West Virginia’s Alex Mooney is taking on the entire GOP establishment in his state’s upcoming Senate primary.
Washington, D.C. — No amount of pleading from Republican forces in Washington will convince Representative Alex Mooney to bow out of West Virginia’s GOP Senate race ahead of the state’s May 14 primary.
“I have never said to anyone, ever, that I would even consider doing anything other than run for the U.S. Senate,” Mooney told National Review in a wide-ranging interview last month in a Washington townhome, a short walk away from the U.S. Capitol. “I think the voters deserve a conservative choice, and I’m the only one running.”
That’s not to say the congressman isn’t miffed that the entire Republican establishment has wrapped its arms around another candidate in this year’s Republican Senate primary — the six-foot-seven coal magnate and Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican governor Jim Justice.
To say Mooney’s an underdog in West Virginia’s GOP Senate primary would be an understatement. The five-term congressman is barreling toward the May 14 primary without the support of the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Steve Daines, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, or former president Donald Trump — all of whom are betting their chips on the state’s popular and larger-than-life two-term governor.
A bevy of polls conducted last year suggested that “Big Jim” Justice was leading Mooney by double digits — even as the governor, the indebted heir to a West Virginia coal empire and luxury Greenbrier resort, owes hundreds of millions to government authorities and creditors.
Mooney waves away those polls as out of date. It’s the D.C. GOP establishment’s endorsements that make him wince.
Asked to recall his initial reaction to the NRSC’s decision to back Justice last year, the word “disappointment” came to mind. “I’ve been a good, loyal Republican for ten years in the House, I pay NRCC dues, I vote for the Republican for speaker. I’ve always been a good conservative Republican,” Mooney says.
He insists that he shouldn’t be underestimated and rails against “liberal Republican” Justice, who ran for his first term with Democratic senator Joe Manchin’s endorsement and the support of the Democratic Governors Association — only to announce during a 2017 Trump rally just a few months into his term that he was rejoining the GOP.
Justice will vote with the Democrats when it matters and “sell them out” if he makes it to Washington, Mooney warns. “I think the folks at the NRSC thought if Jim Justice were to run, Joe Manchin would retire, because he’s happy with Jim Justice taking his spot,” Mooney says. “In their mind, they didn’t want to spend a bunch of money to beat him in a general election. So they got Jim Justice to run. . . . So, it’s not intended to be personal to me. Of course, everything is personal to me because I’m a candidate.”
He begrudgingly gives the NRSC a little bit of credit. “They were right about that, I’ll give them that: Justice running got Joe Manchin to retire. Although personally, I think Joe Manchin was going to retire anyway,” Mooney said of the outgoing senator, citing Manchin’s decision to vote to convict Trump during both of the former president’s impeachment trials as a nonstarter for West Virginians in a general election.
And he offers a warning: “This is the type of race where they really should support me because I’m the only conservative running.”
He has receipts. Mid interview, Mooney dispatched an aide to his car to grab a pamphlet — what he calls his “bible of politics” — which contrasts his own “strong conservative record” with Justice’s support for the “liberal Biden” agenda. It counts among the governor’s gravest political sins his support for the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and pandemic-era “shutdowns” and mask mandates. The pamphlet ticks through the congressman’s conservative credentials, which include his A rating from the National Rifle Association, his 100 percent rating from National Right to Life, and his voting against the “Biden-Pelosi” “NON-infrastructure” bill.
Mooney says he has never spoken with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about his candidacy despite multiple attempts to schedule meetings. “He never gave me a meeting, so I have no idea what the man’s thinking,” he says of McConnell, who announced late last month that he will step down as Senate GOP leader after the November election.
As the months passed by, Mooney says he continued to request a sit-down with the Senate GOP leader about his campaign. But then, next thing he knew, Mooney was reading reporting about a trip McConnell had taken to West Virginia in the fall of 2022 to personally recruit Justice.
“He didn’t seem uncomfortable with my candidacy,” Mooney told NR last month. “But at the same time, the gameplay they wanted to do was the one I described: Get Joe Manchin to retire by Jim Justice running.”
Unbeknownst to the congressman at the time, the now-outgoing Senate GOP leader had flown to West Virginia weeks after the 2022 midterms, according to a source familiar with the matter, right after Mooney had jumped in the race.
The Kentucky Republican’s eagerness to get behind Justice so early in the race signaled just how bullish he was on the governor’s chances of spooking Manchin into retirement in a red-leaning state crucial to this cycle’s Senate map. In February 2023, the McConnell-aligned super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, released a poll showing that the governor had universal name ID and high approval ratings, trouncing Mooney and then-undecided Senate-candidate-turned-gubernatorial-candidate Patrick Morrisey in the GOP primary, and that he’d likely defeat Manchin in the general. Justice jumped into the race two months later.
In October, Trump threw his endorsement behind Justice — a huge asset for the governor in a state the former president carried by nearly 40 points in 2020. Three weeks later, Manchin announced he would not run for reelection.
But McConnell’s group wanted to make sure that Manchin wouldn’t change his mind ahead of the state’s January filing deadline, so they sent up a smoke signal of sorts. In early December, the Senate Leadership Fund bankrolled a pop-up super PAC, Conservative Americans PAC, that spent almost $1 million in ads boosting Justice and attacking Mooney.
Then the state’s filing deadline came and went, confirming the conservative Democrat’s retirement from the Senate.
Justice’s campaign manager, Roman Stauffer, estimates that Justice’s decision to run in this cycle has saved Senate GOP-aligned spending groups “tens of millions of dollars” now that Manchin is not running for reelection. He added that D.C. spending groups have not made any additional commitments to the governor’s Senate campaign (though it’s likely they’ll step in if he needs outside help). “They know Governor Justice is a strong candidate, that he’s winning by large margins, and most likely will not require much of an investment of national Republican dollars here at all.”
Even though Mooney’s underdog pitch didn’t win over Trump or spending groups aligned with Senate GOP leadership, it has won over many state lawmakers, the Senate Conservatives Fund, the Club for Growth, and some of the U.S. Senate’s most antiestablishment members, including Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
“He’s a proven conservative. And we need more of those,” Lee told NR in a brief interview at the U.S. Capitol last week. “It’s a state with an open seat that leans heavily Republican at the moment. Why the rush for so many people to try to decide the primary?” He’s adamant that Republican spending groups shouldn’t be spending in the lead-up to the primary, given the seat is all but guaranteed to swing toward Republicans in November no matter the nominee.
“I’ve known Alex Mooney for several years,” said Paul. “He’s a member of the Freedom Caucus and a guy who has a good conservative voting record, but also a guy who’s been skeptical of involvement in foreign wars, skeptical of sending money to other countries.”
Mooney, who got his BA in philosophy from Dartmouth and sits on the House Financial Services Committee, is no burn-it-all-down kind of congressman. Even though he’s a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, he didn’t join the 20 or so House Republican holdouts who dragged on Kevin McCarthy’s speakership fight back in January 2023, nor did he band with the eight House Republicans who sided with a united Democratic caucus to oust McCarthy from the speakership less than ten months later.
Even before our interview formally kicked off, Mooney pulled out a folder to share old photos of him reading National Review to his then-toddler son. He says he has been reading the magazine since he was a teenager and jokes that NR profiles him once every decade: back in 2003, when he was a young state senator in Maryland, and again in 2013, when he launched a run for Congress in West Virginia.
Eleven years later, Mooney’s in a tight spot.
Alex Mooney with his son.
When Mooney first announced his Senate run more than a year ago, he “weighed all the calculations” and decided that he wouldn’t drop out no matter what. “That part in my mind was over. That doesn’t mean it’s over for the people who want to influence me,” he told NR.
The congressman points to his 2022 member-on-member primary against former congressman David McKinley, who joined twelve other House Republicans in 2022 to vote for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, and whose old constituency overlapped with most of West Virginia’s newly redrawn second congressional district. Even though McKinley led most initial polls, Mooney ended up crushing him in the primary by 19 points. But, of course, Mooney had another arrow in his quiver in that congressional primary that he doesn’t have now that he faces Justice — Trump’s endorsement.
With a little more than two months to go until primary day, Justice’s campaign insists that no amount of ad spending will change the dynamics of the race. Not even ads highlighting the debt-ridden governor’s legal troubles will do the trick, Stauffer says, because voters just really like Justice — and his beloved English bulldog, Babydog.
West Virginians see Justice out with Babydog at public events and they “feel like there’s a personal connection,” Stauffer says. “They feel like they know him. They know he cares about people, and they look past all that stuff,” he adds. “We’ve seen prior opponents spend millions and millions and millions of dollars trying to prosecute that message and move the numbers, and it’s not had any effect at all, and I think that will most likely be the case in this situation.”
Mooney directs NR to a strategic memo put together by his Senate-campaign team in January that insists that once voters learn more about his campaign through positive advertising — and attack ads against “the real liberal Jim Justice” and his legal troubles — they will start breaking his way. He maintains that months-old polls showing Justice up by more than 30 points are outdated and will tighten as the primary approaches, much as his congressional primary did during the last cycle.
“It’s a sacrifice to run, and you ask a lot of people for their money. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t believe I could win,” Mooney says. And he insists you don’t need to squint to see victory for his underdog campaign. “All the mainstream media is doing is pushing the initial poll, because he’s gotten a higher name ID, and saying I’m down all these points. And they’re just trying to make me go away. I’m not going away.”
