By all indications, Shrewsbury, a 32-year-old Marine Corps veteran and community organizer, faces a difficult, if not impossible, road to victory. West Virginia gave Donald Trump his second-biggest margin of support of any state in the nation three years ago, and Manchin is the last Democrat holding a statewide office. Political analysts do not expect voters to elect the Democratic candidate – whoever that turns out to be – and predict Manchin will be replaced by either Governor Jim Justice or Congressman Alex Mooney, the two leading Republicans in the Senate race.
Shrewsbury’s message to them is: not so fast.
“People were really sold on the fact that Joe Manchin could be the only Democrat that could win in West Virginia, and I very much disagree,” Shrewsbury told the Guardian a week after the senator made his announcement.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Charles Town, West Virginia, was where state authorities executed the abolitionist John Brown after he led an attack on a federal armory a few miles down the road in Harpers Ferry, a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the civil war.
In recent years he has used his power as a swing vote in Congress to stop several of Joe Biden’s legislative priorities – attracting the ire of progressives and prompting Shrewsbury to mount a primary challenge.
Political analysts do not expect voters to elect the Democratic candidate – whoever that turns out to be – and predict Manchin will be replaced by either Governor Jim Justice or Congressman Alex Mooney, the two leading Republicans in the Senate race.
In the years that followed, he guarded the perimeter at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, and was deployed to Japan, Malaysia and South Korea before eventually moving to Seattle and then returning to West Virginia, where he realized how bereft his home state was of the prosperity he saw elsewhere in the country and overseas.
Since 2020, Shrewsbury has helped towns dig out from flooding, door-knocked in the narrow Appalachian valleys – known as hollers – to find out what residents were looking for from the state legislature, and talked to mayors and city councils about the opportunities presented by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes consumer usage of renewable energy, including home solar panels.
Despite the state’s conservative leanings, Sam Workman, the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, believed Manchin may have had a path to victory had he decided to run.
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