This will be a rather short entry, although there is a lot of drama for such a small state and the outcomes pretty much settled. For Governor, incumbent Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin should win reelection with little problem. Meanwhile, Joe Manchin runs for a full term in the Senate after winning a special election in 2010 to complete the term of deceased Senator Robert Byrd. He will most likely face John Raese again for the Republicans. For such a conservative state, such a Republican state, one would think that the GOP can do better than a three time loser for a Senate seat. In 2010, Manchin crushed Raese in the General election and there is no reason he will not do the same thing again this time around. Initial polling puts Manchin an average of 32 points ahead and there is practically nothing Raese can do to narrow that gap.

In actuality, Manchin is a Democrat I believe the Republicans can live with in the Senate. He is more centrist than an ideologue and there is a reason for that. He has to be given the political make up of the state. Besides, they have their resident “liberal” in Jay Rockefeller, the senior Senator from the state. Hence, should Manchin veer left, he has to answer to the electorate. If that happens- and there are no indications it will- then a candidate like Raese may find an opening.

In 2008, Obama lost West Virginia by 13 points to John McCain. It is doubtful he will come remotely close this year. With approval ratings in the low 30s, this is one state where we can safely say that Obama is not a welcome man. Considering that coal plays a very important role in the state’s economy, Obama’s attacks on coal, insistence on the clean coal pipe dream and unwavering support of an alternative energy utopia, he stands no chance in 2012. In 2008, Obama managed to carry only 7 of West Virginia’s 55 counties. Ironically, some of them are the very ones that saw population decreases. Which brings us to the subject of redistricting and the controversy surrounding it.

Unlike many other states, West Virginia, when redistricting, demands that county lines be respected and that they not be split. As a result, many times there will be a differential in the ideal population counts for each district beyond those normally associated in other states. This becomes evident in states with small populations where a 2000-3000 difference in population between districts can amount to a .22% deviation from the ideal. As a general rule, deviations of that magnitude automatically trigger alleged violations of the one man-one vote concept. And that was precisely the reasoning of the District Court in ruling the new map unconstitutional. The State then appealed to the US Supreme Court. Coincidentally, a similar challenge out of Texas was being litigated before the Court, although it was slightly different in that the Texas dispute involved the VRA.

The Supreme Court then ruled on January 20th that the District Court in Texas basically exceeded its authority by creating new maps without consideration of the legislatively drawn maps. Without outright ruling that courts lacked that authority, they laid down guidelines that said the courts had to start with the legislatively-drawn maps as the primary template since they reflect the preferences of the people of the state through their elected officials. And since deference is given to those maps, provided they do not violate the VRA or the Constitution, they should prevail. In short, total redraws by courts will be frowned upon. In a one sentence statement, they issued a stay against the court order in the West Virginia case. Usually when a stay is granted, they deem that the State will likely prevail in later court action. Hence, the districts will likely stay intact with minor variations in West Virginia.

In the state, the southern area of the state and the northern panhandle saw population decreases while the eastern panhandle saw almost equal population increases One of the problems in West Virginia is media coverage. Specifically, candidates, in order to get their message out, usually have to buy time on low capacity local stations, or on stations based in the expensive DC market. This problem manifested itself in the 2010 midterm elections.

Regardless, with the districts now pretty much established, it is easier to prognosticate. In the 1st District, Republican incumbent David McKinley will likely face Democratic activist Susan Thorn and he should prevail. In the 2nd, Shelly Moore Capito, a Republican will likely face a May primary challenge against state delegate Jonathan Miller. However, Capito is a safe Republican in this state. In fact, she was considered as a possible candidate for Governor, but deferred on that race in order to retain her House seat. However, one needs to keep an eye on her political future. Although she passed up a run for Governor, there is a Senate election in 2014 for Jay Rockefeller’s seat. As a result, one will have to see how well Miller performs in the primary. A decent showing can only help his political aspirations as the heir apparent to Capito in the 2nd District should she decide on a Senate run in 2014.

The only Democrat in the congressional delegation- Nick Rahall- represents the 3rd District. Either 2010 opponent Lee Bias or Tea Party activist/attorney Bill Lester will oppose him for the Republicans. The bottom line is that there will likely be no changes in the political equation out of West Virginia. Tomblin will win a full term for Governor as Manchin will prevail for a full 6-year term. The House delegation will remain the same.

And I cannot believe I got over 950 words on this entry…

Running totals thus far:
Obama with 144 electoral votes/ Romney with 199 votes;
Net gain of 2 Governors;
Net gain of 4 Senate seats, and;
Net loss of 7 House seats.

Next: Pennsylvania

The early November statewide elections in Kentucky and West Virginia were something of a yawn compared to the excitement of 2009 where big Republican wins in Virginia and New Jersey presaged the 2010 wave that swept Republicans into a dominant position in the House and in states nationwide.

In Kentucky, Republican nominee David Williams was never really a threat to Steve Beshear.

In West Virginia the race was at least closer with Bill Maloney (and some timely help from the RGA) giving Earl Ray Tomblin a real race.  But here too, Republicans not could get over the “Appalachian effect” that keeps conservative Democrats in office even as their national party heads further left and other conservative Democrats throughout the South and elsewhere have become endangered species.

One strong indicator of how uninteresting these two Appalachian races were is that most of the coverage after Election Day focused on Ohio and Virginia—for initiatives and control of the state legislature—rather than the two states with Governor’s races.

But it’s important to go deeper than just two Governor’s races.  Aaron Blake of the Washington Post has coined the term “Appalachian Bubble” to describe the fact that in both statewide races and in selecting their Congressmen, the Appalachian states and districts seem to be a pocket of resistance against the Republican takeover of the South and rural places across the country.

So what’s going on?  Let’s start by looking at two Governor’s races:  Last week’s election in West Virginia and the election two years ago in neighboring Virginia.  Some of the differences between the support that Maloney received in West Virginia and the support that McDonnell won in Virginia can be attributed to the political environment—while Obama and Democrats haven’t really regained much popularity, some of the anger at them has ebbed since 2009.  But there are also some fundamental differences between the two races worth examining.

As you can see, Maloney did significantly worse with McCain voters than did McDonnell and slightly worse with Republicans.  He also lost middle-aged and senior voters at higher rates than he did younger voters and actually out-performed McDonnell among Democrats.  Finally, Maloney underperformed McDonnell with both conservatives and moderates at about the same rate.

In isolation, these numbers don’t tell the whole story.  But for someone whose career in politics and polling has seen the shift of states like Oklahoma and Texas from Democrat-dominated to Republican-dominated and who has recently polled for numerous Republican winners as Louisiana has made the same shift, they are hauntingly familiar.

Here then are three diagnoses and prescriptions to burst the “Appalachian Bubble”:

• Republicans still have not overcome “cultural Democrats.”
  

While some in the media and national Democrat wish-casting about 2012 will argue that the poor performance by Maloney among voters aged 45-64 and 65+ was about a successful strategy of attacking him on Republican plans related to Medicare and Social Security, those of us with memories of earlier transitions in the South see this as part of a pattern where lifetime Democratic voters are just slower to shift their allegiances.

This is also part of the reason why the only group among whom Maloney outperformed McDonnell was Democratic voters—in Virginia the conservative Democrats of ten or 20 years ago are now Republicans; in Appalachia they’re still Democrats and while they can be won, they must be won in each race again and again.

In places like Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and throughout the South, we have slowly converted these cultural Democrats using a variety of issues (don’t let anyone tell you it was only social issues, though they were important).

Some of those issues, such as social issues, still matter greatly while others, like anti-communism and U.S.-Soviet relations, will have to be replaced with new issues like environmental and other regulations.

The biggest factor in overcoming these “cultural Democrats” though was years of focused outreach, advocacy, and education.  Moving voters from national/state ticket splitters to reliable Republicans takes time and patience, and it takes infrastructure and ongoing effort.  If Republicans want to burst the “Appalachian Bubble,” we’ll need to make the investments of time and treasure on the ground to do so.

• We aren’t the populists/reformers.
  

Another big reason Republicans were so successful at converting many historically Democratic states over the past several decades is that we took advantage of the corruption that is endemic to a state with a long history of one-party rule and campaigned as populists and reformers.

Especially in an area like Appalachia, where distrust of everything from big businesses to the federal government (and often the state government, too) is less of a cyclical pattern and more of an enduring cultural fact, being the populist candidate in a race is critical.  And yet Republicans have too often nominated big-businessman-politicians or the next guy on the leadership rolls and ceded the archetypical good-old-boy populist role to the Democrat in the race.

One of the keys to GOP success in other places that have re-aligned from Democratic to Republican in the last 30-plus years was finding candidates who looked and sounded like they were more comfortable shouting up at the seat of power than they were lecturing down from it.  We don’t seem to have done this yet in many of the races we lose in Appalachia.

• We try too hard to “nationalize” these races.
  

One of the great piece of inherited wisdom among D.C. political consultants is that when the political winds are at your back, you want to make every race about national issues, while when they’re in your face, you want to make every race as local as possible.

This turns out to be true most of the time, but it hurt us for years in the more rural (and slower to convert to Republican candidates) places in states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana; and I believe it is still hurting us in Appalachia.

The problem is that while the voters in these places agree with us on the issues, they have an inherent cultural resistance to being told by “outsiders” how to think and what to do.

When those “outsiders” are from Washington, DC, the problem is compounded many times.

It damages any ability GOP candidates have to run as populists and make meaningful connections as part of the community of voters they want to represent—in trying to support Republican candidates on national issues, we make them national candidates among voters whose entire worldview is rooted in a much narrower and closer sense of community.

When we look at the recent history of successful Appalachian Democrats, from Joe Manchin, to Earl Ray Tomblin, to incumbent Democratic Congressmen from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, perhaps the most important key to their success is that they have portrayed themselves as “one of us” to their constituents and take every opportunity to make arguments that are “us versus other,” frequently at the expense of their own party’s national leadership.

While making these Democrats “own” the failures and policies of their party seems like the right strategy, they have survived because they are able to turn this line of attack into another example of how rooted they are in the Appalachian communities and culture that they represent and turn their Republican opponents into creatures of “outsiders” and “Washington.”

Natural gas is the cleanest-burning and most efficient of all the fossil fuels. Because of the age of the Appalachian Mountains, 480-600 million years old, a wealth of fossil fuels, i.e. coal, oil and natural gas was created by Mother Nature ripe for the picking by this country and probably enough to keep the US fuel-independent for a very long time.

Natural gas drilling has been going on for a very long time in West Virginia. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Corky DeMarco, the Executive Director of the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association (WVONGA) and he has provided me with a wealth of information. The first commercial well started producing in 1859 and here’s a bit of trivia for everyone: George Washington even surveyed a natural gas well there in 1750.

There are currently 60,000 active NG wells in West Virginia, with 300 of them being in the Marcellus Shale. Because of the unique properties of shale, special and different drilling techniques must be used. The problem with shale is it has insufficient permeability to allow enough fluid flow to a well bore. Because of the unique properties of shale, the extraction of natural gas in these areas requires a different method called “hydraulic fracking.” This “fracking” or “fracturing” of the rock can be either natural or man-made and is extended by internal fluid pressure which opens the fracture and causes it to grow into the rock. Man-made fractures are created by pumping a cocktail of various chemicals through a bore hole. The fracture must then be kept open, usually by sand. This process can be controversial and environmentalists and citizens have chimed in. Please see my previous post on hydro-fracking for more in depth info and a power-point presentation of the process.

Below is a map of the Marcellus Shale, courtesy of the USGS, which covers most of West Virginia, a good part of Pennsylvania, southern New York and eastern Ohio:

Because shale NG extraction is relatively new to West Virginia, WVONGA commissioned an independent economic impact study by the Bureau of Business and Economic Research College of Business and Economics West Virginia University. This 57-page study was released on January 25, 2011 at a press conference in Charleston and can be seen here. Below is a one-page summary:

WVONGA_SummaryPts

As one can see, many jobs will be created. Of key note is the point:

Future development of Marcellus Shale in West Virginia is dependent on changes to federal and state policies [emphasis mine] as well as changes to tax and environmental policies in other Marcellus Shale states.

Please see my post on the EPA recently revoking an already-in-use coal mine permit in West Virginia, so naturally one of Mr. DeMarco’s key statements to me was:

When the EPA comes in and withdraws permits it is certainly disconcerting and what it really amounts to is a “taking” of the company and assets which have already invested. We can’t expect to compete in a global economy if we have uncertainty in the industry.

Mr. DeMarco explained to me originally in the Marcellus, drilling took place where oil pooled, not in the source rock. As a result 60-80% of the NG in those wells was left, however those wells can be revisited with the new technology used to drill in shale. And here is the shocker. According to Mr. DeMarco the US as a whole uses less than 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas annually. At a meeting 2 years ago in Pennsylvania, estimates were the Appalachian basin collectively with the Utica shale in Ohio held 180 trillion cf of natural gas. Later estimates rose to 500T cf, and now current estimates are a whopping 750 trillion cubic feet of reserves, enough to keep this country energy independent for a very long time, of course if there is no interference from the Feds and companies are willing to invest the huge amount of dollars it would take. These reserves if correct even far outweigh those in the Middle East. And yes, I am positive I heard him correctly. I even asked him to repeat because I was so stunned.

Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) and Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK), co-chairs of the Natural Gas Caucus sent this letter off to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on January 5 of this year because of concerns

the Department of the Interior may seek to impose new regulations on the natural gas extraction process on federal lands and urge you to not institute any new regulatory burdens before the completion of the 2010-2012 Environmental Protection Agency study on hydraulic fracturing.

Check out the other signatories. And of course, not to be outdone progressives in Congress led by Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) fired their own letter off to Salazar on the 12th to

express our strong support of your recent announcement of plans to develop a new policy for the public disclosure of chemical compounds used in hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking on public lands. This is a critical step forward in encouraging the oil and gas industry to be more transparent and responsibly address the potential implications of hydraulic fracturing on water supplies and public health.

I can’t make out all the signatories, but we have many of the “usual suspects” such as Frank, Kucinich, Moran, Woolsey, et al. And on the heels of Obama’s State of the Union address, even before he finished speaking, I had this statement from Doc Hastings, Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee in my email box:

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 25, 2011 – House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) released the following statement regarding the President’s State of the Union address:

“The President spoke at length tonight on the need to increase our economic competiveness and create new jobs. However, it’s the spending and job-destroying policies of his Administration that are jeopardizing our economic future.

“Today, American families are facing the harsh realities of rising gas prices, higher electricity costs and near double-digit unemployment. Instead of addressing these issues head-on, the Administration has spent the past two years blocking access to America’s resources that create jobs and produce more energy. These policies have only succeeded in driving American jobs overseas, threatening our economic recovery and making us more dependent on hostile foreign nations for our energy needs.

“A strong economy needs access to an abundant and affordable energy supply – we have both here in America. The President needs to embrace a robust plan to produce all types of American energy – from renewable to American-made oil and natural gas – and it has to be done without harmful government subsidies or unrealistic mandates. America cannot regulate its way back to prosperity. Certainty in the free market, not fear of red tape, is what will ultimately create jobs and grow the economy.

While it certainly appears that West Virginia is well on its way, at least at this point, with proceeding with drilling more wells in the Marcellus, the same cannot be said for New York. Ex-governor Paterson recently Executive Ordered a ban on horizontal fracking in NY after ACORN-spawned Working Families Party convinced the State Assembly to pass a bill placing a moratorium on all hydrofracking for fears residents might be able to set their tap water on fire. Here is Mark Ruffalo, spokesman for WFP or this subject:

Guess what Ruffalo: you may be a looker but no way will I be going to one of your movies, ever again. And yes, I know WFP was leading the charge because I signed up for their emails long ago and have been following the progress of this. Mr. DeMarco assured me if the process is done correctly, with cement and steel casings on the drill pipes at least 100 feet down, hydrofracking is extremely safe.

I just checked our natural gas bill. We used 189 cubic feet in December. In northern Ohio. $148 at the rate of $0.59360 per CCF for a 3,000 sq ft house kept at 70 degrees. Imagine what 750 trillion cf can do.

Fuel for thought.

Please visit the WVONGA website for a wealth of info on natural gas, including this interactive map of wells there.

Crossposted at Conservative Outlooks

Crossposted at Procinct.net