Gayle Manchin, left, listens as her husband West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin speaks to the media following a news conference at his campaign headquarters on Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010, in Charleston, W.Va. Manchin defeated Ken Hechler and Sheirl Fletcher in a special election and will represent the Democrats in the November general election to fill the void left by the death of U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd. (AP Photo/Randy Snyder)
My buddy Hoppy Kercheval over at MetroNews has declared “mountaintop removal opponents” among the losers in Saturday’s special primary election to nominate candidates to fill Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s Senate seat. In his latest commentary, Hoppy opines:
Democrat Ken Hechler campaigned as a protest vote against the controversial mining technique. He got nearly 16,000 votes (17 percent), but put that in perspective. There were 840,844 Democrats and independents eligible to vote for Hechler/against mountain top removal and only 2 percent did.
If we’re counting how many of the eligible voters cast ballots, by the way, Hoppy’s friend and boss John Raese got only just less than 11 percent of his possible votes from registered Republicans across West Virginia.
On Hoppy’s Talkline show this morning, WVLY’s Howard Monroe offered a different perspective — that perhaps the 17 percent of voters who sided with Ken Hechler were the hard-core mountaintop removal opponents, folks to whom that issue is the only issue, or at least by far the most important one.
I’ve written before that Hechler’s self-proclaimed protest candidacy against mountaintop removal carried a political danger for citizen groups who are fighting the practice. A huge win for Gov. Manchin seemed likely all along, and it has drawn the predicted reaction from one of coal’s biggest boosters in the state media (Hoppy).
But some of the polling data seems to back up what Howard Monroe was saying. For example, the nationwide 2008 poll on mountaintop removal reported that 56 percent of those surveyed opposed mountaintop removal. But only 17 percent of those strongly opposed the practice.
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You’re right, Ken, in that Hoppy has framed the results in the worst possible way for MTR opponents.
Folks should know that in a poll commissioned by the same organization in 2004, *West Virginia voters* opposed mtr by a margin of almost 2:1: http://www.appalachian-center.org/poll_results/wv_mtr_poll_files/frame.htm
It is in fact remarkable that Ken garnered one sixth of the vote, in view of the fact that he raised only about $18,000, while Manchin raised over $1M.
And as Ken pointed out, many voters chose Manchin for other reasons than MTR.
You guys are are “spinning” this so hard it’s making me kind of dizzy. The fact that Manchin raised $1M to Hechler’s $18,000 had nothing to do with the results of the election, Manchin didn’t really spend any money. When Hechler decided to align himself with the law breaking protestors of Boone County most of the WV voters turned against him. It is very politically correct these days to say you are against mountain top mining and the coal industry in general when asked skillfully crafted questions by pollsters hired by anti mining groups, but when someone says “Elect me and I will stop the mining practice” you see where it gets them.
Concerned Miner,
You’re probably right that the $1 million to $18,000 had nothing to do with the results — in that Gov. Manchin didn’t do a ton of campaigning with that money, at least in the primary.
I’ve not seen any polling data or even anecdotal evidence to support your statement that by siding with the MTR protesters Hechler turned voters away from him. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any exit polling data that’s been made available from Saturday’s primary. Without that, there’s no way to really know or make informed statements about why people voted for Gov. Manchin or why people did or didn’t vote for Ken Hechler.
If you go back and read my original post on this topic, I wrote this:
“The danger for mountaintop removal opponents is that Manchin, a very popular governor, could easily defeat Hechler in the primary, for reasons that don’t necessarily have much to do with the coal industry. Still, the victory could be portrayed by the industry as proof that mountaintop removal has strong support among state residents.”
Running for office as a protest on one specific issue in a world that is so complex is always a dangerous thing. Any specific issue — whether mountaintop removal or something completely unrelated to coal and energy — has a smaller group of die-hard activists on both sides. Those folks will vote on that issue alone. The public opinion surveys in West Virginia suggest MTR is such an issue — some folks will vote only on that issue, but most won’t.
That’s just my take, not my spin … and you’re more than welcome to your own thoughts … if you have some polling data or evidence to support them, please do post it.
Ken.
Concerned Miner, it is a hard fact that coal companies operating in WV have broken the law thousands of times more than your “lawbreaking protesters”. The difference is that when a coal company breaks the law it affects the health of everyone in the area. Study after study shows that the closer a person lives to a mine, the more sick they are, even when adjusting for confounding variables. Protesters are breaking minor laws to bring attention to greater atrocities (civil disobedience) while coal companies break major laws (the Clean Water Act) and negatively affect the health, well-being, and quality of life for everyone downstream.
I view things a little differently – Manchin’s win is a vote for the status quo. Even if he does make it to Washington, the EPA as it is right now is still going to make things very interesting (in what I think is a good and longggggggggg overdue way) in this state for the next couple of years.