The four candidates stood on a stage in Raleigh County, before a crowd of local Republicans in early February.
Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, former Delegate Moore Capito, car dealer Chris Miller and Secretary of State Mac Warner were duded up in their coats and ties. At the center was longtime MetroNews broadcaster Hoppy Kercheval.
The radio veteran asked the question that has seemed to drive the state GOP primary for the governor’s seat: who is the biggest conservative of them all?
It’s hard to tell who is. Each front-runner has beat the same drum: they’re pro-gun, pro-coal, pro-Trump.
But, like snowflakes under a microscope, little differences emerge.
There’s Morrisey, a warrior for coal, guns and what he calls “traditional values.” Capito has backed some of the state’s most conservative policies during his time in the House of Delegates, but also supported more liberal policies like paid family leave. Miller is the wildcard with no political experience. And Warner, taking up the rear, offers fairly typical Republican policies with a dash of conspiracy theory.
Patrick Morrisey
In 2015, Morrisey, West Virginia’s first Republican Attorney General since the Great Depression, was only two years into his term, and already floating a run for governor.
Prior to his election, Morrisey had been typical of the new blood that flooded into Jefferson County in the 2000s. Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, he moved to Harper’s Ferry and made the commute to D.C. to work as a lobbyist.
Every so often, he’d stop at The Journal in Martinsburg. The editors on duty would usher him into a corner of the newsroom with a big table and a stained coffee maker. Morrisey’s voice boomed through the room as he regaled the editors with his plans for fighting the federal government.
After one of those meetings, an article in The Journal recounted Morrisey’s decision to remain attorney general so he could keep fighting in court. Morrisey said he wanted to litigate U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations, improve the business climate and fight substance abuse.
READ MORE: Here are the questions we tried to get Morrisey to answer for this story.
For the next nine years, Morrisey largely delivered.
He won a major victory in beating back Obama-era efforts to force coal-fired power plants to reduce greenhouse emissions. He successfully defended the state’s anti-union “Right to Work” law. He litigated a case that overturned a federal law that banned states being barred from giving tax cuts if they received certain COVID relief dollars.
Morrisey helped negotiate landmark settlements against opioid companies for the pills they pumped into West Virginia. Those settlements — which opponents have attacked as being too little and paying trial lawyers too much — worked out to be the nation’s highest per capita, with $554 for every man, woman and child in the state.
Morrisey waded into the national stage, joining lawsuits over immigration, transgender kids in sports and vaccine mandates. His face is plastered across the right-wing media ecosystem, with interviews on Fox and Newsmax.
This exposure might explain why Morrisey is currently getting donations from folks across the country. A look at campaign finance records show he’s received small donations from a fireman in Boston, a construction worker in Colorado and a cashier in Idaho.
The sound bites drive the campaign for Morrisey. When it comes to economic development, he’s going to have a “backyard brawl” with neighboring states by slashing regulations and taxes to spur business recruitment. He’s going to “keep woke ideas out of West Virginia” and “fight the deep state.”
Just how exactly he’ll do it gets murky. Mountain State Spotlight asked him for specifics, and shared questions from our readers, but his campaign wouldn’t answer them.
Moore Capito
The Dec. 21, 2023, governor’s press briefing was packed full of news.
Sitting in front of the American and West Virginia flags, Gov. Jim Justice opened with a call for prayer for two state troopers who’d been shot serving a warrant.
Shimmying his chair back and forth, Justice shuffled his papers.
“OK, we have a special announcement by a friend, Moore Capito, our Judiciary Chair in the House of Delegates is with us now, so Moore, if you’d like, you can go ahead and … but you’re a great friend,” Justice said.
The camera cut to Moore Capito, son of U.S. Sen. Shelly Moore Capito and grandson of former Gov. Arch Moore. Capito looked directly into the camera and said after seven years in the House of Delegates, he was resigning to focus on his run for governor.
“I was elected in 2016 alongside two ‘get it done’ conservatives, you being one of them, governor and Donald Trump as president,” Capito said. “And boy have we gotten it done. We’ve built roads, we’ve cut taxes and we’ve created so many jobs.”
READ MORE: Here are the questions we tried to get Capito to answer for this story.
Capito, now in a dead heat with Morrisey, received an endorsement from Justice six months later.
Called “laser focused” in Justice’s endorsement, Capito has voted in favor of a slate of Republican staples over the last seven years like the 2023 personal income tax cut and the state’s abortion ban.
But he’s not a cookie-cutter conservative.
During his time in the House of Delegates, he was a lead sponsor on multiple attempts to establish a paid family leave act for state employees, all of which failed to get approval from the GOP supermajority. He voted in favor of medical marijuana, even sponsoring a bill to make edibles legal. In 2019, he risked angering hard-core conservatives in his own party when he sponsored a bill that would ban conversion therapy for gay and transgender minors in the state. When the Legislature rolled back standards on aboveground storage of chemicals, Capito broke ranks with his party and voted against it.
Mountain State Spotlight asked Capito about some of these things, along with questions from readers. He didn’t answer.
Chris Miller
Dutch Miller, “High Price Terminator”.
That’s the slogan that flashed across screens in a 2014 advertisement for the West Virginia car dealership chain founded by H.D. “Dutch” Miller.
Sporting a buzz cut, a leather jacket, makeup on the side of his face and a pair of shades, Dutch’s grandson, Chris Miller, channeled the original Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as he put on a thick Austrian accent.
“I am the high price Terminator,” he said. “Come with me, if you want a deal.”
A decade later, Miller would be following in the former California governor’s footsteps with his own run for office .
Best known for his wacky car commercials, Miller entered the race with no government experience. While his mother, Carol, held seats in the statehouse and is currently a sitting U.S. Representative, the younger Miller stuck to selling cars. Over the last couple years, he’s been dipping his toes in the water, giving speeches at the Conservative Political Action Conference and increasing his social media presence with frequent conspiracy theories.
READ MORE: Here are the questions we tried to get Miller to answer for this story.
Hearkening back to Justice’s first gubernatorial run in 2016, Miller has leaned heavily into his experience as a businessman.
With a $3 million loan to himself, Miller started making waves in the election with proclamations that he’d eliminate the personal income tax on day one. When asked how the state could make up for the 40% hit in its revenue that tax cut would cause, Miller has said all officials need to do is “unleash capitalism.”
On education, Miller has also been a bit of an outlier. He advocates cutting the state Department of Education, blaming the bureaucracy for sucking up resources. Miller said the state could use the savings to raise teachers’ pay.
As far as Miller’s campaign goes, the ads brim with testosterone.
In one commercial, he drives to a shooting range in a Humvee and fires a semi-automatic rifle. Another one shows Miller, a boxer, sparring in the ring.
The venom of the campaign has focused on Morrisey, trying to link him to supporting gender transitions for minors. Ad after ad from the Miller camp has accused Morrisey of lobbying on behalf of trans health care providers and doing nothing about during his time as attorney general.
Morrisey has actually defended — and lost — a state law that would ban transgender children from competing in high school sports. He’s also signed onto multi-state litigation against the federal government over the same issue.
Miller would not answer questions from Mountain State Spotlight and our readers about his platform.
Mac Warner
Mac Warner, West Virginia’s two-term secretary of state, sits in his campaign headquarters in downtown Charleston. It’s 10 a.m. and he’s the only one in the office — adjacent is a wide open room, with stacks of paper lining a divider wall. In the background, a printer shoots out a ream of paper.
Warner, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and tie slightly askew, looks like a candidate running for office.
Compared to the other GOP front-runners, Warner’s campaign has been relatively shoestring. He’s raised a little more than $500,000, compared to the $3.3 million by Morrisey. While it’s hard to drive across the state without seeing a “Mac Warner for Governor” sign, his campaign consistently trails in the polls.
Over the last few years, Warner has made state and national headlines when he accused the CIA and the FBI of stealing the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The Secretary of State said it wasn’t a case of stuffing ballot boxes, but a “psychological operation” to suppress negative news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, an issue that’s a rallying cry for right-wing conspiracy theorists.
He said the media has “wanted to pigeon hole me as a nutcase.” While Warner’s claims haven’t been verified, he contends as a Secretary of State, he’s in the know.
READ MORE: Here’s a transcript of Mountain State Spotlight’s interview with Warner.
Peeling that back, Warner’s campaign platform is fairly typical: he wants lower taxes, higher pay for teachers and an investment in infrastructure. Child care, according to Warner, is a top priority, especially after the Legislature failed to do anything about it this year.
Drawing from his 23-year career in the U.S. Army, the candidate said a Warner administration would be about “teamwork”, taking in viewpoints from the Legislature, experts and non-governmental organizations.
“The people of West Virginia are gonna see a whole new government when we come into the administration,” Warner said. Warner said he hopes to leverage his wife Debbie’s time in the House of Delegates to get policies passed. He says what sets him apart from the other candidates is that he’s in this race to be governor. The others, he said, are using it as a stepping stone to a federal office.
“I want to be governor of West Virginia simply because of my love. I’ve been all over the world, been to more than 80 countries, lived in eight states, been to all 50 states,” Warner said. “I could’ve lived anywhere I wanted, but I chose to come right back here to West Virginia because of my love.”
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These four men aren’t West Virginians’ — or even Republicans’ — only choice for governor. In the GOP primary, there’s also Kevin “KC” Christian, who is proposing “Mountaineer Deliberative Democracy” which among other things includes expanding the political boundaries of the state. Mitch Roberts, who ran as a write-in during the 2020 election and received 152 votes, is also vying for the nomination.
Whichever Republican wins the May 14 primary will go on to the general election. On the November ballot, they’ll face the presumptive Democratic nominee Steve Williams, Huntington’s first three-term mayor, and Chase Linko-Looper of the Mountain Party.