions in the coal industry.He refused to support more funding for climate action and came out against tax raises for wealthy Americans to pay for it.“There were things in there I considered could be considered inflammatory…inflation is the biggest challenge we have in our country,” he said on Sunday.Then, he added, “we re-engaged” in negotiations. There was relief among Democrats and climate experts last week, and a sense of turning a corner if the bill passes, both for climate action and the performance of the beleaguered Biden administration, despite the reduced bill.Manchin hailed Biden.“You do not do anything of this size without the president,” he saidthanking Biden for his support in the negotiations.What’s in the climate bill that Joe Manchin supports – and what isn’t Read moreThe bill includes $369bn, especially tax credits to encourage renewable energy production that gets the US close to its planet-heating emissions reductions target of a 50% cut by 2030, and support for purchasing electric cars.TopicsJoe ManchinWest VirginiaUS politicsJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      ‘What about my life?’ West Virginia girl, 12, speaks out against anti-abortion bill

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      ‘What about my life?’ West Virginia girl, 12, speaks out against anti-abortion bill Plea by Addison Gardner during public hearing against bill that would prohibit procedure in nearly all cases goes viral00:56An impassioned plea from a 12-year-old girl has gone viral after she spoke to West Virginia Republican lawmakers during a public hearing for an abortion bill that would prohibit the procedure in nearly all cases.On Wednesday, Addison Gardner of Buffalo middle school in Kenova, West Virginia, was among several people who spoke out against a bill that would not only ban abortions in most cases but also allow for physicians who perform abortions to be prosecuted.Addressing the West Virginia house of delegates, Gardner, among about 90 other speakers, was given 45 seconds to plead her case.“My education is very important to me and I plan on doing great things in life. If a man decides that I’m an object and does unspeakable and tragic things to me, am I, a child, supposed to carry and birth another child?” Gardner said.She went on to add, “Am I to put my body through the physical trauma of pregnancy? Am I to suffer the mental implications, a child, who had no say in what was being done with my body? Some here say they are pro-life. What about my life? Does my life not matter to you?”As Gardner – a volleyball and track athlete at her middle school, spoke, she was looked on by Rita Ray, an 80-year-old woman who had an abortion in 1959, 14 years before terminations were deemed a constitutional right.In a photo captured by Kyle Vass, a journalist from the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, Ray can be seen smiling in the background as Gardner issued her impassioned plea.One user who tweeted the photo wrote, “Rita Ray, 80, who risked her life pre-Roe by getting an abortion from someone who wasn’t a healthcare provider, watches on as Addison Gardner, 12, contemplates her own future without access to legal abortion in WV.”Despite speeches from Gardner and other abortion rights activists, the house passed the bill by an overwhelming vote of 69 to 23. Shortly after Gardner delivered her address, house members adopted an amendment that would allow abortions in cases of rape or incest.However, the amendment, which passed narrowly with 46 to 43 votes, only allows for the procedure to be performed up to 14 weeks of pregnancy and only if the rape or incest is reported to the police.Unlike some other states which have “trigger bans” that would ban abortions within 30 days of Roe being overturned, West Virginia has a 150-year-old pre-Roe abortion ban that would come back into effect in the absence of Roe.Last week, Kanawha county circuit judge Tera Salango blocked the enforcement of the abortion ban and granted the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, the state’s only abortion clinic, the ability to continue performing the procedure.Salango said its patients, “especially those who are impregnated as a result of a rape or incest, are suffering irreparable harm”, the Associated Press reports.West Virginia’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, described the ruling as “a dark day for West Virginia”.The abortion bill moved to the West Virginia senate on Thursday and may be passed by the end of the week.TopicsWest VirginiaAbortionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican who livestreamed Capitol attack given three months in prison

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      Republican who livestreamed Capitol attack given three months in prisonWest Virginia lawmaker Derrick Evans, 37, who filmed self-incriminating footage, pleaded guilty to committing civil disorder00:43A West Virginia lawmaker who participated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol while livestreaming the deadly insurrection has been sentenced to three months in prison.Derrick Evans, 37, was arrested and charged shortly after the attack, in part thanks to self-incriminating video footage he shot of himself leading and egging on rioters who overwhelmed police at the Capitol.Feds seek delay in Proud Boys conspiracy case as it collides with parallel January 6 inquiryRead moreHe resigned, then pleaded guilty to the felony of committing civil disorder in March, but was given bail and appeared virtually from his home for sentencing on Wednesday.Evans, who had been sworn into the Republican-led legislature less than a month before the attack, is among 21 lawmakers known to have joined the rioters trying to overturn the 2020 election. He is the only one to be prosecuted so far.Evans had a penchant for broadcasting live on his Facebook page, Derrick Evans – The Activist, which had 32,000 followers, whom he encouraged to travel to Washington to “fight for Trump”, according to prosecutors.He documented his bus journey to the capital, and then headed straight for the east side of the Capitol. Donning a helmet, Evans shouted out updates to the growing crowd about the violence occurring on the west side of the Capitol, where rioters first breached the building, according to the sentencing memo.Evans narrated as the mob eventually overwhelmed the police and pushed through the Rotunda doors, according to video clips from his account played in court.“We’re taking this house, I told you today! Patriots stand up! … My people didn’t vote for me because I was a coward.” After breaching the building, he said, “We’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!”He deleted the video later that day, but it had already been widely circulated.Evans is among at least 825 people so far charged in connection with the insurrection, of whom 310 have pleaded guilty.Before January 6, Evans had streamed live footage of himself outside West Virginia’s only abortion clinic, which led to a 10ft fence being built around the building and a clinic volunteer having to obtain a restraining order against him. Evans also broadcast his protests against Black Lives Matter and drag shows.On Wednesday Evans told the judge that he took responsibility for his actions and regretted that his actions would leave his kids “fatherless for months”.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsWest VirginiaRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Did Joe Manchin block climate action to benefit his financial interests?

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      Did Joe Manchin block climate action to benefit his financial interests? Recent revelations that Democratic West Virginian senator quietly made millions from his coal business could come back to haunt him as he eyes a run for re-electionNancy Hilsbos, a former coal miner living in the West Virginia county that Senator Joe Manchin calls home, barely noticed the nondescript office block she passed almost daily.The property, at the top of a rise on the road out of the small city of Fairmont, bears a large sign: “Manchin Professional Building”. Nameplates announce the offices of accountants, financial advisors and insurers. But there is no mention of the most profitable and influential company registered at the address – the Democratic senator’s own firm, Enersystems.Manchin was recently revealed to have quietly made millions of dollars from Enersystems over the past three decades as the only supplier of a low grade coal to a high-polluting power plant near Fairmont. That came as news to Hilsbos and just about everyone else in the city.“What surprised me was that we didn’t know it. One of the most shocking things was that I’ve driven by that place thousands of times in the last 30 years and I had no idea that’s where his business operation was headquartered because there’s no sign,” said Hilsbos.“I wonder why he’s not prouder of what he’s done. Why doesn’t he have a big sign that says Enersystems?”In 2020, Manchin earned nearly half a million dollars from the company, and $5.6m over the previous decade.But Hilsbos, who worked underground for 13 years and was also a union activist, is less bothered by the senator keeping the source of his wealth shielded than what else may have been hidden from view.For years, Manchin has justified voting against curbs on the burning of fossil fuels and other measures to tackle the climate crisis on the grounds that they were bad for West Virginia with its economy and culture rooted in coal mining. Last year, he used his vote in a hung US Senate to block President Biden’s $3.5tn economic plan in part because he said he was “very, very disturbed” that its climate provisions would kill the coal industry.But following the revelations that Manchin has made what most West Virginians would regard as a small fortune from the Grant Town power plant, Hilsbos was left wondering if US climate policy, and by extension the global response to the crisis, has been held hostage to the senator’s financial interests.“If he used it to slow the responsible addressing of climate change issues then that’s an international responsibility,” she said. “What’s wrong is him throwing so much weight against the public interest when he has so much to gain by the continued existence of this kind of facility.”Hilsbos is not alone in her concern.Christopher Regan, a former vice-chair of the West Virginia Democratic party who worked as an aide to Manchin, recalled a time when the senator painted prominent Republican officials in the state as “involved in self-service as opposed to public service”, a line Regan then promoted.“This thing with the coal plant turns that around on him. What’s he doing? Is this for West Virginia? Or is this just strictly for his own narrow pecuniary interest?” he said.Regan said that’s a question that could haunt Manchin as he eyes a run for re-election in two years.Manchin founded Enersystems in 1988 with his brother, Roch, at about the time the state was considering an application to build a power plant in Grant Town, a small former mining community less than 20 minutes drive north of Fairmont.Manchin, then a state senator, helped clear the way for the construction of the power plant while negotiating a deal to become the only supplier of its fuel. Not just any fuel but discarded coal known as “garbage of bituminous”, more popularly called “gob”, that is even more polluting than regular coal.When the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised concerns that the Grant Town plant was too close to other coal burning facilities, increasing pollution levels in the area, Manchin intervened and the objections went away. Later, as his state’s governor, Manchin used his political influence to win approval for an increase in the rate charged for electricity charged by the plant which increased bills for ordinary West Virginians. The New York Times reported that, in a highly unusual arrangement, the senator has been getting a cut of those bills.After his election to the US Senate in 2010, Manchin sat on the energy committee, and then became its chair, from where he has blocked environmental regulations that would have hit the Grant Town plant and other gob burning facilities. Manchin also stood in the way of Biden’s multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan which potentially threatened the power plant with tighter federal climate regulations. The senator defended the move as necessary in the midst of the Covid crisis, economic uncertainty and with fuel supplies threatened by Russia’s war on Ukraine.But the suspicion remains that he was, at least in part, acting in his own interests. Hilsbos said that the first she knew about the source of Manchin’s wealth came from recent revelations in The Intercept and later the New York Times. They prompted demonstrations outside the power plant in April to demand its closure because of the additional pollution caused by gob.Although Hilsbos said she sympathised with the protesters concerns, she also understood the fears of people in Grant Town, once home to the largest underground mine in the world by the amount of coal produced. The mine closed in the mid-80s, shedding hundreds of jobs. Now the power plant, with about 50 workers, is the only major private employer in a town without a gas station or convenience store.“Some neighbours came forward and said, I’ve always hated that place. But when we went to the town council meeting and tried to explain to them why people were coming from everywhere to demonstrate here, they said, ‘We don’t want you here, don’t come’,” said Hilsbos.“A lot of the people involved in the town council have worked in the mines themselves. They feel like this is what we can do to hold on to our homeland, not have to move away, have this little plant as long as we can.”While few in neighbouring Fairmont knew where Enersystems was, Manchin also maintained a highly visible campaign office opposite the county courthouse in the heart of the city, between Bill’s Bail Bonds and a yoga studio. From there, he built a strong loyalty among West Virginia voters as a conservative Democrat prepared to stand up to the liberal wing of his party and to defend coal.Regan said the senator spent years cultivating an image of himself as his own man, above party politics.“He’s done a good job of it. He had his famous rifle ad, shooting the climate bill during the Obama administration, that he used to gain distance from the Democratic party on the national scale. But the effectiveness of that strategy may be running out. The magnitude of the shift within the state is too large for it to work anymore,” he said.In 2010, Democrats had a firm grip on the West Virginian legislature. Today, the Republicans are in control and they hold the governor’s office.All of West Virginia’s congressional seats have fallen to the Republicans, leaving Manchin as the last Democrat holding statewide office. Manchin won his Senate seat in 2012 with nearly 61% of the vote, beating the Republican candidate by more than 24 points. Six years later, his margin of victory was just three points and he took less than half the vote after openly criticising Donald Trump in a state where the then president was hugely popular and remains so.For all that, Greg Thomas, a prominent West Virginia Republican operative and Manchin opponent, does not think the coal plant revelations will damage the senator with most voters.“If you’re a West Virginia politician and you’re not under some sort of investigation, you’re not trying hard enough to help your people,” he said.“No one here cares about environmentalists protesting Joe Manchin’s personal financial holding. It’s gotten to the point where it’s like, who cares if he does? We assume they’re all corrupt.”Thomas said that Manchin’s political stands against his fellow Democrats have reinvigorated support.“His popularity in West Virginia is coming back after it dropped over his fights with Trump. Pushing back against Biden has helped. His position on energy issues has been big, he said.Manchin’s approval rating among West Virginia voters has surged to 57% from just 40% early last year – and is even higher among Republicans.Regan disagreed, saying that suspicions about his actions over the power plant are “threatening” to the senator because they come on the back of disenchantment among the state’s dwindling band of Democratic voters over his failure to support Biden’s agenda. Manchin’s vote against enshrining abortion rights into federal law as the supreme court appears poised to strike down Roe v Wade will further alienate some Democratic voters in the state.Regan said the last election left Manchin with a margin of victory of fewer than 20,000 votes – a narrow cushion to soak up the loss of angry Democrats who will not turn out to vote for him. He said the Grant Town power plant revelations are likely to stoke the dissatisfaction within that part of the electorate.“Those Democrats he has alienated by being against Build Back Better and the child tax credit, and those very, very popular provisions among Democrats, may cost him in terms of people who don’t vote or people who just simply won’t vote for him anymore. That may cost him the margin he has left and leave him in a bad situation in 2024.”Then there is Trump. West Virginia voted for him in both presidential elections by the largest margin of any state except Wyoming.“I think anybody in 2024 who is not prepared to say that Trump won the election – is not going to be an acceptable candidate anymore,” he said. “He can’t walk into the Republican camp, and he’ll have alienated too many Democrats to win.”TopicsJoe ManchinWest VirginiaUS politicsCoalFossil fuelsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      4 Takeaways From Tuesday’s Primaries in Nebraska and West Virginia

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      A federal candidate backed by former President Donald J. Trump won a contested primary for the second consecutive week on Tuesday, as Representative Alex Mooney resoundingly defeated Representative David McKinley in West Virginia in the first incumbent-vs.-incumbent primary race of 2022.But Mr. Trump’s endorsement scorecard took a hit in Nebraska, where his preferred candidate for governor, Charles W. Herbster, lost in a three-way race to Jim Pillen, a University of Nebraska regent who had the backing of the departing Gov. Pete Ricketts.Here are four takeaways from primary night in Nebraska and West Virginia:Trump successfully notched a win in West Virginia.On paper, West Virginia’s new Second Congressional District should have given an advantage to Mr. McKinley, 75, who had previously represented a larger area of its territory as he sought a seventh term. But Mr. Mooney, 50, who once led the Republican Party in neighboring Maryland, nonetheless romped across nearly the entire district, with the exception of the state’s northern panhandle, on Tuesday.Mr. Trump’s endorsement is widely seen as powering the Mooney campaign in one of the states where the former president has been most popular.Representative Alex Mooney of West Virginia at a rally last week in Greensburg, Pa., hosted by former President Donald J. Trump.Gene J. Puskar/Associated PressThroughout the race, Mr. Mooney slashed at Mr. McKinley as a “RINO” — “Republican in name only” — and took aim at some of his aisle-crossing votes, including for the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed Congress last year and the bipartisan legislation to create the commission examining the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Trump sided with Mr. Mooney early on, and invited him to appear alongside him at a rally in Pennsylvania last week. There, Mr. Trump joked that Mr. Mooney should defeat Mr. McKinley “easily.” He largely did, with landslide-level margins topping 70 percent in some of the eastern counties that border Maryland.The race comes a week after Mr. Trump helped J.D. Vance win an expensive Ohio Senate primary, and it again showed his influence when endorsing House and Senate candidates.Biden’s approach to governance suffered a defeatPresident Biden was not on the ballot in the West Virginia House race. But his belief that voters will reward members of Congress who put partisanship aside to get things done took another blow.Mr. McKinley seemingly fit very much in the long West Virginia tradition of bring-home-the-bacon lawmakers (See: Robert C. Byrd).Mr. McKinley had campaigned alongside Gov. Jim Justice, a Democrat-turned-Republican, and turned to Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, in the closing stretch as a pitchman.But Republican primary voters were in no mood for compromise.“Liberal David McKinley sided with Biden’s trillion-dollar spending spree,” said one Mooney ad that began with the narrator saying he had a “breaking MAGA alert.”On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Biden delivered a speech acknowledging that he had miscalculated in his belief that Trump-style Republicanism would fade with Mr. Trump’s departure. “I never expected — let me say — let me say this carefully: I never expected the Ultra-MAGA Republicans, who seem to control the Republican Party now, to have been able to control the Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said.On Tuesday evening, voters in West Virginia reaffirmed where the power in the party lies.Trump’s pick stumbles in a governor’s raceMr. Herbster had tried to make the Nebraska governor’s primary a referendum on Mr. Trump. He called it “a proxy war between the entire Republican establishment” and the former president. He cited Mr. Trump at every opportunity. He appeared with him at a rally.But the race became about Mr. Herbster himself, after he faced accusations of groping and unwanted contact from multiple women in the final weeks of the race.Voters instead went with Mr. Pillen, a former University of Nebraska football player, who had also run as a conservative choice with the backing of the departing governor. A third candidate, Brett Lindstrom, a state senator from outside Omaha, had campaigned for support from the more moderate faction of the party.Charles W. Herbster on Tuesday night in Lincoln, Neb., after losing the Republican primary for governor.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesMr. Herbster becomes the first Trump-endorsed candidate to lose in a 2022 primary — but most likely not the last.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Trump-backed Alex Mooney wins GOP nod for West Virginia’s House seat

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      Trump-backed Alex Mooney wins GOP nod for West Virginia’s House seatTuesday’s races in West Virginia and Nebraska seen as a measure of the former president’s grip on Republican voters A Trump-endorsed congressional candidate has won the Republican primary in West Virginia, while the former president’s favored candidate fell short in Nebraska’s primary election for governor.Alex Mooney on Tuesday beat fellow incumbent David McKinley in West Virginia’s second congressional district Republican primary on Tuesday.“Donald Trump loves West Virginia, and West Virginia loves Donald Trump,” Mooney said in his victory speech.Dr Oz embraced Trump’s big lie – will Maga voters reward him in Senate race?Read moreMcKinley was sharply criticized by the former president when he broke with his party as one of 13 Republicans to vote with the Democrats to support Joe Biden’s $1.2tn infrastructure bill. Trump called McKinley a Rino, or “Republican in Name Only”, and endorsed Mooney the day Biden signed the infrastructure law.The two incumbents, who have taken dramatically different approaches to their time in office, were pitted against each other in the state’s second congressional district after population losses cost West Virginia a US House seat.In Nebraska, Trump’s choice for governor, Charles Herbster, lost to an official at a university, according to US media reports, even though Trump had hosted a rally for him a little more than a week earlier.The Nebraska contest had been dominated in recent weeks by accusations that Herbster, an agriculture executive, had sexually harassed several women, which he has denied.US media outlets projected rival Jim Pillen, a hog farmer and university board member, would defeat Herbster and win the nomination.Also in Nebraska, Representative Don Bacon was on track to win the Republican primary after Edison Research predicted he would hold off challenger Steve Kuehl. Trump had urged voters to reject Bacon due to his criticism of Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Bacon will face a competitive November election in the Omaha-based district against Democrat Tony Vargas, who was projected by Edison Research to win his party’s primary.The races in Nebraska and West Virginia have provided some measure of the former president’s enduring sway with GOP voters. They come on the heels of a victory in Ohio by JD Vance, author of the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”, who defeated six other candidates to win the Republican primary for US Senate last week. Vance was also endorsed by Trump.The former US president is facing some of the biggest tests of his influence in Republican primary elections later this month. In Pennsylvania, his endorsed Senate candidate, Dr Mehmet Oz, is locked in a competitive race against former hedge fund CEO David McCormick and five others, while his candidate in North Carolina, US representative Ted Budd, is competing in a field that includes a dozen other Republicans.In Georgia, Trump has endorsed primary challengers to governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, both of whom defied him by rejecting his false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.In a story last month, the Nebraska Examiner interviewed six women who claimed Herbster had groped their buttocks, outside of their clothes, during political events or beauty pageants. A seventh woman said Herbster once cornered and forcibly kissed her.In Nebraska, the allegations against Herbster, a longtime supporter of Trump’s, didn’t stop the former president from holding a rally with him earlier this month.“I really think he’s going to do just a fantastic job, and if I didn’t feel that, I wouldn’t be here,” Trump said at the rally at a racetrack outside Omaha.Some voters said the allegations didn’t dissuade them from backing Herbster either.As she voted at an elementary school in northwest Omaha on Tuesday, Joann Kotan said she was “upset by the stories, but I don’t know if I believe them”. Ultimately, the 74-year-old said she voted for Herbster “because President Trump recommended him”.The Associated Press contributed reportingTopicsWest VirginiaHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansnewsReuse this content More