Okay an
ACTUAL West Virginian speaking here!
I'm not surprised, given his actions as governor.
Democrats are trying to get rid of the bad apples in the party.
A lot of the WV democratic party is "bad apples". The government is bought out by companies like Frontier to the point that you can't pass any telecom law without their okay (they have a huge monopoly and the state is in bed with them financially) as well as the coal companies particularly down in the southern parts in the state.
Also a lot of companies that have chemical plants have also infiltrated the state government many of the Democrats included to the point of claiming there is too many regulations that caused some of the chemical spills like Charleston faced a year or two ago despite it actually being viritually no regulations that allowed them to unsafely store those chemicals before it spilled into the water supply.
Nah, he just realized the errors of his ways.
Given how corrupt both state parties are it's more that he's aligning with a changing trend in WV state politics. He's still just as corrupt as before, he's just changing a label.
Democrats here have always been really pro-gun and generally more like conservatives socially. The entire state leans more towards left economics as we have little way to improve our economy while keeping the status quo of coal mining and chemical plant production. A lot of that is due to the fact that both have so thoroughly corrupted the state government both parties involved.
It's been clear for a while now that if we just embraced creating new industries (like greener energy and technology focused industries) and expanding on other successful ones that don't have enough support or attention (like tourism) we would get out of our economic situation. But as it is now we just kind of stay in a perpetual state of middle lower class if not poverty for huge swaths of the state.
Granted some of that is attributable due to geography but in large part monopolies prevent new companies (particularly when it comes to telecoms, manufacturing and energy) from coming in, which means no competition which means no stimulated economy. So he will likely support most of the same economic stuff. The democrats and Republicans here are little different in that respect.
So him going Republican doesn't mean much of anything.
I used to live in WV. Place was a dump, good riddance.
Hey! Some of us still are
stuck live in this
dump place!
Actually where did you live? Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg and Morgantown and some surrounding towns are alright (well Parkersburg
almost and Morgantown is too expensive to live in). Anywhere else is almost always truly a dump.
That isn't saying much I guess as combined that's just over 800,000 people of those 4 metros (I looked it up) out of 1.8 million and a lot of that Huntington and Parkersburg metro pops count places in Ohio... so okay let's say over 55% of the state is a dump but the rest is kinda okay.
