In October I wrote:

One deep red state that hasn’t gotten any attention is West Virginia, but the tremors of the impending political earthquake are being felt here, too.

[deletia]

There is no public polling available for WV for this election cycle, but from the behavior of the governor, the 2 WV senators, and my sniveling nepo baby House rep it feels like the political ground of WV is shaking. And the source of that shaking is the erosion of Trump’s approval rating.

And I was right.

On Tuesday I referred to a state house race where the local Koch group Americans For Prosperity WV primaried a reliable Republican vote because he didn’t slavishly vote for everything they wanted. The ousted member ran a write-in campaign, and the Democrat won the seat. This is how the AFPWV leadership reacted:

You know you’re in a cult when you call the normal primary process a “coup”.

AFPWV also boasted about spending “six figures” to elect…checks notes…5 candidates:

Five candidates and hundreds of thousands of dark outside dollars. And when I posted mocking this ridiculous, the AFPWV director liked and retreated my tweet, not at all embarrassed by this show of ineptitude. And not at all ashamed about using outside money to drown out the will of the people who live here. Crowing about a victory where you unfairly overweighted the scale is the mark of someone who truly doesn’t get it.

The sheer failure of the Koch ideas in WV is best summed up here:

Overall, state Democrats picked up 12 seats in the House of Delegates. Eight of them are women, too. And that’s because they focused on local issues, and not the concerns of out of state millionaire vultures:

Thacker, a first-time candidate, said the current Legislature hasn’t paid attention to what people in Jefferson County wanted on issues like data centers. Thacker said many residents in her district worry that the area is developing too fast, and that there’s not enough water for people, let alone data centers.

“There are issues that are very specific to our county that run the gamut. They’re not Republican issues. They’re not Democrat issues. They’re not national issues. They are our issues, and we need to focus on those. And that’s what I’ve been doing,” Thacker said.

Jefferson County sits across the state border from Loudoun County, Virginia, which has one of the highest median incomes in the country. Public teachers living in Jefferson County drive to work in Virginia, where they can earn more money, she said.

“I’m hoping that we can get a locality pay that isn’t just for the Eastern Panhandle, but a locality pay for every county that’s higher than average cost of living,” Thacker said. “Because our cost of living here, a typical house in this area is like $400,000. There are parts of West Virginia where you can buy a house for $40,000. You know, one tenth of what it costs here. And yet, we all have the same base pay scale wherever we are in West Virginia. That doesn’t work.”

It’s also worth noting that Jefferson County (along with Berkeley County, which is now pink), is one of the 2 counties experiencing steady and significant population growth. And Jefferson County is also dealing with an unwanted water bottling plant proposal. Right before the election news came out that the current (Republican) County Commissioner had brokered a real estate deal to do an end run around the decision of the County Commission. So he got booted, too. The Good Ol’ Boy network is also at risk because the people moving in are more diverse, too. The next election is going to be very interesting.

I’ll leave you with this: