When President Trump urged West Virginia Republicans to vote against insurgent candidate Don Blankenship in Tuesday’s Senate primary, the convict and former coal CEO shot back that he was “Trumpier than Trump.”
If so, that was apparently too Trump even for West Virginia, a state where the president beat Hillary Clinton by 42 points and still boasts a job approval rating above 60 percent. Blankenship finished third in the primary, barely breaking 20 percent of the vote and dispelling the conventional wisdom that his candidacy had surged after a bizarre debate performance in which he lodged scarcely veiled racial attacks against the family of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (known to Blankenship as “Cocaine Mitch”), R-Ky.
“Great Job West Virginia,” tweeted Donald Trump, Jr., the president’s eldest son, who was dismissed as an establishment figure by Blankenship.
National Republicans were fearing the worst, since they have frequently found themselves powerless to stop primary candidates who jeopardized winnable general elections — in fact, their opposition only seemed to make these candidates stronger. Some of these Republicans put Trump himself in this category.
Trump won, of course, receiving more electoral votes than former President George W. Bush and carrying states that hadn’t gone Republican since Ronald Reagan was president. But many populist upstarts struggled mightily, culminating in Judge Roy Moore losing a Senate race to a conventional liberal Democrat in the overwhelmingly Republican state of Alabama.
If Tuesday night’s Republican primary winners were not like Moore, they were not exactly rejecting Trump either. Rep. Jim Renacci, who won the GOP primary to challenge Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, was Trump’s handpicked candidate.
Businessman and former state Rep. Mike Braun easily won the Republican nomination to take on Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., running on a pro-Trump platform. Braun positioned himself as an outsider and blasted the two sitting members of Congress he was running against as the “Swamp Brothers,” in reference to Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” mantra concerning D.C.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, the Republican who won the senatorial primary while Blankenship imploded, has defended Trump from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Both he and second-place finisher Rep. Evan Jenkins, R-W. Va., went out of their way to appear with Trump in the state last month.
A primary race in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District appeared to tilt narrowly Wednesday morning in favor of establishment-friendly state Sen. Troy Balderson over the more pro-Trump Melanie Leneghan, who also enjoyed the support of Trump-aligned Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
“Troy has worked tirelessly to cut taxes and create jobs in the State Senate, and he will continue that important work on behalf of Ohio’s 12th District in Congress,” said NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers, himself an Ohio Republican lawmaker, in a statement.
The president warned West Virginians to “Remember Alabama” when they voted. Trump had endorsed against Moore in the primary, but backed him in the general election — a set of circumstances some Republican sources worried would repeat themselves in West Virginia, complicating the party’s ability to distance themselves from Blankenship.
In the Alabama Senate race, many local Republicans simply refused to believe mounting allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore, brushing them aside as products of liberal media bias no matter how well-sourced. Blankenship was similarly trying to spin his conviction related to the death of 29 miners, for which he served a year in prison, as Obama-era regulatory overreach familiar to working West Virginians.
Blankenship nevertheless proved a bridge too far even for angry, anti-establishment Republican primary voters. He still drew a fifth of the vote. McConnell and other leading Republicans tried to avoid opposing him publicly, fretting that Washington’s involvement would backfire. They left a late anti-Blankenship push to conservative groups and Trump’s Twitter feed.
Republicans are now hopeful Tuesday night’s results put them in a good position to pick up Senate seats in the states Trump won easily in 2016, despite a tough national environment and scandals swirling the White House.
“Tonight is a great night for the Majority,” tweeted National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director Chris Hansen. “Maybe it’s time to do fewer deep dives on [Ted Cruz’s Democratic challenger] Beto [O’Rourke] and more pieces on all of the VERY vulnerable Democrats on the map in 2018.”
Republican primary voters may not have opted for the Trumpiest nominees. They settled for just Trumpy enough to possibly win.
