West Virginia

Republican House member Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia will challenge Democrat Jay Rockefeller for the U.S. Senate. At 59, Capito, who has served in the House of Representatives since 2001 and is the daughter of former West Virginia governor Arch Moore, will be facing a 75-year-old Rockefeller, who was first elected to the Senate in 1984.

The AP reports:

AP RACE CALL: Romney wins West Virginia. #Election2012

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 7, 2012

Romney, W.V. 

Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia refused to answer a question about his position on repealing part or all of Obamacare this afternoon outside the Senate chamber. Asked by THE WEEKLY STANDARD if he supported repealing any part of the 2010 health care law, Manchin then stepped into an elevator with retiring Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who laughed as the elevator doors closed.

Alex Pappas reports that West Virginia Democrats continue to distance themselves from President Barack Obama: 

In a move showing how politically toxic President Barack Obama has become in parts of the country, three prominent West Virginia Democrats announced Monday they will not attend the Democratic National Convention in September.

“We’ve had some small contributions, but the largest was, I think, maybe a hundred dollars,” says presidential candidate John Wolfe Jr., speaking to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “I’m basically paying for this myself, dipping into my retirement account.”

The federal prison inmate who got 41 percent of the Democratic primary vote in West Virginia last week against President Obama tells CNN that this election is about the economy:

As he sat in a prison cell in Texas, Keith Judd, inmate # 11593-051, was winning 40% of the vote in the West Virginia Democratic primary last week amid whatever fanfare one could receive in such a place.

Now that President Obama's reelection team wants to include coal on the agenda, it's worth remembering that Obama himself warned in 2008 that his policies would bankrupt anyone who started a coal power plant. Here he is in 2008, speaking with the San Francisco Chronicle:

After a disappointing showing in West Virginia, where President Obama received only 59 percent of the vote against a prison inmate in the Democratic primary, the president's reelection team decided to highlight the importance of coal (or clean coal, to be exact) on its website. (West Virginia is a major mining state.) Well, the Obama team has had problems with coal in the past. 

Keith Judd, a federal inmate incarcerated in Texas, garnered 40 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in West Virginia yesterday. The good showing by the convict is a bit of an embarrassment for Barack Obama, but the president's reelection campaign appears to be taking advantage of the situation. The address keithjudd.com mysteriously redirects to a donation page for Obama-Biden 2012. Here's a screenshot:

President Barack Obama has won the Democratic party primary in West Virginia--but it was closer than expected. The president's only opponent in the race, Keith Judd, is an inmate at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas. Obama received 59.4 percent of the Democratic primary vote, Judd received 40.6 percent.