In the end, West Virginia’s Republican Senate primary wasn’t much of a contest at all.
The Mountain State’s larger-than-life Republican governor, Jim Justice, handily defeated five-term Representative Alex Mooney in Tuesday evening’s GOP contest, early election returns show, paving the way for him to cruise to a likely victory this fall in his bid for retiring Democratic senator Joe Manchin’s seat.
The Associated Press called the race at 8:15 p.m.
Justice’s resounding primary win is a huge victory for Washington Republicans, who had practically begged the well-known and well-liked coal magnate to run for Senate as part of a broader strategy of scaring Manchin into retirement. Senate Republicans’ early personal outreach to Justice included a trip by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to West Virginia a few weeks after the 2022 midterms when Mooney was already in the race, a source familiar with the matter told National Review.
Those early entreaties from Senate Republicans prompted Justice to announce his candidacy in late April 2023. Then came former president Donald Trump’s endorsement of Justice in October, followed by an announcement from Manchin just a few weeks later that he wouldn’t seek another term — all but handing the seat to Senate Republicans in the general election.
Speaking with National Review earlier this year, Mooney reflected on the “disappointment” he felt when he heard that the National Republican Senatorial Committee — Senate Republicans’ campaign arm — had endorsed Justice, a debt-ridden former Democrat with a more liberal record. “I’ve been a good, loyal Republican for ten years in the House,” Mooney said.
“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 added. “In their mind, they didn’t want to spend a bunch of money to beat him in a general election.”
Senate Republican leaders’ early support for Justice has also frustrated anti-establishment senators like Mike Lee (R., Utah) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who have long opposed leadership involvement in primaries and see the governor as far too moderate to represent a state that Joe Biden lost by nearly 40 points in 2020. Like Mooney, they’ve spent recent months criticizing Justice for his support for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, for his businesses’ unpaid bills, and for only switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican during a 2017 Trump rally.
Yet without Manchin in the general-election race, Justice’s primary victory pads Senate Republicans’ margins amid an already competitive general-election cycle in which a number of vulnerable Democrats are sharing a ballot with their party’s deeply unpopular 81-year-old incumbent president.
Justice’s campaign manager, Roman Stauffer, estimated earlier this year that the governor’s decision to run for U.S. Senate this cycle has saved Senate GOP-aligned spending groups “tens of millions of dollars” that they can now pour into other must-win Senate battlegrounds like Montana and Ohio.
Not even hard-hitting TV ads hitting “deadbeat billionaire” Justice for his unpaid bills appeared to have any tangible effect on the race.
“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,” Stauffer told National Review earlier this year.
West Virginians see Justice at public events with his beloved English bulldog, Babydog, and they “feel like there’s a personal connection,” he added. “They feel like they know him. They know he cares about people, and they look past all that stuff.”
Luckily for Justice, who watched election returns this evening surrounded by friends and family at the governor’s mansion in Charleston, one of Mooney’s wealthiest backers ended up leaving him hanging on the spending front. The Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that had initially pledged $10 million to boost Mooney in the primary, ended up spending only a little more than $2 million hitting Justice on air, Federal Election Commission filings show.
“Mooney is the best conservative for the seat, but President Trump’s endorsement hardened Justice’s support and there wasn’t a viable path forward,” Club for Growth president David McIntosh told Politico earlier this month.
In the end, Mooney ended up slightly out-raising and out-spending Justice, according to FEC filings updated April 24. But the congressman’s monthslong underdog status meant that without a few extra million dollars from outside groups in the final stretch, Justice’s primary win was all but inevitable.
And unless West Virginia Democrats can pull a rabbit out of a hat sometime over the next few months, it should be smooth sailing for Justice into November.
“He’s not raising a lot of money. He’s not spending a lot of money,” said Jessica Taylor, the Cook Political Report’s senate and governors editor. “But when you’ve got his personality and Babydog, do you really need to?”