Kercheval, the prominent West Virginia radio host, said on his Friday radio show as the news broke that the development was a big blow for Democrats in the state, but one that isn’t necessarily a big surprise. “Manchin has been toying with this independence for a long time. Even though he’s a Democrat, he’s been operating in Washington like an independent for a while,” Kercheval said.

I mean, it’s a symptom, not a cause. West Virginia went from being very Democratic to very Republican. Coal is very important to West Virginia’s economy. It wasn’t wealthy to begin with, and killing coal has made West Virginia even worse off. And it was never very socially-liberal.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/08/why-once-blue-west-virginia-turned-red-and-what-voters-fear-today/8296536001/

Just 14 years ago, Democrats held a legislative supermajority. Today, Republicans hold the governor’s seat and a state legislative supermajority. Twenty-one state legislative races fielded no Democratic challengers.

The state’s congressional delegation is almost entirely Republican. Its one Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, is an outlier in his party – on Saturday he publicly slammed Biden for highlighting the push to retire coal-fired power plants.

Power had been shifting to the right as the strength of unions waned. Then national Democratic efforts to cut carbon emissions fueled support for Donald Trump.

He won every single county in West Virginia in 2016 and 2020.

So a sense of dread may be particularly acute here for Democrats.

“It is easy for the Democrats to be discouraged,” said Marybeth Beller, a political science professor at Marshall University. The few remaining precincts that lean heavily Democratic are concentrated in a few larger cities, in the capital, Charleston, and around Marshall, in Huntington.

“West Virginia has a lot of very socially conservative people who have felt threatened as the nation has adopted more progressive policies,” Beller said.

She cited gay marriage as one such shift. West Virginia had passed a ban on gay marriage in 2000, but it was overturned in the courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court later affirmed a right to gay marriage nationwide.

Surber said Democrats have been “too concerned about what pronouns you use” instead of focusing on economic issues. Though the midterms are “incredibly crucial,” he said, “I don’t feel that hopeful, honestly.”

But most cited the need for more economic growth in Huntington, a city that has seen its share of economic struggles since the 1980s and has faced fallout from a state coal industry that has declined by 50% in the past decade, a West Virginia University study found last year.

In Huntington, that has left 32% of residents living in poverty, creating an outsized impact from inflation that a congressional report found cost households nearly $500 more a month compared with January of 2021.

Andy Fugeman, 62, sitting outside an apartment in Marcum Terrace, a subsidized apartment complex, said he hopes the election will bring more higher-paying jobs, help with child care and drug treatment in a state where overdose death rates have ranked among the nation’s highest.