Tag: West Virginia

The Story:  Senator Joe Manchin (D - WV), an enthusiastic supporter of his state's coal industry, will be the ranking minority member of the important...

White evangelicals are the largest religious group in Alabama and West Virginia, where restrictions on abortion passed with 59 percent and 51 percent of the vote respectively. And that means the landscape for abortion policy in the United States may also be changing. Millennials are already more liberal in their leanings than any other generation. And over half of young Democrats (53 percent) in a related September poll say that abortion is a critical issue. The trends are different when it comes to the politics of White evangelicals. While White evangelicals’ have strong feelings about abortion, at least half of this group contends that other issues are just as important. Conservative positions on policies like immigration, climate change, government-sponsored health care, and tax reform are emerging in place of traditional “religious voter” issues. In contrast, religious groups that lean more Democratic—the religiously unaffiliated and black Protestants — are more convinced that the judge will vote to overturn Roe (more than half of the former and two-thirds of the latter). In part because white evangelicals have broadened their agenda and abortion is only one of many policy targets for the group. At the same time, increased threats to abortion access are bringing about a more concentrated focus on abortion by Democrats and leading to evolving opinions of millennials on this issue.

Less than a week after he lost a West Virginia congressional race by nearly 13 points, Democratic state senator Richard Ojeda announced Monday his plans to run for the presidency of the United States. “We got a long ways to go, this is going to be a long fight, but we’re going to do this together,” Ojeda said in a live statement broadcast online. “I’m Richard Ojeda, and I’m running for the president of the United States of America.” The Ojeda presidential committee formed less than a week after Republican Carol Miller squashed a surge of enthusiasm behind Ojeda’s campaign by decisively winning their race for the open U.S. House seat in West Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District. He criticized politicians who “legislate themselves into wealth” and proposed a system in which federal lawmakers are subject to a wealth cap of $1 million, and must donate the rest of their holdings to charity. Likewise, after leaving office, they can only receive retirement of up to $130,000 per year and total income of up to $250,000 per year, with anything above that being donated to charity. Also, Ojeda said federal lawmakers should be subject to “the very same health care systems as the average citizens,” harkening back to his congressional campaign’s emphasis on health care and protecting the Affordable Care Act. “I can guarantee you, we will finally see a fix in our health care system when the very people voting on those bills are directly affected,” he said. And even those are no guarantee for Ojeda. He won two of 18 counties in the 3rd District, Fayette and Boone. He then won re-election in 2016 by a whopping 44 points.

Gov. The 30-minute segment, titled “Perfect Storm,” aired on WVVA, an NBC affiliate based in Bluefield. It consisted of Bray Cary, an adviser to Justice and board member of publicly traded natural-gas driller EQT Corp., interviewing the governor about the potential goodness of Republicans if they swept Tuesday’s elections. The ad was paid for by West Virginians for Fair Courts, which is headed by Greg Thomas, a longtime GOP consultant in West Virginia and campaign manager to Blankenship for his Senate run in the Republican primary earlier this year. According to disclosures to the Federal Communications Commission, the group paid $5,000 to run the ad, which included campaign plugs for Republicans like Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and congressional candidate Carol Miller, and for nonpartisan judicial candidates like West Virginia Supreme Court Justices Tim Armstead and Evan Jenkins. Along with Cary interviewing Justice in a format reminiscent of a Charlie Rose interview, the segment features a video compilation of news clips generally focused on positive economic news in the state. When asked about the appearance of a state-made video that includes the governor and two state employees appearing in a political ad, he said the video compilation was not made for political purposes. “I see that point, but the video was made to document the then-current posture of the administration, in terms of what that political issue is,” he said. Abraham said he asked an attorney with the state Ethics Commission for an informal opinion, and that attorney agreed with him. Despite being technically nonpartisan candidates, Armstead and Jenkins both served as elected Republicans before Justice appointed them to the Supreme Court.

Midterm elections 2018: Trump braces for possible Democratic reckoning as results roll in – live Read more More than half of the polls have closed in the US, and preliminary results are beginning to roll in. In one of the most eye-catching developments of the night Democrat Beto O’Rourke took an early lead over Senator Ted Cruz. At one point, just a few hundred votes separated them. Also in Florida, more than 1.5 million felons will have their voting rights restored, after voters there backed a ballot initiative called Amendment 4. Felons are disproportionately likely to be black and lean Democratic, according to an analysis by the Tampa Bay Times. In key US Senate races: the vulnerable West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin will keep his seat. We are still waiting on results from another historic race in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams is fighting to become the first female black governor of any state. In one example, voter turnout in a critical swing district in Florida was 87% of what it was in 2016, when Trump won the presidency. Voter turnout in midterms is typically about two-thirds the level in presidential election years. Democrats will need to flip 21 more House seats to control the lower chamber.

Democrat Joe Manchin wins re-election in West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin will win re-election in West Virginia, CNN projects, defeating Republican challenger Patrick Morrisey and keeping in Democratic hands a seat in a state that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump. The state, once a Democratic stronghold, has become so heavily Republican that the sitting governor, Jim Justice, switched to the GOP last year. He broke with the rest of the party to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, though he waited to announce his position until Kavanaugh’s confirmation was already guaranteed. Barr's win comes in a district President Donald Trump carried by 15 percentage points in 2016. It was seen as a must-win for the GOP's hopes of holding onto control of the House. McGrath, who defeated Lexington Mayor Jim Gray in a Democratic primary, was part of a surprisingly strong crop of Democratic political newcomers, many of whom had military experience. These 4 Democratic senators will win re-election, CNN projects Four Democratic senators will win re-election, CNN projects. They are: Sen. Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota Sen. Martin Heinrich in New Mexico Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York Watch below: Latest projections for key Senate seats The mood at Trump’s watch party is "good," source says A White House source described the mood at President Trump’s watch party in the White House as “good,” adding one main reason is because it’s still early in the night. The source echoed what other White House officials are saying tonight — that if anyone learned anything from 2016, it’s to not make assumptions based on exit polls. Melania Trump is watching election results Sen. Sherrod Brown calls his win the "blueprint for our nation in 2020" Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, in his victory speech, referred to his victory as “the blueprint for our nation in 2020” — a line certain to spark 2020 presidential speculation around the populist lawmaker.

Former organized crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger was killed after he was transferred to a federal prison in West Virginia, according to multiple officials. #CNN #News

Notorious mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger had just been relocated to the West Virginia prison. The circumstances of his death are unclear. Bulger was convicted of 11 murders in three states. NBC’s Pete Williams reports. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc…

Kendra explains why, as a busy mom, she chose to run for Congress. Kendra is committed to serving West Virginia and making our needs the priority in Washington.

The big two lessons of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation are that U.S. politics right now is party politics – and that the Republican Party has fully absorbed the style and principles of Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, and other influences that tell it to never compromise and always exploit all short-term advantages as much as possible. Parties are (among other things) networks of individual partisans, and that means that within specialized areas – such as the top lawyers and the politicians who work with them – strong personal relationships develop. That helps a lot when things go wrong. That explains why Democrats, including several up for election in Republican states, almost unanimously opposed Kavanaugh (and the only exception, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, was widely thought to be an available “no” vote if needed). On the Republican side, meanwhile, things are the same as with the Democrats, except more formalized with the role of the Federalist Society as the arbiter and protector of Republican orthodoxy in judicial selections. George W. Bush and Donald Trump have nominated people from the most conservative edge of the conservative mainstream. That’s why his nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court was bitterly opposed by Democrats when George W. Bush was president. Faced with a Republican majority in the Senate in 2016, Obama sought to compromise – nominating an older moderate liberal, Merrick Garland. We’ll know more after the 2018 and 2020 elections.