Added to the RedState.org Blog Project

This page has become a part of the RedState.org Blog Project, a directory of right-of-center state and local political blogs.

To those who found this page from the RSBP, welcome! I primarily cover state and major local political events in West Virginia when I am not buried to my eyeballs in law school readings. I try to post a few times each week, and more often if required by the news of the day. While tremendous anxiety persists about the national political scene this fall, West Virginia Republicans are excited and very optimistic about our chances of continuing the progress we have made at the state level to begin realigning West Virginia from a solidly Democratic state to a Republican-leaning state.

In 2000, West Virginia shocked the country and gave George W. Bush the 5 electoral votes that put him in the White House--5 electoral votes that, if received by Al Gore, would have made Florida irrelevant and elected the first Republican, Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, to Congress in a generation.

In 2002, we reelected Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito by a 20-point margin over self-financing multimillionaire trial lawyer Jim Humphreys in a rematch of the 2000. Additionally, we gained 7 seats in the House of Delegates and 4 in the state Senate, defeating the chairmen of the Senate's two most powerful committees.

In 2004, we carried the state for President Bush by a 13-point margin (and carried all 3 congressional districts and 46 of the 55 counties, including 9 of the state's 10 most populous counties), elected 3 more Republican state senators (giving us the largest number of Republican senators, 13 of 34, at any time since the Democrats took control of the Senate in 1932), elected a Republican, Betty Ireland, as Secretary of State, and defeated the first Democratic incumbent for a statewide office in more than 80 years as Brent Benjamin defeated controversial state Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw.