West Virginia Republican Presidential Convention

The controversial first ever West Virginia Republican Presidential Convention (WVGOP Presidential Convention) attracted 3 of the 4 Republican presidential candidates on February 5, the day when 23 other states were holding Republican presidential primaries.

In addition, the convention was mentioned in national news accounts throughout the afternoon and evening of the convention and in following days.

Bob Fish, convention CEO, was quoted in a wire service story on February 7 as saying of state party leadership. “They’ve seen how widely heard, listened to and discussed their opinions were. That’s going to make it hard to take it away from them.” The article suggested that a repeat of the presidential convention in 2012 is likely.

Mike Huckabee gave a boost to the perception of West Virginia’s significance in presidential races by saying on MSNBC’s Hardball program on February 6, “The states that I won are the states that a Republican has to win if he is going to be president on the Republican ticket. You don’t win the South, you don’t get it. You don’t get West Virginia and Arkansas, those two swing states can make or break the entire presidential election.”

The Boston Globe saw significance in Huckabee’s West Virginia victory, saying, “The first sign of Huckabee’s strength among conservative Christians came early yesterday when he won a convention of West Virginia Republicans. ” (However, an editorial in the Charleston Gazette on February 6 closed with the statement, “Mountain State Republicans may not be as keen for evangelical politics as Tuesday’s result might imply.”)

Yes, the West Virginia Republican Presidential Convention received nationwide coverage on Super Tuesday, but the coverage was not necessarily positive.

The headline of the February 6 account in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette read “W.Va. McCain Camp Pulls a Fast One, Gets the Spotlight” and referred in the first sentence to “tiny West Virginia’s beleaguered Republican Party.”

Controversy concerning the number of West Virginia delegates to the Republican National Convention continues as the New York Times on February 7 (as well as other papers) reported that, although the WV convention was to be “winner-take-all,” the Ron Paul campaign claims to have been given 3 national delegates by the Huckabee campaign as part of second ballot maneuvering at the state convention. (This agrees with a February 5 press release on the Ron Paul campaign site.)

The publicity received by the West Virginia Republican party may have come at the cost of losing the loyalty of many party members.

A sampling of the disagreements among West Virginia Republicans is posted at Vic Sprouse’s Change West Virginia blog in response to his post “Some follow-up WVGOP Convention thoughts.”

Slightly more than 2,000 of the state’s approximately 344,000 registered Republican voters registered to vote online for county delegates to the state convention. The number voting in person at the county caucuses or conventions (in Berkeley, Fayette, Harrison, Jefferson, Marion, Monongalia, Morgan, Nicholas, Ohio, Pleasants, and Wood) is not readily available.

Tom Searls writing in the Charleston Gazette, said, “There were some confused Republicans in West Virginia Tuesday. Some thought they were supposed to go to their polling places to vote for president. Others, on the floor at the state party’s convention, wondered how their delegates to the national convention ended up where they did.”

I believe the state convention process is flawed at several levels.

Voters who were unsure when their county’s caucus would be or whether they would be free of other commitments that day or evening to participate had to register by November 30 to vote online.

Unspecified problems occurred in two counties, Mineral and Monongalia, that resulted in a delay of over a week before the names of their elected delegates were announced. Mineral County apparently held a “replacement convention” on January 26 to “replace the election held January 12th, 2008 where problems occurred.”

Whether it was due to apathy or lack of knowledge about the process of selecting delegates to the state convention, in a few counties (Braxton, Gilmer, Grant, and Wirt) NO ONE, not even those who had filed to run, voted for county delegates to the state convention. In Wyoming County, no one even filed to run.

Participation at the county and state levels was time consuming and expensive. In those counties choosing to have a county caucus or convention people could not just run in and vote as at a traditional polling place in a traditional primary election. In Morgantown the only available parking near the caucus site was in a parking garage.

The state convention took most of a day, requiring many employed delegates to take a day off from work. Because of the early starting time of the state convention (understandable in order to be the first state to announce results on Super Tuesday) many delegates had to spend the previous night at a Charleston hotel, adding to the expense of participation. The biggest insult was the requirement that each delegate to the state convention pay a $25 fee! That smells like a poll tax to me!

Perhaps most seriously, ordinary rank-and-file party members lost their chance to be considered by their fellow voters for election as delegates to the national convention. Instead each presidential campaign selected its own slate of delegates by some private process. This new process of selecting delegates to the national convention has closed in the face of “ordinary” Republicans the door to the chance to attend the national convention.

Another hidden cost of the state presidential convention system was in the time and energy expended by party leaders at both the county and state level. So much effort was put into choosing county delegates and in some counties organizing county caucuses or conventions that those involved in leadership appear not to have had enough time left to recruit candidates for public office, especially the state legislature. For example, looking at candidate filings through the Secretary of State’s office, we see no Republican filed for State Senate districts 6, 9, 12, and 13, and no Republicans filed for House of Delegates districts 2, 3, 5, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 42, 45, 46, 47, and 56. (There are other House districts in which fewer Republicans filed than there are positions.) More visibly, no Republican filed to challenge the two incumbent Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives from West Virginia, Alan Mollohan and Nick Joe Rahall.

I hope that, after the euphoria of the national attention to our state convention fades, state party leadership will reconsider their intent to hold another presidential convention in 2012.

Minerva Abbott
Proud to be a West Virginian
Proud to be a Reagan Republican

References:

Amid deal-making claims, W.Va. GOP pleased with convention
The Intelligencer Wheeling News-Register, February 7, 2008

Michael Kranish – Evangelical voters bolster Huckabee in Southern states
Boston Globe, February 6, 2008, page A13

Opinion: Huckabee: State GOP choice
Charleston Gazette, February 6, 2008

Mackenzie Carpenter – W.Va. McCain Camp Pulls a Fast One, Gets the Spotlight
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 6, 2008, page A-1

Julie Bosman – Still Winning, Even When Behind
The New York Times, February 6, 2008, page 28

Ron Paul Secures Three Delegates in West Virginia State Convention
press release, February 5, 2008, Ron Paul 2008
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/press-releases/235/ron-paul-secures-three-delegates-in-west-virginia-state-convention

Vic Sprouse – Some follow-up WVGOP Convention thoughts
http://www.wvsos.com/elections/candidates/data/ReleaseDateResult.asp?ElectionYear=2004&Type=CA

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