Christian Smith
Transgender issues have emerged as an unexpected focal point in the West Virginia governor’s race, as Republicans in the crowded primary seek to distinguish themselves as more conservative than their competitors in the solidly red state.
In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s primary, former state Rep. Moore Capito (RW.Va.), businessman Chris Miller and a PAC supporting West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey launched ads capitalizing on misinformation and Republican concerns surrounding gender-affirming health care and transgender athletes.
A March 28 announcement support Miller accuses Morrissey of profiting from the “trans agenda” as a former Washington health lobbyist. “Your pronouns?” a narrator asks. “Greedy liberal.” Another pro-Miller spot — paid for by West Virginia Forward, the super PAC chaired by Miller’s father, Matt F. Miller — claims that Morrissey once lobbied for a pharmaceutical company that “helps turn boys into girls.”
A senior Morrisey campaign strategist ignored the pro-Miller ads. “The attacks came. There was a lot based on falsehoods and abject lies, so the campaign responded in kind, but that was not what the focus was on,” said Jai Chabria.
One Black Bear PAC ada pro-Morrisey group that received large contributions from the conservative Club for Growth Action, accuses Miller of having “protected them, not us” while serving on the board of Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. Another hits Capito for working to “protect woke advisors” and argues that “our next governor has to keep the radical transgender agenda out of West Virginia.”
Miller’s campaign manager, Evan Lee, said in a statement that the dealership plans to “tackle the radical trans agenda” and presented Miller as a “businessman like President Trump.”
Capito’s campaign also published advertisements playing with worries about trans athletes and praised their efforts to ban puberty blockers for trans children.
The number of attacks focused on transgender issues has left some strategists perplexed.
“I think voters in West Virginia are perplexed by the focus on transgender issues,” said Greg Thomas, a Republican strategist based in the Mountain State. “I think it’s just something that got out of hand.”
Capito, Miller, Morrisey and West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner are the top four candidates jostling to replace Outgoing Gov. Jim Justice (R), who plans to advance to the Senate be able to retire Senator Joe Manchin (DW.Va.).
Conrad Lucas, former chairman of the West Virginia Republican Party, said “it comes as a surprise to most people here” that transgender issues have become such a prominent primary issue.
“Employment, the economy, is always number one in everything, but it is certainly not a differentiator. … I think that’s the difference,” he said.
One Emerson College Research/The Hill Research released Tuesday found that the top issue for Republican voters in the West Virginia primary is the economy, followed by education, coal/energy, threats to democracy and immigration. Transgender rights did not make the top five.
Asked about their concerns about the cost of living, border security and transgender issues, about 8 in 10 West Virginia Republicans polled said they were “very concerned” about prices and the border, and 54 percent said the same on transgender issues.
But 20 percent said they were “not at all concerned” about transgender issues, compared to three percent who said they were not concerned about the border.
“It’s amazing the way they’ve made this the focus,” Charleston-based political strategist Tom Susman said of the candidates’ efforts to frame each other as “weak” on policies that restrict health care and participation in the transgender athletics. “They are really running to the far right.”
Susman pointed to that poll, arguing that while the results show Republican concern, they do not indicate that Mountain State voters want to see transgender issues become the focus of the race.
“This wasn’t really an issue in West Virginia” until campaigns started spending big and “talking about who is the least transgender of each of the candidates,” Susman said. “You would think there are hordes of transgender people [people] trying to cross the Ohio River into West Virginia. It’s an absurd.”
Thomas pointed out that West Virginia, one of the most conservative states in the country, it has already banned gender-affirming health care for minors and passed legislation that prevents transgender student-athletes from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity, although the latter is embroiled in a legal battle that Morrissey has taken twice to the Supreme Court. In March, the Court signed a law that prohibits non-binary gender designations on birth certificates.
“We’ve done it all,” Thomas said. “Why are you spending a million dollars on ads to achieve essentially what could be done with a handful of Facebook groups across the state?”
West Virginia lawmakers have introduced more than two dozen bills targeting LGBTQ people this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), although only one of them, the birth certificate bill, managed to pass both chambers of the Republican Party-dominated state Legislature.
“This session has been the worst legislative session I’ve ever had to work in,” said Ash Orr, a transgender and reproductive rights organizer in West Virginia. “But I try to remind myself and others to see how far we’ve come.”
The winner of the May 14 GOP gubernatorial primary is expected to sail to the governor’s mansion against the only Democratic candidate, Huntington Mayor Steve Williams, in the fall. Former President Trump, who is extremely popular in the state, is expected to easily win the presidential race.
But the state just changed solidly in the conservative column in recent years. Democrats made a trifecta over the state Legislature and the governor’s mansion for nearly two decades before power changed hands in the mid-2010s.
Orr said she feels the tide is starting to turn once again, despite the outsized role transgender rights played this year in the campaign.
“I believe these politicians are using these extremist talking points because they know that’s how they can get sidetracked,” he said. “However, we are starting to see across West Virginia and other states that this is starting to lose steam. Even Republican voters who don’t support the LGBTQ+ community are getting fed up with our policymakers using the same talking points over and over again and wasting our time and sessions on these issues.”
Only 29 of the more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills state lawmakers introduced this year became law, according to ACLU data, and nearly half — 244 and counting — were defeated before the end of the legislative session.
Morrisey leads the Republican primary with 28%, according to the latest Emerson poll, although his support fell 5 points between May and March. Capito’s support rose 11 points, putting him just behind Morrisey at 25 percent. This 3 point separation is within the survey’s margin of error.
Support for Miller and Warner increased slightly to 19 and 12 percent, respectively, and another 16 percent of primary voters are still undecided.
“You essentially have four Republican brands here, so it was always expected to be highly competitive. And you have three very well-known historical names in West Virginia who are running for office, and you also have a very popular attorney general,” Lucas said.
Captain is the son of Senator Shelley Moore Capito and grandson of the late Governor Arch Moore, while Miller is the son of Rep. Carol Miller (RW.Va.) and grandson of the late Rep. Samuel Devine (R-Ohio). Warner’s brotherKris Warner, a former state Republican Party chairman, is now running to replace his brother as Secretary of State.
“So what you’re seeing in the governor’s race… is basically the field moving as far to the right as possible to court the MAGA, culture war kind of thing. And so they are in some ways outdoing themselves in terms of who can be more right-wing and more focused on these types of cultural issues,” said John Kilwein, chair of the political science department at West Virginia. University.
Early voting in the race also indicates low turnout in Tuesday’s election despite the competitive primary, according to local points of sale. That “tends to mean that the most partisan and the most conservative” will show up to vote, said Lucas, the former state Republican Party chairman.
“It’s certainly running to the right with a knife. They all are,” Lucas said of the gubernatorial primary. “Each is displaying their conservative bona fides, so a lot of this will come down to who West Virginians trust to be the true conservative, and we’ll see who that is on Tuesday.”
