West Virginia Republican Gubernatorial Primary Yields Upset

When Democrat Joe Manchin stepped down as West Virginia governor to take office as U.S. Senator last November, the state scheduled a special election for this October 4 to replace him. In last Saturday’s primary, acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin easily won the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side, however, local businessman and political newcomer Bill Maloney defeated the early favorite, former Secretary of State Betty Ireland, by a surprisingly wide margin.
 
Early polls of the race conducted by Public Policy Polling indicated that Ireland was a heavy favorite as late as the end of April. A PPP survey from April 21 to 24 showed Ireland favored by 31 percent, besting all other candidates, including Maloney, who only received 17 percent support. But a May 11 to 12 survey showed Maloney surging with 32 percent to Ireland’s 31 percent. In the end, Maloney won with 45 percent to 31 percent for Ireland.
 
Ireland had struggled to raise money for the race. By the beginning of April, she and her husband, Sam Haddad, had loaned her campaign $125,000, while bringing in just under $80,000 in donations. Maloney had raised nearly $140,000 by the same point‑and fortified his coffers with an additional $500,000 of his own money.
 
Maloney had been reaching voters across the state with television ads, radio ads, and direct mail for several weeks before the election. In the home stretch, he targeted Ireland’s supporters with a statewide negative ad buy aimed at her. Ireland’s final statewide television buy, on the other hand, topped out at just $17,000 and consisted of positive spots with stock imagery that did not feature the candidate herself.
 
Larry LaCorte, founder of the Charleston-based Democratic general consulting firm Rainmaker Media, which worked for state Senate President Jeff Kessler in the primary, says that Ireland’s messaging tried to cover too much ground and was overly convoluted. Cartney McCracken, a colleague of LaCorte’s at Rainmaker, agrees. “I was up in Morgantown three weeks ago, and [every Republican] I spoke to was pro-Maloney,” she says.
 
Maloney’s public profile received a significant boost during the October 2010 coal mine collapse in Chile, which trapped thirty-three miners underground for two months. Maloney lent his technical expertise in the broadening of the mine’s supply shaft, which led to the successful rescue of all the trapped miners—an accomplishment that he highlighted in a statewide positive ad. “He has very little negatives,” says McCracken.
 
Anthony Conchel, co-founder of Red State Communications, which has offices in West Virginia and Ohio, believes that Maloney’s media campaign was key in putting him over the top. “What I heard was the amount of direct mail and TV that Maloney was able to buy had a direct impact on the outcome,” says Conchel. “Betty Ireland obviously had strong name recognition statewide, but the amount of TV and mail that Maloney was able to do in the last month drove his name recognition up and possibly increased her negatives.” Conchel adds that the low turnout in this race, estimated at less than 15 percent, meant that the majority of voters were highly motivated and likely to have been paying attention to Maloney’s media campaign.
 
Despite Maloney’s triumph in the primary, he will face steep odds in the general election against acting Gov. Tomblin. West Virginia remains, after all, a state that is deeply Democratic in non-presidential elections. Indeed, a May 10 editorial in the online news source HuntingtonNews.net cites a bit of wisdom from a former Republican governor that the GOP nominee will need the support of 85 percent of the state’s Republicans in order to win in November. Republican voters in West Virginia often crossover to vote for conservative Democrats in state elections, making the state’s sizeable Democratic advantage among registered voters all the more difficult for Republican candidates to overcome.
 Noah Rothman is the online editor at C&E. E-mail him at nrothman@campaignsandelections.com