The Rule and the Reason for It

There is a rule in federal campaign finance law that most voters take for granted: a super PAC may raise and spend unlimited money in support of a candidate, but only if it operates independently of that candidate’s campaign. The independence is not a technicality. It is the entire constitutional and legal basis on which super PACs are permitted to exist at all.

The rule exists because unlimited money concentrated in a single political operation, coordinated with the candidate it benefits, creates a structural corruption risk that courts and regulators have long recognized. The independence requirement is the firewall. Remove it and what remains is an unlimited campaign treasury with no disclosure requirements and no contribution limits, operated by the same people running the official campaign.

Public filings from the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office describe a political apparatus built around Governor Patrick Morrisey in which that firewall may exist only on paper. At its center is a single name that appears across the campaign, the super PAC, and the state political committee simultaneously: David Howell.

David Howell’s Three Hats

According to records filed with the West Virginia Secretary of State, David Howell held the following roles concurrently within the Morrisey political network:

• Director of Morrisey 2024, Inc. The official campaign corporation for Morrisey’s 2024 gubernatorial run. This is the entity that pays staff, produces advertising, manages the candidate’s schedule, and coordinates all official campaign activity.

• Director of Black Bear PAC. A federal super PAC that, alongside the Club for Growth, pledged to spend more than ten million dollars supporting Morrisey’s governor’s race. Black Bear ran advertisements supporting Morrisey and attacking his opponents throughout the primary and general election. Its FEC filings list Scott Will as a senior adviser, but Howell appears as a director of the committee itself.

• Chairman of Blue and Gold PAC. A West Virginia state 527 political committee within the Morrisey network, separate from the federal entities but part of the same coordinated infrastructure.

The overlap is not incidental. Howell was not a peripheral figure who happened to hold a nominal title in one entity while doing real work in another. By the account of the filings, he was a director-level presence across all three structures at the same time, serving a single candidate’s political interests through each of them.

The relevant legal standard is not ambiguous. Super PACs are constitutionally permissible under Citizens United and subsequent rulings only because the Supreme Court accepted the premise that independently spent money poses less risk of corruption than direct contributions. The moment that independence collapses, so does the legal rationale for permitting the unlimited spending in the first place.

A director who simultaneously controls both the candidate’s official campaign corporation and the super PAC spending millions on that candidate’s behalf is not, in any meaningful operational sense, independent. The same judgment, the same institutional loyalty, and the same strategic interests govern decisions on both sides of the supposed firewall.

The WV WASP sought comment from David Howell and from the Morrisey administration’s press office. No response was received prior to publication.

Beverly, Massachusetts

Howell’s overlapping roles do not exist in isolation. They are embedded in a broader infrastructure that raises its own questions about where West Virginia’s political operation actually lives.

Data compiled from public filings identifies a single city shared by virtually every major financial entity in the Morrisey network: Beverly, MA. That city appears as the registered location for Morrisey 2024, Inc., Black Bear PAC, the Blue and Gold Fund (a federal leadership PAC), Blue and Gold PAC (the state 527), Team Morrisey JFC (a joint fundraising committee), the WV Prosperity Group, Sugar Maple PAC, and Bulldog Compliance. The financial infrastructure of West Virginia’s governor’s political operation does not live in West Virginia.

The compliance infrastructure is managed by two Massachusetts-based operatives, Bradley Crate and Charles Gantt. Neither is a West Virginia figure.

Scott Will, a senior adviser to Black Bear PAC and Morrisey’s 2012 campaign manager, has been a fixture throughout the network’s development. Will also served as a paid transition consultant after Morrisey’s November 2024 election win, moving seamlessly between the super PAC advisory role and the governor’s formal transition apparatus. When the governor’s office launched the West Virginia Prosperity Group to manage his post-election transition, Will was identified in reporting as the operative in charge.

The picture that emerges is not of a West Virginia political operation. It is a Massachusetts-administered machine with West Virginia on the label.

The Money Trail

The financial flows within the network add another layer of concern on top of the structural overlap.

Black Bear PAC was built primarily on national money. The Club for Growth Action contributed $2.1 million in a single transaction during the first half of 2023, representing nearly the entirety of the PAC’s fundraising for that period. By mid-2023, Black Bear had $3.8 million in cash on hand, with both Black Bear and Club for Growth having publicly committed to a combined goal of more than $10 million in support of Morrisey’s governor’s race.

That same Black Bear PAC, where Howell sits as director, received $125,000 from the West Virginia Prosperity Group on December 29, 2025, seven months after the Prosperity Group had received $500,000 from Morrisey’s own inaugural committee. The money moved from inauguration funds to the West Virginia Prosperity Group (the WVPG is incorporated under IRS code as a social welfare organization -- the same designation that allows groups like it to engage in political activity without disclosing their donors), then from that organization to the super PAC.

Under West Virginia law, inaugural committees with leftover funds must donate the excess to charity. The Secretary of State’s office has previously indicated that social welfare organizations qualify as charities under that definition. Once donated, the office has said, the law no longer governs how the money is used. The Prosperity Group’s board has not disclosed the source of its remaining funding beyond the inaugural committee contribution.

Woven into this network is a second pass-through entity: the 1925 Fund Inc., a 501(c)(4) with no listed officers and no public presence, through which $9.2 million appears to have flowed. The inaugural committee also donated $125,000 to the 1925 Fund. Scott Will has been identified in prior reporting as the operative in charge of the 1925 Fund as well. A social welfare organization with no public officers, no website, and nine million dollars in reported flows, administered by the same man who advises the super PAC whose director also runs the campaign.

The legal walls between these entities are asserted on paper. Whether they exist in practice is the question the filings raise.

Now Targeting the Legislature

What began as a governor’s political operation has expanded. The network documented in public filings is now actively engaged in 2026 Republican primary races for the state legislature.

Chris Pritt, who served as Campaign President of Morrisey 2024, Inc. during the governor’s race, is now a candidate for the Republican nomination in Senate District 17, running against incumbent Senator Tom Takubo. Public filings show outside groups aligned with the Morrisey network, including the School Freedom Fund and the Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, spending in support of Pritt’s campaign. The same operative infrastructure that managed Morrisey’s campaign is now working its own alumni into legislative seats.

In Senate District 10, Sugar Maple PAC has reported at least $16,473 in spending to support Jonathan Comer’s candidacy. Sugar Maple PAC is managed by Charles Gantt as treasurer, the same Beverly, Massachusetts compliance operative who manages the right side of the Morrisey financial network.

And then there is Tresa Howell, a candidate for House Delegate District 52. Tresa Howell is David Howell’s wife.

The same David Howell who simultaneously directs the governor’s campaign corporation and the super PAC that spent millions electing that governor has a spouse running for a legislative seat that falls within the network’s expanding 2026 footprint. Whether that candidacy has received direct network support is something we intend to pursue through public filings.

The network is building a legislative caucus.

What the Law Says and What the Filings Show

The WV WASP is not a court and will not render a legal verdict. What the public record shows is this:

Federal law prohibits coordination between a candidate’s authorized campaign committee and an outside group spending money in support of that candidate. The Federal Election Commission defines coordination broadly to include shared personnel, shared decision-making, and material involvement by campaign officials in the outside group’s activities.

The public filings show a single individual holding director-level roles in both Morrisey’s official campaign corporation and the super PAC that spent millions supporting his candidacy. They show those entities sharing an address, sharing compliance infrastructure, and operating within a network that has moved money from inaugural funds through pass-through nonprofits and back into the super PAC.

Morrisey himself is not listed as a direct officer or director of the outside entities. That is how these structures are designed. The buffer is legal architecture. Whether it reflects operational reality is the gap between the filing and the truth.

The FEC received no public complaint regarding the Morrisey network’s structure as of the time of this reporting. The agency’s enforcement record on coordination cases is limited. West Virginia’s own campaign finance laws do not impose restrictions on coordination between campaigns and state-level political committees that go beyond federal requirements.

Which means that what is described in these filings may be entirely legal. It may also be exactly what campaign finance law was designed to prevent.

What Republican Primary Voters Should Know

This is not a story about Democrats scrutinizing a Republican governor. West Virginia has not had a Democratic governor in a decade. The network described in these filings is a Republican operation, built with Republican money, now being turned on Republican incumbent legislators in the May 12 primary.

The senators targeted by Morrisey-aligned groups are Republicans. The incumbents being challenged by Pritt and Comer are Republicans. The voters who will decide those races are Republican primary voters.

Those voters deserve to know who is spending money in their primaries, who controls that spending, and whether the men and women asking for their votes are backed by a network whose legal independence from the sitting governor’s office rests on the word of the same small group of Massachusetts compliance professionals who have managed his finances from the beginning.

The structure is public. The filings are available. The question of what it all means is one West Virginia Republicans have every right to ask before they cast a ballot.

EDITOR’S NOTE

This article is based on public filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office. Readers with additional documentation regarding the entities described in this report are encouraged to contact the WASP securely.

The WV WASP is a West Virginia political news, satire, and commentary outlet. Follow us on X: @wvwasp | wvwasp.com 🐝

The races in Part 2 are where the factional war is loudest. But some of the most interesting stories on the 2026 Senate ballot are in the races fewer people are talking about. Primaries where the candidates filed without being recruited. Districts where a party switch raises questions. Specials where an appointee has to defend a seat they were handed. And a few races where the outcome may already be decided before a single vote is cast.

Here is the rest of the board.

The Sleepers

District 4: The Primary Nobody Asked For

Cabell, Jackson, Mason, Putnam Counties Republican primary: Sen. Eric Tarr (i) vs. Phillip Surface vs. Travis Willard Democratic primary: Zachary Abbott

Eric Tarr is one of the most interesting figures in this entire cycle. As detailed in Part 1, he is the former Senate Finance chair who publicly said the Republican Senate caucus had no consensus on a public policy agenda heading into the 2026 session. He has criticized both the Takubo recruitment effort and the populist wing he loosely aligns with. He is, by most accounts, frustrated with everyone.

But Tarr is no career politician coasting on a title. He has a remarkable personal story which can easily be found on his public social media. He won his Senate seat in 2018 by defeating appointed incumbent Mark Drennan in the Republican primary with 51.8 percent of the vote and ran unopposed in 2022.

And now he has two primary challengers of his own.

The remarkable thing about the District 4 primary is that nobody recruited these candidates. A source close to the challenger recruitment operation told the WASP flatly: “No one recruited those guys to run against Tarr…they decided to run on their own.”

Phillip Surface is running on a platform that reads like a point-by-point echo of the critiques leveled at the Senate throughout this series. In a statement to the WASP, Surface said: “I am running for State Senate in District 4 because West Virginia needs serious, results-driven leadership on jobs, infrastructure, affordability, education, and healthcare. The Senate, for too long, has focused on issues that do not address the main issues facing our people.” He backs targeted tax and regulatory reforms, workforce training, broadband expansion, rural hospital support, and long-term infrastructure investment. Whether or not Surface was formally recruited, he is clearly running the same playbook.

Willard’s campaign website strikes a similar chord, emphasizing “putting people above politics” and pledging to focus on jobs, healthcare, education, and infrastructure. He has reportedly told people he plans to spend $250,000 on the race, though a source close to the recruitment effort expressed deep skepticism about where that money would come from.

This is Trump country. The district went for Trump by a wide margin in 2024 and includes Putnam County’s fast-growing Teays Valley corridor. Tarr’s brand of fiscal conservatism and his willingness to publicly criticize his own caucus may cut both ways with primary voters. But the challengers have failed to distinguish themselves from the incumbent.

Bottom line: Tarr probably survives, but the fact that he drew two unsolicited challengers tells you something about the mood inside the southern Putnam County portion of district 4.

District 11: The Zombie Candidacy

Barbour, Braxton, Pendleton, Pocahontas, Randolph, Upshur, Webster Counties Republican primary: Sen. William “Bill” Hamilton (i) vs. Robert Karnes vs. Jack Reger

Robert Karnes keeps coming back.

Karnes first won this seat in 2014, part of the historic wave that gave Republicans control of the Legislature for the first time in over 80 years. He lost it to Hamilton in the 2018 primary. He won the other District 11 Senate seat in 2020 by defeating the incumbent in the Republican primary. Then he lost that seat to Robbie Morris in the 2024 primary. Now he is running for his old seat again, against the man who beat him six years ago.

That alone would make this race notable. But Karnes carries considerable baggage. His tenure in the Senate was marked by controversial public statements. He sparked headlines with remarks questioning marital immunity in sexual assault cases, and in October 2024, he posted a comment on social media about then-Presidential candidate Kamala Harris that was widely condemned as sexist and vulgar. Questions about his residency have also followed him through multiple campaigns. Karnes could be described as so far right that he lands outside the ideological arena where most district 11 voters likely reside.

Hamilton, by contrast, is a moderate Republican with labor union sympathies. He is a Buckhannon native who has been in the Legislature since 2002, first in the House and then in the Senate after beating Karnes in 2018. He is a retired insurance agent. He ran unopposed in 2022 and announced two years ago during a candidate forum that he would not seek reelection. He apparently changed his mind, filing on the first day of the candidate filing period. In his announcement, Hamilton said his focus remains on “creating good jobs, affordable healthcare, improving infrastructure, supporting education, revitalizing our state parks and tourism, and finishing broadband expansion.”

Reger is the third candidate in the race and is less well known. Some sources have told us Reger could serve as a spoiler to the higher profile Karnes challenge, therefore handing the race to the incumbent Hamilton. Reger is a retired career educator and Buckhannon city councilman who spent 38 years in public schools. His campaign is built around a crisis that is personal to this district: three of District 11’s seven counties are facing school closures and consolidations. Reger has called it a failure of legislative leadership and argues that when communities lose their schools, they lose everything that holds them together. It is a localized pitch in a district where that issue lands differently than abstract debates about tort reform or culture wars.

This is the largest Senate district in the state at over 4,400 square miles, covering seven counties in the rural heart of West Virginia. Hamilton has the incumbency advantage and chairs the natural resources committee, but in a three-way race in a district this vast, turnout patterns can produce surprises.

Bottom line: Reger is clearly focused mostly on public education. Will that resonate? Karnes has won and lost so many races in this district that he is practically a permanent fixture. Whether voters find his persistence admirable or exhausting will determine whether Hamilton holds on.

District 12: The Quiet Challenge

Calhoun, Gilmer, Harrison, Lewis, Taylor Counties Republican primary: Sen. Ben Queen (i) vs. Joseph Earley

Queen flipped this seat in 2022, winning the general election with 68.7 percent of the vote. He is the Senate Majority Whip and a member of the leadership team, which makes him a target by association even if he is not personally part of the factional warfare.

Earley ran for Congress in West Virginia’s 2nd District in 2024. He brings some name recognition from that race but is not well known across the Senate district. Without a major recruitment operation behind him, Earley faces an uphill climb against an incumbent who won convincingly last time and holds a leadership title.

Bottom line: Queen is the favorite and is well-liked in the district, but the fact that someone filed tells you even leadership-aligned incumbents are not getting free passes this cycle.

District 16: The Eastern Panhandle Hold

Berkeley, Jefferson Counties Republican primary: Sen. Jason Barrett (i) vs. Chantele Mack

Barrett is a former Democrat who served in the House of Delegates from the 61st District. He won reelection as a Democrat in November 2020, then switched his party registration to Republican weeks later, drawing sharp criticism from Democratic leaders who called it “self-serving opportunism.” He ran for the Senate as a Republican in 2022 and won with 60.5 percent. He is identified by sources as part of the Tarr sub-faction within the caucus. No Democrat filed for this seat, making the Republican primary tantamount to election.

Mack is not well known, and Barrett’s 2022 margin suggests he has a solid base in the district. But the Eastern Panhandle is one of the fastest-growing parts of the state, and its electorate is harder to predict than the rural districts that dominate the rest of the map.

Bottom line: Barrett should hold, but the lack of a Democratic challenger means the primary is the only game in town.

District 17: The Recruiter Gets Recruited Against

Kanawha County Republican primary: Sen. Tom Takubo (i) vs. Chris Pritt

This is the race with the richest irony on the entire ballot.

Takubo has spent the better part of a year recruiting challengers to run against sitting senators across the state. Now he has a challenger of his own.

Chris Pritt is a former delegate who served two terms in the House (2020-2024). He is an attorney who co-founded Pritt & Pritt, PLLC with his wife Kelly in Charleston. Pritt ran for the District 17 Senate seat in 2024 but lost the Republican primary to Eric Nelson. When Governor Morrisey tapped Nelson to be Secretary of Revenue, the seat opened back up. Pritt chose to challenge Takubo rather than run for the special election against appointee Anne Charnock.

Pritt’s Facebook page says he represents “the Republican wing of the Republican Party,” a phrase that tells you exactly where he is positioning himself. He is a very close ally and confidant of Governor Patrick Morrisey. Pritt sees Takubo as insufficiently conservative. Takubo, a pulmonary and critical care physician who co-founded Pulmonary Associates of Charleston, sees himself as a pragmatic problem-solver who has been in the Senate since 2014 and served as majority leader from 2018 to 2025.

Takubo would be hard to beat in Kanawha County, where he has deep roots and a professional reputation that extends well beyond politics. But the fact that the man orchestrating the largest primary challenge operation in recent WV GOP history is himself facing a primary adds a layer of vulnerability to the entire effort. If Takubo loses his own seat while his recruits win theirs, the irony would be almost too perfect.

Bottom line: Takubo is the heavy favorite, but Pritt is not a nobody. He has run before, he has a base, and he will make Takubo spend time and money defending home turf instead of helping his recruits.

The Party Switchers

District 6: The Four-Way With Baggage

McDowell, Mercer, Mingo, Wayne Counties Republican primary: Sen. Mark Maynard (i) vs. Jeff Disibbio vs. Eric Porterfield vs. Edwin Ray Vanover Democratic primary: Joshua Hamby vs. Wyatt Lilly

This is the wildest primary field on the ballot, and it is not close.

Start with Disibbio. He is the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of the Two Virginias, a Bluefield University criminal justice instructor, and a former bank trust officer. He holds a law degree from Regent University and bachelor’s degrees from Radford University and Bluefield College. He sits on a long list of local boards: the Mercer County Planning Commission, the Tourism Board, the Building Commission, the Solid Waste Authority, and the Craft Memorial Library Board, among others. His resume is serious.

But here is the wrinkle: Disibbio ran in this district in 2024 as a Democrat. He lost to Craig Hart in the general election after a messy situation in which he was accidentally left off the ballot in Mingo County during part of early voting, prompting an ACLU legal challenge. Now he is running as a Republican. Party switches are common in West Virginia. Running for the same seat you just lost, in the other party’s primary, one cycle later, is less common. Disibbio has positioned himself as part of the statewide pro-jobs recruitment slate, telling WVVA that the group of candidates he’s running with is “not worried about titles or who gets the credit, it’s simply about advancing West Virginia.”

Then there is Porterfield. Eric Porterfield served one term in the House of Delegates (2018-2020) before being voted out in his own Republican primary, finishing last among the candidates. During his single term, Porterfield made national news for making all sorts of off-color comments during his time in public office. The West Virginia Republican Party officially denounced his comments. He ran for this Senate seat in 2024 and lost again. Now he is back for a third try.

Vanover, from Bluefield, is the least known of the four candidates.

Maynard has held this seat since 2014 and won reelection in 2022 with 73.4 percent of the general election vote. He is a Marshall University graduate and a fixture in southern West Virginia politics. But a four-way primary in a district that covers the state’s southwestern corner, from the coalfields of McDowell and Mingo to the small cities of Mercer County, is inherently unpredictable. If the vote splinters, margins get thin. Trump carried this district with over 80 percent in 2024, making it one of the reddest Senate districts in the state.

Bottom line: Maynard is the favorite by a wide margin, but this field guarantees the race will be covered. Disibbio’s resume and Chamber connections make him the most credible challenger. Porterfield’s presence ensures the race gets attention just because, well, you get our point.

District 13: The General Election Preview

Marion, Monongalia Counties Republican primary: Sen. Mike Oliverio (i) (unopposed) Democratic primary: Del. John Williams

This is not a primary story. It is a general election story hiding in a primary wrapper.

Oliverio is one of the more unusual figures in West Virginia politics. He was first elected to the Senate in 1994 as a Democrat, served multiple terms, ran for Congress in 2010 as a Democrat challenging Alan Mollohan, but lost in the general to David Mckinley. He then returned to the Senate in 2022 as a Republican, defeating longtime Democratic delegate Barbara Fleischauer with 50.3 percent of the vote.

Williams is a sitting Democratic delegate from Morgantown who has served since 2016. This will set up a match of the ideological divide that defines the 13th District: Morgantown’s college-town progressivism versus the more conservative voters in the rest of the district.

Trump carried the district with just 51.5 percent in 2024, making it the most competitive Senate district in the state by presidential vote share. A Republican source told the WASP he has heard “a lot of people talking about” this race being competitive.

Bottom line: Oliverio held on by a thread in 2022. Williams will test whether that thread holds.

The Specials

District 3 Special: The Boley Succession

Pleasants, Ritchie, Wood, Wirt Counties Republican primary: Sen. Trenton Barnhart (i) vs. Jason S. Harshbarger

Barnhart was appointed by Governor Morrisey to fill the seat vacated by longtime Sen. Donna Boley. He was serving in the House of Delegates at the time of his Senate appointment. Barnhart is young, works hard, and keeps his head down, even if he is socially awkward. No Democrat filed, making this primary tantamount to election.

Harshbarger is not well known, and Barnhart has the advantage of incumbency and strong previous campaign infrastructure.

Bottom line: Barnhart should hold, but an appointee is never as safe as an elected incumbent.

District 17 Special: The Other Kanawha Race

Kanawha County Republican primary: Sen. Anne Charnock (i) vs. Michael Jarrouj Democratic primary: Ted Boettner vs. Richie Robb

Charnock was appointed by Morrisey to replace Eric Nelson after Nelson was tapped as Secretary of Revenue. She is a former Charleston municipal court judge. Jarrouj is a restaurant owner who has created dozens of jobs, fitting the profile of the pro-jobs candidates the recruitment operation has been promoting across the state.

This race was originally seen as the more vulnerable of the two District 17 contests. One observer noted that “Charnock could be vulnerable being an appointed state senator.” Pritt chose to challenge Takubo instead of Charnock, which may have given Charnock a break. Jarrouj will need to make the case that his private-sector experience matters more than Charnock’s judicial background.

The Democratic primary is also worth watching. Boettner is a policy analyst, and Robb is a former mayor of South Charleston.. Whoever wins will take on the Republican primary winner in a Kanawha County general election that could be competitive.

Bottom line: This is the kind of race where the appointee has a title but the challenger has a story to tell.

The Open Seat

District 5: The Huntington Showdown

Cabell, Wayne Counties Republican primary: Chris Miller (unopposed) Democratic primary: DuRon Jackson vs. Josh Keck vs. Paul Ross

This is an open seat created by the retirement of Sen. Mike Woelfel, the Democratic minority leader. It is one of the few districts where Democrats believe they have a real chance, and the three-way Democratic primary reflects that optimism.

Miller is the president of Dutch Miller Automotive and the son of U.S. Rep. Carol Miller. He ran in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2024 and lost to Morrisey, but he built name recognition and a donor base in the process. He is unopposed in the Republican primary, which gives him a significant advantage: while Democrats sort out their nominee, Miller can focus entirely on the general election.

A Republican source told the WASP that Democrats “are gonna make them work down there” but that Miller “works his tail off” and will get the job done.

Trump carried this district with 61.3 percent in 2024, but Woelfel won reelection as a Democrat in 2022 with 54 percent, proving the district will cross party lines for the right candidate. The Democratic nominee will need to replicate that crossover appeal.

Bottom line: Miller is the favorite, but this is the district where Democrats have the best math to steal a Senate seat.

The Race That Is Already Over

District 10: Deeds Cruises

Fayette, Greenbrier, Monroe, Nicholas, Summers Counties Republican primary: Sen. Vince Deeds (i) vs. Jonathan Comer No Democrat filed.

This one is not close, and the reasons why are instructive.

Deeds is popular in his district. He won big in 2022 despite facing a well-funded primary opponent. No Democrat bothered to file against him, which tells you something about how the other party views his strength.

This race originally had three Republican candidates, but Robert Shirley Love from Fayette County, was removed from the ballot after Deeds himself filed an emergency petition in Kanawha County Circuit Court. The lawsuit alleged that Love did not meet the state Constitution’s five-year residency requirement, citing Georgia voter records showing Love voted there in December 2022 and social media posts suggesting he and his wife did not move to West Virginia until late 2023 or early 2024. Love suspended his campaign. If that story sounds familiar, it should: residency challenges have become a recurring theme in West Virginia Senate races, as Part 1 of this series detailed with the 2022 Kiessling case.

That leaves Comer, a Lewisburg pastor, as the sole challenger. Sources tell the WASP that Comer was directly recruited into the race by Governor Morrisey and First Lady Denise Morrisey. The Morriseys have clashed with Deeds because he does not support their agenda 100 percent of the time. But the recruitment effort appears to have been thrown together at the last minute. With less than two months until the primary, Comer has no ads running and held his first fundraiser on March 19. Outside of Greenbrier County, he has virtually no name recognition. Multiple sources familiar with the district say Comer also carries personal baggage that locals are well aware of and that could surface during the campaign.

This is the race that Part 1 referenced when we noted that “in at least one other race, sources tell the WASP that the Morrisey camp recruited a challenger on behalf of the incumbent faction. That effort has not gone well.”

Bottom line: Deeds wins easily. The Morrisey camp recruited a challenger with little funding, no ads, no name recognition outside one county, and local baggage. This is what happens when the recruitment effort runs in the wrong direction.

What the Full Board Tells Us

Across three parts of this series, we have now covered all 19 seats on the May 12 ballot. The picture that emerges is not simple. It is not a clean story of reformers versus the establishment, or moderates versus conservatives, or insiders versus outsiders.

It is a story about a political party that achieved total dominance and then spends too much of its time fighting internally. A party where a quarter of the Senate is being challenged not by Democrats but by other Republicans who think the incumbents have failed. A party where the recruitment operation’s own architect publicly apologized for the last batch of candidates he helped elect. A party where the governor is backing incumbents who, in one case, has an agenda that conflicts with his own. A party where a former senator who has lost twice is running for a third time, where a former Democrat is running as a Republican for a seat he just lost as a Democrat, and where a delegate whose comments during his single term drew a formal denunciation from the West Virginia Republican Party.

West Virginia’s Republican Party is in no danger whatsoever of losing power. It is in danger of not knowing what to do with it.

May 12 will not resolve that question. But it will tell us who gets to try to answer it next.

The WV WASP is a West Virginia political news, humor, and commentary outlet. Follow us on X @wvwasp and at wvwasp.com.

If Part 1 was the big picture, this is where the picture gets specific. Six Republican Senate primaries will decide whether the current power structure in the upper chamber survives or gets replaced. These are the races where the factional battle described in Part 1 is playing out in real time, with real candidates, real money, and real consequences.

Here they are.

District 1: The Race That Could Hand Democrats a Seat

Hancock, Brooke, Ohio, Marshall Counties Republican primary: Sen. Laura Wakim Chapman (i) vs. Joe Eddy Democratic primary: Del. Shawn Fluharty (unopposed)

This is the most layered race on the board, and the one with the highest stakes for both parties.

Joe Eddy is the kind of candidate the pro-jobs recruitment operation was designed to produce. He is a retired engineer and the former head of Eagle Manufacturing, where he oversaw more than 400 employees. During Donald Trump’s first term, Eddy served as an advisor to the president on manufacturing issues. He is not a political operative. He is a business guy who decided the Senate needed someone who has actually run something.

Chapman won this seat in 2022 by flipping a Democratic district. But her first term has been turbulent. She resigned as chair of the Senate Health and Human Resources Committee after saying Senate President Randy Smith demanded a loyalty pledge she was not comfortable giving. She later argued publicly that Eastern Panhandle senators hold a disproportionate share of committee chairmanships at the expense of the Northern Panhandle. The logic of that complaint has a flaw: if her district is underrepresented in leadership, resigning a chair position only makes that worse.

More than one Republican insider tells the WASP that Chapman’s judgment, both political and personal, has drawn scrutiny in Charleston and could become a liability if Democrats decide to make it an issue in a general election against Fluharty.

And that general election matters. Fluharty, a sitting delegate from Ohio County, is running unopposed in the Democratic primary. He will be well funded and well organized. A Republican source familiar with the race told the WASP flatly: if Chapman survives the primary, she loses to Fluharty in November. The seat flips Democratic.

That assessment is backed by the numbers. Chapman, according to the same source, has received less than one-third of her campaign contributions from Republican donors. In a district that Trump carried with 68.7 percent in 2024, that fundraising profile is a warning sign.

Governor Morrisey made the District 1 dynamics even more interesting when he posted on social media calling it “one of the defining races” of 2026, framing the contest as “common sense conservatism versus lefty extremism” in a Chapman-versus-Fluharty matchup. The problem? Morrisey’s post made no mention of Joe Eddy. The Republican primary was treated as if it did not exist. For a governor whose own agenda would arguably be better served by the pro-jobs challengers winning, it was a curious choice.

Bottom line: This primary is not just about who represents the Northern Panhandle in the Senate. It is about whether Republicans keep the seat at all.

District 3: Azinger’s Survival Test

Pleasants, Ritchie, Wood, Wirt Counties Republican primary: Sen. Mike Azinger (i) vs. Del. Bob Fehrenbacher

Mike Azinger is one of the most conservative members of the Senate, and he is in trouble for the second straight cycle.

In 2022, Azinger won his primary with just 51.5 percent of the vote. That is not the margin of a senator whose district is satisfied with his representation. It is the margin of a senator who nearly lost and now has to do it again.

Fehrenbacher is an engineer and a sitting member of the House of Delegates. That matters for a practical reason most voters do not think about: a current delegate already has a voter contact operation. He has knocked on doors. He has attended local events. He has constituent relationships that a first-time candidate would need months to build. Fehrenbacher walks into this race with an infrastructure that Azinger’s 2022 challenger did not have.

The district covers the Mid-Ohio Valley, and the question is whether Azinger’s brand of hard-right conservatism still sells in a region where the economic concerns that people like Greg Thomas and Senator Tom Takubo have been hammering are deeply felt. Parkersburg is not a culture war town. It is a town that wants to know where the next paycheck is coming from.

Bottom line: If Azinger survived 2022 by the skin of his teeth against a lesser-known opponent, a sitting delegate with a ground game could finish the job.

District 8: The Three-Way Test of the Takubo Coalition

Kanawha, Putnam, Jackson, Roane, Clay Counties Republican primary: Sen. T. Kevan Bartlett (i) vs. Dr. Steven Eshenaur vs. Lance V. Wheeler

This is the race that will tell you whether the Takubo recruitment model works outside of Kanawha County’s urban core.

Bartlett is not a newcomer to the Legislature. He was appointed to the House of Delegates in 2019 by Governor Jim Justice after the death of Del. Sharon Malcolm, but lost his Republican primary in 2020 to Dana Ferrell. Governor Morrisey gave him a second chance in January 2025, appointing him to the Senate after Mark Hunt resigned to become state auditor. He carries voting records from both chambers and some name recognition, particularly in western Kanawha County, but he has never won a contested election.

Eshenaur is an ER physician at Jackson General Hospital and the health officer for the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department. A GOP insider described his resume to the WASP as “unbelievable” and said Eshenaur is “out working the other candidates.” He is one of Takubo’s healthcare-sector recruits, which makes this race a direct referendum on whether voters in a sprawling, largely rural district will respond to a candidate whose pitch is competence and professional achievement rather than ideology.

Wheeler is the wild card. He previously ran for this district in 2014 and has served as a Kanawha County Commissioner. But a Republican source close to the race told the WASP that Wheeler “voted for several tax increases as a County Commissioner and Kanawha County lost jobs during his tenure.” In a primary where jobs and the economy are the central argument, that record could be a problem.

The same source acknowledged the difficulty of handicapping a three-way race where all three candidates have limited name recognition across the district. In a race like this, turnout and ground game matter more than usual.

Bottom line: If Eshenaur wins, the Takubo coalition proved it can compete in rural West Virginia. If Bartlett holds on as the appointee, the incumbent faction dodged a bullet. If Wheeler splits the vote in the wrong direction, anything can happen.

District 9: The Split That Changes Everything

Fayette, Raleigh, Wyoming Counties Republican primary: Sen. Rollan Roberts (i) vs. Dr. Michael Antolini vs. Del. Adam Vance

This race looked like a long shot for the challengers until it became a three-way.

Roberts won his 2022 primary with just 51.7 percent of the vote, another incumbent who survived but did not exactly inspire confidence. A Republican source familiar with the race told the WASP that Roberts, described as being closely aligned with Sen. Brian Helton, “spent much of the last year campaigning in Wyoming County.”

Then Adam Vance, a sitting delegate, entered the race. And the math changed.

According to a source close to the challenger operation, the votes Roberts was cultivating in Wyoming County will now go to Vance, who represents that area in the House. That leaves Roberts fighting on two fronts: Vance taking his rural base and Antolini, a family doctor and small business owner, competing strongly in Raleigh County, which makes up the vast majority of the district’s population.

Antolini’s candidacy was considered uphill before Vance filed. Now it may be the race where the challenger faction gets its most unexpected win.

Bottom line: Roberts needed a one-on-one race to survive. He did not get one. The Vance entry may have been the single most consequential filing of the entire cycle.

District 14: The President Pro Tem, the Veteran Politician, and the Party Switcher

Taylor, Preston, Tucker, Grant, Hardy, Mineral Counties Republican primary: Sen. Jay Taylor (i) vs. Marc Harman vs. Mike Manypenny

Jay Taylor is the Senate’s president pro tempore. He won his seat in 2022 with 76.2 percent of the general election vote. On paper, he should be untouchable. But this is 2026, and in the West Virginia Senate, nobody is safe.

Harman is a businessman and former member of the House of Delegates from Grant County, where he served from 1981 to 1989. He is a veteran of local politics in a district that sprawls across six counties in the eastern part of the state. Harman is positioned as the more practical Republican, the candidate focused on roads, broadband, and economic development rather than ideological purity.

Then there is Manypenny, whose presence on the Republican ballot is one of the more unusual stories of the cycle. Mike Manypenny is a former Democratic member of the House of Delegates who served from 2009 to 2015. In 2016, he ran for Congress as a Democrat against David McKinley and lost decisively. He has also run for the House of Delegates multiple times as a Democrat, most recently losing to Republican Amy Summers in 2022. Now he is running in a Republican Senate primary.

Party switches happen in West Virginia. The state’s entire political realignment over the past two decades is built on them. But Manypenny’s history is recent enough and his Democratic resume long enough that his presence in this primary could become a factor, either as a vote splitter or as a target for opponents who question the sincerity of the conversion.

Bottom line: Taylor has the title and the general election margin, but titles do not vote in primaries. Harman has local credibility and the pragmatic pitch. Manypenny adds unpredictability. In a three-way race in a six-county district, the math gets complicated fast.

District 15: The Math Race

Berkeley, Hampshire, Morgan Counties Republican primary: Sen. Darren Thorne (i) vs. Ken Reed vs. Robert Wolford

On paper, this looks like a standard three-way primary with an appointed incumbent defending his seat. Underneath the surface, the math tells a different story.

Thorne was appointed to fill the vacancy left by Charles S. Trump IV, who left the Senate after being elected to the Intermediate Court of Appeals. Thorne has never been elected to this seat. He is from Hampshire County.

Reed is a pharmacist and multi-business owner who operates Reed’s Pharmacies across the Eastern Panhandle and co-owns the Canary Grill in Berkeley Springs. He is a former Morgan County Commissioner and a former member of the House of Delegates representing the Berkeley/Morgan 59th District. He also ran for Secretary of State in 2024, losing to Kris Warner in the Republican primary but performing well in the Eastern Panhandle.

A Republican source laid out the district math for the WASP, and it strongly favors Reed. Berkeley County makes up roughly half of District 15. Reed has been elected there. Morgan County accounts for another 25 percent. Reed has been elected there too. The remaining 25 percent is Hampshire County, where Thorne is from, but Wolford is also from Hampshire. They will split that vote.

Reed also carries high name recognition from his 2024 Secretary of State campaign, particularly in the parts of the district where the most voters live.

Bottom line: This is the race where the math may matter more than the message. Reed has been elected in 75 percent of the district’s geography. Thorne has never been elected to the seat, although he served in a smaller House district. Wolford splits the one county where Thorne has a home-field advantage. If the numbers hold, Reed is in a very strong position.

What Part 2 Tells Us

Six races. Six stories. But one pattern runs through all of them.

In every one of these primaries, the incumbent or appointee is defending a record or a position that the challenger faction believes is out of step with what Republican voters actually want. The challengers are not running to the right of the incumbents on social issues. They are running on jobs, competence, and the argument that the Senate has failed to govern.

Whether that argument wins is up to the voters on May 12. But the fact that it is being made in this many districts, by this many credible candidates, with this much coordination behind it, tells you something might be fundamentally shifting in West Virginia Republican politics. 🐝

Next: Part 3 of “The GOP Senate Civil War” covers the sleepers, the specials, and the rest of the board, including the Tarr primary nobody recruited, the Deeds race that might already be over, and the districts where Democrats could steal a seat. Follow the WV WASP on X @wvwasp and at wvwasp.com.

The WASP was watching. Here is what happened.

The Numbers, Briefly

Of the 2,777 bills introduced over nine weeks, 304 completed the full legislative process, roughly one in nine. That ratio sounds grim until you consider what some of those 304 actually were: a personal income tax cut retroactive to January 1, a pay raise for teachers and state troopers, and Baylea’s Law, a measure that turns community grief into criminal deterrence and will make drunk drivers in this state think harder before getting behind the wheel.

Then there is Raylee’s Law, which did not pass for the fourth consecutive year.

The High Water Mark: Baylea’s Law Becomes Law

Baylea Craig Bower was 25 years old when she was killed on Easter Sunday morning, April 20, 2025, heading home from her in-laws’ house to spend the holiday with her parents. A drunk and cocaine-impaired driver named Destany Lester, 19, was traveling over 90 miles per hour on State Route 121 in Raleigh County when she crossed the centerline and hit Baylea head-on.

Lester was convicted of DUI causing death. Her sentence: home confinement followed by a youthful offender program. That outcome landed in Boone and Raleigh Counties like a match in dry grass.

Del. Josh Holstein (R-Boone) knew Baylea’s family. He learned of her death that same Easter morning when his pastor, before beginning services, asked his daughter to turn off the church livestream and told the congregation what had happened. Holstein carried the story to the floor months later with quiet conviction: “I play music at my church, and I’ve watched that man, from the time he lost his daughter to now, still have faith, stronger than most people I’ve ever seen.”

Holstein’s bill, House Bill 4712, raised the sentencing floor on DUI causing death from three-to-fifteen years up to five-to-thirty years, tripled the applicable fines, and went further than prior law by prohibiting probation, suspended sentences, home confinement, or youthful offender diversion for drivers found to have acted with deliberate disregard for others’ safety. Senate Judiciary Chairman Tom Willis (R-Berkeley) called it closing “a loophole in the law.” He is correct about that, whatever else one might say about Chairman Willis, and we will get to that as well.

Notably, the bill sat in Willis’s Senate Judiciary Committee for three weeks without an agenda appearance, long enough that WV MetroNews published a commentary bluntly titled “Why Isn’t Baylea’s Law Running?” The committee finally took it up on March 11, passed it, and the full Senate followed on March 13 with a 34-0 vote. That the bill required public pressure to get a committee hearing is a pattern worth noting. It is not the only time this session that bills with broad support and clear merit sat in committee longer than they should have.

Baylea’s friends and family were present in the gallery the day it passed the House, dressed in blue. Her best friend Raegan Harper described what Baylea would have made of the scene: “She would be here. She’d be holding the biggest photo. She’d probably be chanting. She would be doing an interview. She would have posted it all on Facebook. She probably would have had triple the amount of people that are here.”

The bill cleared the House 95-0. It cleared the Senate 34-0. Not one dissenting vote in either chamber. Gov. Morrisey will sign it. He should do so promptly and with ceremony. Baylea’s family has earned that much.

The Wins That Crossed The Line

Senate Bill 392, the personal income tax cut, completed the full legislative process on the final day. The House had stripped out a vape tax the Senate originally attached as a pay-for mechanism; the Senate agreed Saturday and the clean bill passed. The cut is 5 percent, retroactive to January 1. Sen. Trenton Barnhart (R-Pleasants) called it “another step towards eventually getting to zero.” The direction is correct, and the WASP supported this outcome from the beginning of the session.

House Bill 4765, the teacher and State Police pay raise, survived a late-session fight over a locality pay amendment the Senate had inserted. The Senate ultimately backed down, and the 3 percent raise for teachers, school service personnel, and State Police troopers cleared with under ten minutes remaining. A 3 percent raise for other general revenue state employees was folded into the budget bill.

The Legislature also paused Saturday to honor WV Army National Guard Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, who was shot on November 26, 2025, while on patrol in Washington, D.C. as part of Operation Safe and Beautiful and died the following day. Gov. Morrisey presented the West Virginia Distinguished Service Medal posthumously to her parents, Gary and Evalea Beckstrom, in a Capitol ceremony Saturday. Both chambers recessed so members could attend. Some moments transcend the session calendar.

The Governor Takes His Bow

Hours after the session ended, the West Virginia Prosperity Group, a political messaging organization aligned with Gov. Morrisey, sent a press release to mark the occasion. “Governor Morrisey continues to deliver on his promise to make West Virginia the shining state in the mountains,” said WVPG spokesperson Nathan Brand. “From tax cuts and education to economic competitiveness, Morrisey has secured huge wins for the Mountain State, and he’s just getting started.”

The release catalogued a full victory lap: tax cuts, pay raises, Hope Scholarship funding, the rural health program, energy planning, micro-credentialing, portable benefits for independent contractors, workforce development, and the elimination of 30 outdated boards and commissions. The governor also claimed credit for fighting to increase roads and highway funding.

The WASP reports the release as written, for the record. What the release did not mention is where the more interesting story lives.

What Died, And Who Helped Kill It

Three bills that would have materially advanced West Virginia’s economic future did not make it to the governor’s desk. Sources tell the WASP that Gov. Morrisey worked behind the scenes to kill all three. This is not a story about legislative dysfunction alone. It is, in part, a story about a governor using his political capital in the Senate to stop legislation his own Republican allies in the House had championed.

The first is TEAM West Virginia. House Bill 4001 would have created a private, independent nonprofit economic development corporation modeled directly on Ohio’s JobsOhio program, one of the most successful state economic development vehicles in the country. We wrote about it here. House Speaker Roger Hanshaw championed it from the opening days of session. The House passed it on Crossover Day. The Senate never moved it to the floor.

WV MetroNews commentator TJ Meadows wrote last week, in a piece titled “The Senate Said ‘No’ to West Virginia’s Economic Future,” that “supporters of TEAM West Virginia believe the governor quietly worked the Senate in an effort to stop the bill.” Meadows, who is not prone to overstatement, put it plainly: while the House tried to give the state much-needed medicine, the Senate added poison by refusing to run the bill. He noted that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine reportedly joked that JobsOhio has worked so well he was not sure he should encourage West Virginia lawmakers to adopt something similar. “Congratulations, Governor DeWine,” Meadows wrote. “You and Ohio win.”

Sources who spoke to the WASP confirm Meadows’s read and go further. According to those sources, Morrisey’s position was that he does not need legislation to recruit companies to West Virginia, that he can do it on his own, and that the TEAM WV structure would constrain the flexibility he prefers in dealmaking. Sources describe the governor’s posture on economic development as that of a man who wants every lever personally in his own hands and does not trust the Legislature to build infrastructure he cannot unilaterally direct. The governor’s office was not asked for comment prior to publication.

The WASP will say plainly what that posture costs West Virginia. The state is losing population every year. One data center deal does not reverse that trend. Ohio built JobsOhio into one of the premier economic development machines in the country precisely because it removed the process from the day-to-day political calculations of whoever happens to be governor. What West Virginia needs is an institution. What it got instead was a governor who preferred to keep the phone calls to himself.

The second and third bills are House Bill 4006 and House Bill 4010. HB 4006, the West Virginia Aerospace and Advanced Manufacturing Growth Act, would have created a formal state program to attract, develop, and support aerospace operations and manufacturing in West Virginia, including a grant program, economic development agreements, and a workforce training pipeline targeting one of the fastest-growing industrial sectors in the country. HB 4010 would have committed $75 million to an airport hangar grant program, targeting wide-body hangar construction at qualifying West Virginia airports to build an aviation repair, overhaul, and maintenance base in the state.

Both died. Sources tell the WASP Morrisey worked against both for the same reason he opposed TEAM WV: he preferred to control aerospace and aviation recruitment personally rather than have the Legislature build a statutory framework around it.

The West Virginia Prosperity Group’s victory press release did not mention TEAM WV, HB 4006, or HB 4010. The WASP noticed.

The locality pay fight deserves mention here. The Senate’s amendment to the teacher and State Police raise bill would have given supplemental compensation to workers in higher-cost counties, a policy with straightforward logic. Sources tell the WASP that Morrisey also worked to kill locality pay, and that the Senate ultimately receded from that amendment in part due to pressure from the governor’s office. Whether public school teachers in high-cost counties should have received that additional compensation is a question those teachers may want to keep in mind between now and the next election.

Chairman Willis’s Session: A Note On Patterns

Senate Judiciary Chairman Tom Willis (R-Berkeley) is running in the May Republican primary for U.S. Senate against incumbent Shelley Moore Capito. That political context is not incidental to what follows. It is the context.

Willis used the Judiciary chairmanship throughout the 2026 session as a legislative platform for that campaign. He shepherded bills on abortifacients, Second Amendment reaffirmation, and mandatory ICE cooperation through the Senate with evident energy and considerable floor time. His conservative credentials are not manufactured. He is a Green Beret, an attorney, and the man who unseated then-Senate President Craig Blair in the 2024 primary.

He is also, by the account of multiple Capitol sources, a difficult colleague. The polite version is that members find him hard to work with. The impolite version is how they actually say it in the hallways, and this publication aims to remain readable at breakfast.

The WASP has been told by sources that Willis killed HB 5319, a public camping regulation bill, by placing it on his committee’s agenda on the final meeting day of his committee and then pulling it from the agenda while committee members were still in the room. His stated reason was that the bill was “poorly written.” The bill’s legislative sponsor had endorsed Shelley Moore Capito in the Senate primary. Sources draw a direct line between those two facts. Willis has not addressed the allegation publicly.

Following the bill’s failure, the ACLU claimed credit for defeating HB 5319. Willis’s allies and the bill’s opponents are content to let that narrative stand. It is tidier than the alternative explanation.

The WASP is a conservative publication, and we have no particular interest in carrying water for the ACLU. We are also a publication that believes conservative legislation deserves to be killed or passed on its merits, not on the basis of which Senate primary endorsements its sponsor gave. If Willis used a Judiciary Committee chairmanship funded by West Virginia taxpayers to settle a campaign score, that is a serious allegation and it deserves to be answered seriously. His silence on the matter is noted.

On the campaign trail and in the Capitol hallways, Willis has been telling people that God told him he is going to win the Senate race. The WASP does not adjudicate theological claims about U.S. Senate contests. What the WASP can report is that Shelley Moore Capito holds $4.35 million in cash on hand against Willis’s roughly $200,000, carries the endorsement of President Trump, has the support of more than half the Republican House caucus, and out-performed Trump statewide in the 2020 election. The voters of West Virginia will weigh those factors on May 12.

Sources also tell the WASP that Willis is actively planning for the possibility that the numbers do not break his way. If the Senate primary does not go as expected, sources say Willis intends to position himself as a candidate for West Virginia Senate President in the leadership elections that follow November.

He is also said to be considering a challenge to Del. Josh Holstein (R-Boone) for the WVGOP state chairmanship, with that election coming this summer. Holstein, who currently serves as state party chairman, has expressed to many sources that he is interested in running for re-election. Our sources tell us Tony Hodge, the previously elected co-chairman of the WVGOP, is contemplating a run for re-election to that position. Both men are well-liked, impressive spokesmen, and have very strong conservative credentials in their record. They will be a formidable team for any challenger to overcome.

The Lowest Low: Raylee’s Law Dies Again, With A Photograph Standing Guard Outside The Door

Now we get to it. And the WASP wants to be clear about the frame before we begin: this is not a section written from the perspective of a liberal outlet lamenting Republican failure. This is a conservative publication asking why a Republican supermajority, in both chambers, could not find a way to protect abused children across seven consecutive sessions.

Raylee Jolynn Browning was eight years old. She died the day after Christmas, 2018, in Fayette County, of sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia. That pneumonia was the physical end product of prolonged abuse and neglect at the hands of her father, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s sister. All three were convicted and sentenced to prison in subsequent years. Before she died, Raylee’s teachers had seen enough to contact Child Protective Services. Her father, upon learning of the report, withdrew Raylee from public school and into homeschooling. She disappeared from the mandatory reporter system. She was dead within weeks.

Raylee’s Law is targeted and deliberately narrow. The Senate version that crossed over to the House Saturday required teachers who file abuse or neglect reports to notify their county superintendent within 24 hours. The superintendent would then be required to inquire with CPS about the investigation’s status, also within 24 hours. CPS would have 48 hours to confirm the investigation to the superintendent, and a full 10 days to substantiate the claim. Only if CPS failed to substantiate the claim within that window, or determined the report was unfounded, would the county school board be required to approve a homeschooling request. The entire mechanism is designed to prevent one specific thing: a parent under active investigation for child abuse using the homeschooling transfer process to move a child out of reach of the adults most likely to notice something is wrong.

This bill has been before the Legislature since at least 2020. The House passed versions of it in both 2024 and 2025. In 2024, a Boone County girl named Kyneddi Miller died of starvation while being homeschooled. In 2025, an 11-year-old Taylor County girl named Miana Moran died weighing 43 pounds. The bill still did not become law. West Virginia has a Republican supermajority. The WASP supported that supermajority’s election. The WASP would like to know what it is being used for.

The sequence this year was as dramatic as anything the 87th Legislature produced. On Friday night, Day 59, with fewer than 24 hours remaining, a bipartisan coalition of roughly 15 senators led by Sen. Ryan Weld (R-Brooke) amended Raylee’s Law into House Bill 5537, a minor cleanup bill repealing obsolete sections of the Education code.

What happened next is worth pausing on. Senate President and Lt. Gov. Randy Smith (R-Preston) ruled the amendment non-germane, which under normal circumstances would have ended the conversation entirely. Sen. Weld challenged the ruling directly. Eighteen senators then voted to override their own Senate President, a parliamentary maneuver so rare in the West Virginia Legislature that most members who have served multiple terms have never seen it executed successfully. The presiding officer of the Senate was overruled by the body he presides over, on a bill about protecting children from abuse, with less than 24 hours left in the session. That is not a procedural footnote. That is the West Virginia Senate doing something genuinely difficult and institutionally significant because its members believed the stakes required it. Smith himself, notably, voted in favor of the measure after his ruling was overturned. The amended bill passed 24-7.

Weld, a former prosecutor with hands-on experience in child abuse and neglect cases, chose his words carefully: “This is a balancing act. It’s not about the family who loves their kid. It’s about the kid who can’t speak up on their own.”

Senate Education Chairwoman Amy Grady (R-Mason), a fourth-grade teacher and one of the bill’s principal Senate architects, was equally plain: “Homeschool families are not the problem, and this is not about punishing or targeting them. Sadly, there have been situations where the homeschooling system has been used to hide abuse. That is why this is needed.”

The Senate had done its job, and done it the hard way. What happened next, on the House side, is a story that multiple named sources have now told the WASP directly, on the record, and their accounts align.

The House received the Senate’s message on HB 5537 on Saturday morning. According to Del. Shawn Fluharty (D-Ohio County), who has championed this legislation for years and is speaking on the record, the bill was in the House’s possession by 10 a.m. Saturday. The chamber had until midnight. What followed, Fluharty said, was a day of breaks and farewell speeches while the bill sat untouched. “Instead of running the legislation, we spent all day taking breaks and giving farewell speeches applauding ourselves instead of actually working,” Fluharty said. “Then during the final hour, Roger Hanshaw finally decided to receive the Senate message after sitting on it for over 12 hours. By that time the fix was in and we all knew the bill had no chance.”

That is a direct, named, on-the-record accusation that Speaker Hanshaw personally held the Senate message for more than 12 hours before formally receiving it. Hanshaw’s office has not responded to the allegation.

At 10:30 p.m., Del. David “Elliot” Pritt (R-Fayette) had tried to force an immediate vote. His motion failed 47-49. Sens. Grady and Weld physically walked onto the House floor during a recess to ask deputy speakers Matthew Rohrbach and Joe Ellington to please put the bill on the floor. That two sitting senators had to cross the building and personally lobby House leadership to schedule a vote on a bill the chamber had held since morning tells you everything you need to know about the priorities operating in that room.

What followed in the remaining 45 minutes was eye-popping. According to Del. Pritt, who spoke to the WASP directly and on the record, it was an organized effort by two opposing factions. Pritt said roughly ten members walked into the chamber that night with a coordinated plan, prepared motions, and a deliberate strategy to use House rules to guide the process toward passage. Arrayed against them was a faction with its own plan, and that faction’s plan was to run out the clock.

“I tried so hard,” Pritt told the WASP. “I used every procedure and rule available to me in an attempt to move this bill. Many of us did. Many of the motions I made were made in an attempt to restrict the plans those who opposed the bill had to filibuster or run out the clock.”

Pritt rejected directly the framing some members offered afterward, that his procedural motions were silencing debate or rushing the process. “The arguments that the motions I was making were ‘silencing debate’ or circumventing the process are disingenuous at best,” he said. “The argument that this was ‘rushed at the last minute’ is entirely disingenuous. We have debated and amended this bill for the entire four years I have been in the Legislature. Everyone in that room knows what this bill is, and to play dumb on camera for the whole world to see is something they will have to live with, not me.”

Del. Adam Burkhammer (R-Lewis) offered the opposition’s most presentable argument on the floor: “I don’t care what time it is. Our job is to write good law.” The WASP’s response to Del. Burkhammer is this: the Legislature had 60 days and this bill had been before the body since at least 2020. If draftsmanship was the problem all along, six sessions is more than enough time to produce the good law nobody produced. The amendments at 11:40 p.m. were not a good-faith effort to improve legislation. They were, as Pritt stated plainly, purposeful and planned filibustering. Burkhammer did not respond to our requests for comment.

What broke Pritt, and what he wanted the WASP to report, was not the procedural defeat. It was what came after. “It was the clapping, the high-fiving, and the laughing that really got to me,” he said. “I am sitting at my desk literally in tears because I understand what the ramifications of another year of inaction could be for kids in our state while I’m simultaneously watching some people I serve with celebrate the stonewalling of and the purposeful killing of a common sense and just piece of legislation that has been vetted, debated, compromised, and agreed upon for three years. I can’t stomach that.”

At 11:57 p.m., with the Senate already adjourned sine die, the House passed an amended version of the bill 94-1. It meant nothing. The Senate was gone. The clock had run out precisely as designed.

The Crouse Defense, The Grady Rebuttal, And The Shamblin Counter

In the hours after session ended, Delegate Kathie Hess Crouse (R-Putnam) posted a detailed account of the night’s events on Facebook, offering an explanation of the House’s conduct that deserves examination on the merits.

Crouse wrote that the House did not receive the Senate’s message on HB 5537 until approximately 9:30 p.m. Saturday night, well after the chamber had been in session all day. If accurate, that would meaningfully change the picture. A bill arriving at 9:30 p.m. with other Senate messages ahead of it in the queue is a different situation than a bill that sat available all day while members worked other business.

The documented record does not support a 9:30 p.m. arrival. Capitol reporters tracking the bill’s movement placed the Senate message in the House’s possession on Saturday morning. Fluharty, speaking on the record, puts the bill in the House’s hands by 10 a.m. But the most direct rebuttal of Crouse’s account came not from a Democrat or a reporter but from Sen. Grady herself, a Republican, responding to Crouse’s Facebook post directly and by name.

“The Senate sent the bill to the House on Friday night, but you guys had already adjourned for the night,” Grady wrote. “However, it was in possession of the House ALL DAY Saturday, from at least 10:00 a.m. It did not arrive at 9:30 p.m. House leadership just chose to ignore it and let it sit there all day. Senator Weld and I walked over around 10:30 p.m. and made a deal with them so it could at least have a chance.”

That last detail matters. The bill’s appearance on the House floor at 11:12 p.m. was not a spontaneous decision by House leadership. It was the product of a negotiated arrangement that two senators had to physically broker after walking across the building. The House did not choose to take up the bill. The House was persuaded to give it a floor appearance after more than twelve hours of inaction, with less than an hour remaining.

Grady also disclosed something that reframes Crouse’s position considerably. “I thought we had something we agreed on in the bill I had in the Senate since you provided input that I included and you told me you were okay with it,” Grady wrote to Crouse. “However, things and agreements seem to change when a little pressure is put on people.” That is a Republican senator telling a Republican delegate, in public, that she had incorporated that delegate’s own suggested language into the bill and received her approval, only to watch that agreement dissolve when political pressure arrived.

Grady’s closing assessment of the session, offered directly on the record, was unsparing: “The number of political ploys and games that are played with this bill, and others, every year is exhausting and shameful. I have never been more disappointed and disgusted in the dishonest actions I saw of many of my colleagues, in the Senate and House, as I was this legislative session.”

Crouse’s substantive defense is also worth engaging directly. She argues, and Del. Burkhammer argued on the floor, that the Senate’s version of Raylee’s Law missed the point because the real failure in Raylee’s case was Nicholas County CPS ignoring years of abuse reports before her death. That critique is not without merit. CPS did fail Raylee Browning, catastrophically and repeatedly. Holding CPS accountable for those failures is a legitimate and worthy legislative goal.

It is also a goal that has been available to pursue for years. No standalone CPS accountability bill advanced out of the House during the 87th Legislature. No member fast-tracked a CPS reform measure at any point before 11:40 p.m. on the final night of the session. The argument that Raylee’s Law should be rejected in favor of better legislation carries considerably more weight when that better legislation exists and is ready to move. At midnight on March 14, it did not.

Crouse’s account drew a quiet but pointed response from within the Republican caucus itself. Delegate Andy Shamblin (R-Kanawha) broke from his usual practice of avoiding political commentary on social media and posted a statement saying he had never felt more disappointed in the legislative process. Shamblin, a Republican writing about a Republican-controlled chamber, was unsparing about what he observed. “Some lawmakers filibustered, attempted amendments, and did all they could to run out the clock,” he wrote, “and it worked.”

Shamblin was also direct about the bill’s purpose and the bad-faith framing used against it. “This is not an attack on homeschooling,” he wrote. “West Virginia has thousands of responsible homeschooling families who do a tremendous job educating and raising their children. Nothing in this bill changes their rights or freedoms. What this legislation does is address a very narrow situation: when there is already an active CPS investigation into abuse or neglect. In those cases, it simply pauses the ability to withdraw a child from school until the investigation is resolved. That seems like basic common sense.”

Shamblin credited Fluharty for his years of advocacy on the legislation and offered pointed recognition to the bill’s Senate champions. “Major shoutout to Senators Amy Grady and Ryan Weld who faced enormous difficulty getting this passed the Senate but persevered,” he wrote.

A Republican delegate explicitly calling out his own Republican colleagues for running the clock on a child-protection bill is not a routine event in the West Virginia House. That Shamblin felt compelled to break his own practice and say it publicly is itself a point worth noting.

The Floor, And The Fallout

Fluharty, who placed a poster-sized photograph of Raylee Browning in the hallway outside the chamber doors because House rules bar props inside, addressed the members who had spent the day not moving the bill as the clock expired. “This is abhorrent behavior. Disgusting government. When you’re done here tonight, after you kill this bill again, go out there and at least have the guts to look at her. Have the guts. I don’t think you do.”

In a statement provided to the WASP on the record, Fluharty was more expansive about where responsibility lies. “Disgraceful cowardice has been shown from Republican leadership for years on Raylee’s Law, but nothing tops the abhorrent behavior seen on the last day of session,” Fluharty said. “The House had possession of it at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Instead of running the legislation, we spent all day taking breaks and giving farewell speeches applauding ourselves instead of actually working. The fringe lunatics concocted amendments to slow down the bill because they would rather fight for child abusers’ rights than children’s rights. Every West Virginian should be disgusted. They deserve to know the type of people serving in their legislature.”

Grady said afterward: “I can’t believe we have so many members of the Legislature who stand up and defend child abusers. It’s disheartening, disturbing, and heartbreaking.”

Weld was precise: “They had the bill for eight, nine, ten hours. They got it before 11 o’clock this morning and did nothing. With some of the things that I saw and heard in that debate, I’ve never seen a fight to protect child abusers.” He added a promise: “After what I saw in here yesterday and over there today, I’m 100 percent locked in. This is coming back next year, so they better be ready for it.”

Pritt, speaking to the WASP after adjournment, said he carries the defeat personally even as he acknowledged the fault lies with those who planned against the bill. “I am just so disappointed with myself for being unable to successfully get it done,” he said, “and I am disappointed in many of the people I serve with for their purposeful and planned filibustering. I am even more disappointed with the actions of many of them at the end of the night.” His commitment going forward was unambiguous: “Whether I am re-elected or not, someone down there will know it is the right and just thing to do, and they will continue to push for it to make it across the finish line.”

The fallout was not limited to supporters of the bill. West Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Mike Pushkin, speaking on the record, called the final hour of Day 60 in the House “absolutely disgusting” and said it epitomized everything people hate about politics. Beyond Raylee’s Law itself, Pushkin catalogued what else died in the chaos of that final hour. Legislation to provide tax relief to metallurgical coal producers facing mine closures and job losses went unaddressed. A bill to increase the homestead tax exemption and provide relief to homeowners never came to a vote. Increased funding for special needs students, in a state where county school systems have been making difficult decisions about whether to keep schools open, also ran out of time. “Their priorities are horribly haywire,” Pushkin said.

The WASP notes that Pushkin is the Democratic Party chairman and his characterizations of Republican legislators reflect that perspective. The bills he named as casualties are real, and their failure is documented. Whether the cause was the same faction that killed Raylee’s Law or simply the general disorder of a final hour that had been mismanaged from the morning, the result is the same. Legislation that West Virginia needed died on the floor of Roger Hanshaw’s House.

The Bottom Line

The WASP is a conservative publication, but we will remain a fair publication. We believe the GOP supermajority should be held accountable when it fails, and that the strongest conservatism is one that demands results, not just party affiliation.

The income tax is lower. Teachers and troopers got a raise. Baylea Bower’s death will be the last time in West Virginia a drunk driver gets home confinement for killing someone on Easter morning. Those things matter, and the WASP says so without reservation.

But the full picture of this session includes a governor whose political operation issued a glossy press release about wins while sources describe him working behind the scenes to kill three economic development bills that Republican legislators had championed. It includes a Senate Judiciary chairman using his committee’s calendar as a campaign instrument against a colleague’s bill because he endorsed the wrong person in a Senate primary. And it includes a House of Delegates, under Speaker Roger Hanshaw’s watch, that received a child-protection bill on Saturday morning, held it for twelve or more hours, required two senators to physically cross the building and broker a deal to get it on the floor at all, and then presided over a final-hour process in which a coordinated faction ran out the clock while colleagues sat at their desks in tears and others celebrated.

The West Virginia Prosperity Group says Gov. Morrisey is “just getting started.” The WASP notes that TEAM West Virginia, HB 4006, HB 4010, and locality pay are not in that press release. The governor’s political operation is telling a story about the session, and it is a story with significant pages missing.

The Legislature had an unambiguous opportunity, on the final day of the session, to close a loophole connected to the deaths of multiple West Virginia children across multiple years. That opportunity was managed into the ground by a minority of House members who walked in with a plan to kill the bill, executed that plan, and celebrated when it worked. In Roger Hanshaw’s chamber. On his watch. With his schedule.

The Senate did its job on that particular bill, and did it the hard way, overriding its own presiding officer to get the bill across the building. A bipartisan coalition of senators showed more institutional courage on Day 59 than the House showed across all of Day 60. Republican delegates like Andy Shamblin and Elliott Pritt stood up and said what needed to be said, in public, at political cost to themselves. A Republican senator called out her Republican colleagues by name, in public, on the record, and said she had never been more disgusted by dishonest behavior in her time in the Legislature. The bill died anyway.

The WASP will have more to say about this in the weeks and months to come. Our sources, whom we protect fiercely, tell us that House leadership has never emerged from a legislative session on more uncertain footing. The 2026 session planted something. Whether the people with the authority to act on it have the appetite to do so is the question West Virginia Republicans should be asking themselves right now. 🐝

The West Virginia WASP is a West Virginia political news, humor, and commentary outlet. Follow us at wvwasp.com and @wvwasp on X. A portion of the legislative floor quotes are sourced from contemporaneous media coverage of floor proceedings. The Morrisey and Willis sections reflect reporting from Capitol sources; the governor’s office was not asked for comment prior to publication; Sen. Willis was asked for comment but we received no response. 🐝

The May 12 Republican primary is two months away, and the real fight for control of the West Virginia State Senate is not between Republicans and Democrats. It never was. It is a multi-faction Republican brawl that could determine the chamber’s leadership, its legislative priorities, and whether Senate President Randy Smith keeps his gavel.

Forty-eight Republican incumbents across the Legislature (House and Senate) face contested primaries this cycle. That is the highest share of contested incumbents since 2010, and for the second consecutive cycle, every single contested incumbent is a Republican. Democrats have their own primary contests this year, 22 of them, but not one involves a sitting Democratic incumbent. When it comes to the fight over who holds power in the Legislature, the battle is being waged entirely inside the GOP.

And nowhere is that more visible than in the State Senate, where 19 of 34 seats are on the May ballot, where at least a dozen of those feature serious challengers, and where a few Republican insiders tell the WASP they expect up to seven or eight new senators when the dust settles. That would be roughly a quarter of the chamber.

The Factions

To understand the primary, you first have to understand that the West Virginia Senate Republican caucus is not one team. There are several teams, and quite frankly, they do not like each other very much.

The coalition that made Randy Smith Senate president has fractured. According to multiple sources familiar with internal caucus dynamics, what was once a unified bloc has splintered into sub-factions with competing priorities and, in some cases, competing candidates. One of those sub-factions includes Sen. Eric Tarr (R-Putnam), the former Senate Finance chair, along with Sen. Rupie Phillips, Sen. Amy Grady, and Sen. Jason Barrett. Sources familiar with the situation described the Senate as “out of control and totally up for grabs during this primary election.”

Opposing them is not one challenger faction but a coordinated, multi-front recruitment operation. The WASP has confirmed that the effort involves Sen. Tom Takubo (R-Kanawha) and Wheelijg businessman David H. McKinley, the son of the former Congressman. He is the leader of the Mountaineer Freedom Alliance, an issue advocacy group. Additionally, several pro-jobs organizations across the state are involved. They are working different lanes but pointed in the same direction.

Takubo has been quietly encouraging a slate of challengers he hopes will redirect the Senate away from culture war politics and toward practical policy. Several of his recruits come from the healthcare sector, which has not gone unnoticed by his critics. Takubo told WV MetroNews he would not comment on specific races until after filing closed, but his fingerprints are on the effort. If his candidates win in large enough numbers, Takubo could position himself as the next Senate president.

Republican consultant Greg Thomas, the executive director of West Virginia Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), has been working the other lane. Thomas’s grievance is different from Takubo’s. He believes Republican senators have become beholden to the personal injury bar, and he wants to replace them with candidates who will advance tort reform and prioritize economic development. Thomas has been open about what he is doing. “Over a decade ago, we ran a dozen campaigns against big-government, big spending anti-business liberal Democrats who took all of their money from Democrats and trial lawyers,” Thomas told MetroNews. “This year we are running about a dozen campaigns against big government, big spending anti-business liberal Republicans who are funded by Democrat trial lawyers.”

Thomas went further on MetroNews Talkline, arguing that populist Republicans have exhausted their agenda. “We took care of the social issues. We outlawed abortion in WV with exceptions; we banned transgendered surgeries... we did all of the things you would want to do,” Thomas said. “Now we have this new group that comes in and it’s like they’re jealous they didn’t get to vote on this stuff. So, they come up with these new fringe things and the next thing you know we’re talking about anti-vax.”

Different diagnoses, but the same patient. Takubo thinks the Senate is wasting time on fringe issues when it should be governing. Thomas thinks the Senate sold out on tort reform. McKinley brings political credibility and a strong pro-jobs agenda. Together, they represent the most organized challenge to sitting Senate leadership in the history of the Republican supermajority.

Smith, for his part, has declined to comment on any of the factional warfare, saying his focus was on the legislative session.

Another interesting aspect: Smith’s hold on the gavel is being tested from outside and inside his own coalition. Sources tell the WASP that both Sen. Tom Willis (R-Berkeley) and Sen. Brian Helton (R-Raleigh) have been positioning themselves as potential successors to the Senate presidency. Willis is currently running for the U.S. Senate against Shelley Moore Capito, which complicates his timeline, but the maneuvering itself signals that even members of the existing power structure see a leadership change coming and want to be in position when it happens.

The House-Senate Divide

If you want to understand why these challengers exist, look at how the two chambers performed during the 2026 session.

The House of Delegates, under Speaker Roger Hanshaw, passed a package of ten to twelve economic development bills. The Senate passed one, maybe two.

Thomas, in a radio interview on 580 WCHS, called that disparity “a travesty” and argued it reflects a fundamental problem with the current Senate. “A quarter of our state Senate is not gainfully employed,” Thomas said. “They haven’t figured out a way to get a job for themselves. How would they be able to figure out how to get a job for somebody else?”

That line is harsh, but it captures the frustration that the pro-jobs faction feels about a chamber they believe has lost its way. West Virginia has the lowest workforce participation rate in the country, a distinction it has held since 1976. The state has lost roughly 200,000 working-age residents over the past two decades. And yet, according to multiple Republican insiders, the Senate’s legislative priorities during the 2025 and 2026 sessions have tilted heavily toward social issues, mandates on businesses, and bills that critics say increase the cost of electricity, food, and insurance without addressing the underlying economic problems.

Tarr himself, before the session began, publicly told the West Virginia Press Association that the Republican Senate caucus had no consensus on a public policy agenda. He later put a finer point on it during a Talkline appearance: “It’s a frustration of mine to come in, as a senator in a Republican mega majority, come in and really not know what the plan is set, except for it to be a possible free for all.”

A Republican mega majority with no plan. That is not an opposition talking point. That came from a conservative senator who is himself facing a primary challenge in the 4th District, where two candidates filed against him without any help from the recruitment operation. According to a source close to the effort, “No one recruited those guys to run against Tarr.”

The Deterrent Effect

There is an argument, quietly made by those involved in the recruitment effort, that the challengers have already accomplished something just by filing.

The 2025 legislative session, by nearly universal agreement among Capitol insiders, was a disaster. Thomas publicly called it the “worst session ever.” After that session, Thomas went on statewide radio and publicly apologized for helping to elect bad candidates to the West Virginia Senate, as the WV WASP reported on X. He told the West Virginia Record that “even candidates who identified as conservative appeared to align with those interests once in office.”

The 2026 session, while far from perfect, was not as bad. The challengers’ camp believes that is not a coincidence. Having serious candidates on the ballot, with real resumes and real funding, checked some of the worst impulses in the chamber. The theory is simple: senators who know they have a primary opponent in May behave differently in February and March.

Whether that theory holds up is debatable. But the recruitment operation’s own people believe the threat of competition did more to moderate the Senate this session than anything the governor or the House leadership could have done on their own.

The Morrisey Factor

Governor Patrick Morrisey has inserted himself into the Senate primary picture, though not always in ways that help his own cause.

Morrisey posted on social media that the District 1 race between Sen. Laura Wakim Chapman and challenger Joe Eddy is “one of the defining races” of 2026, framing it as “common sense conservatism versus lefty extremism” in a Chapman-versus-Democrat matchup. The problem? Morrisey’s post pretended the Republican primary does not exist. Eddy was not mentioned. That was not an accident.

In at least one other race, sources tell the WASP that the Morrisey camp recruited a challenger on behalf of the incumbent faction. That effort has not gone well, as Part 2 of this series will detail.

But here is the irony that multiple Republican insiders have pointed out: Morrisey’s own agenda, focused on economic growth and deregulation, would likely be better served by the challengers winning than by the current Senate leadership surviving. A GOP insider told the WASP that if the challengers succeed and Senate leadership turns over, “I think that would be the best thing. I think a lot of Morrisey’s agenda are things that the new pro-jobs, pro-growth candidates would want to work with him on.”

The governor, in other words, may be backing the wrong horses.

The Money Question

Every primary comes down to money and organization, and on this front, the picture is murky.

Brian Helton, a senator aligned with the incumbent faction, was telling allies he would raise $250,000 per race to defend the seats under threat. A person familiar with the fundraising landscape expressed deep skepticism to the WASP, saying he doubts the incumbent side has raised $250,000 total across all of their races.

The incumbents’ ground game, according to multiple sources, is built around the roughly 33 percent of Republican primary voters who reliably support Governor Morrisey. The theory is that Morrisey’s endorsement, where it comes, delivers a floor of support that can win a low-turnout primary.

The challengers are betting on a different model: candidates with real-world resumes who can make the case that they know how to create jobs because they have actually done it. Joe Eddy in the 1st District ran a manufacturing business with 400 employees. Dr. Steve Eshenaur in the 8th is an ER physician. Michael Jarrouj in the District 17 special is a restaurant owner who has created dozens of jobs. The argument is that voters want someone who has done something outside of politics, not another career officeholder.

Which model wins on May 12 will determine whether the West Virginia Senate looks the same in 2027 or whether it becomes a fundamentally different institution.

What This Is Really About

Strip away the personalities, and this primary is a referendum on what the Republican supermajority is for. West Virginia Republicans hold a 32-2 advantage in the Senate and a 90-9 edge in the House. They have the governor’s mansion. They have both congressional seats. They have both U.S. Senate seats. There is no Democrat anywhere in the state with enough power to block anything.

The voters watching this unfold are not asking which Republican faction is more conservative. They are asking why a party with that kind of power cannot seem to govern with it.

That is the question every one of these primary candidates will have to answer on May 12. 🐝

Next: Part 2 of “The GOP Senate Civil War” takes a district-by-district deep dive into the races that will decide control of the chamber, including exclusive sourcing on the dynamics inside Districts 1, 8, 9, 14, and 15. Follow the WV WASP on X @wvwasp and at wvwasp.com so you don’t miss it.

“At Ease”

It was just after 7 p.m. on Monday, March 2, when Senate Judiciary Chairman Tom Willis did something that confused half the people in the room.

The committee had been taking testimony on Senate Bill 1071, a bill that had lit up gun-rights media from coast to coast, a bill that would direct the West Virginia State Police to purchase fully automatic machine guns and sell them to qualified residents at troop headquarters across the state. Gun Owners of America (GOA) had drafted it. National gun media was covering it in real time. Supporters were lighting up phone lines and filling email inboxes at the Capitol.

Then Willis called for the committee to be “at ease” and disappeared into a back room with a handful of members.

The senators who remained at the table looked around. Nobody was presiding. Several members noted aloud that a quorum no longer appeared to be present. Eventually, members drifted out. The committee adjourned. What exactly happened next depends on who you ask, and that disagreement is now at the center of a fight that stretches from the halls of the Capitol to the Republican primary for the United States Senate.

The Bill Nobody Expected

SB 1071, formally titled the “Public Defense and Provisioning Act,” landed in the Legislature on February 23, seven days before the Crossover Day deadline that requires bills to clear their chamber of origin. It was introduced by Sen. Chris Rose (R-Monongalia) and Sen. Zack Maynard (R-Lincoln), but its real architect was Gun Owners of America, the national organization that has spent years positioning itself as the no-compromise alternative to the NRA.

The bill’s legal theory was ambitious, to put it mildly. Since 1986, the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act has banned the civilian transfer of any machine gun manufactured after May 19 of that year. The result has been an artificial scarcity market where pre-1986 transferable machine guns sell for $20,000 to $50,000 or more, putting them out of reach for ordinary Americans.

But the Hughes Amendment contains a carve-out. Federal law at 18 U.S.C. § 922(o)(2)(A) permits transfers “to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof.”

GOA’s argument was straightforward: if the State of West Virginia creates an office within the State Police that acquires machine guns and transfers them to qualified citizens, those transfers are “by” and “under the authority of” a state. No nullification. No defiance of federal law. Just a plain-text reading of the exemption Congress wrote 40 years ago.

The bill would have created an Office of Public Defense headed by the State Police Superintendent. That office would purchase M16/AR-15 platform rifles, M249-type squad automatic weapons, MP5 submachine guns, and other firearms “in common use by the military or law enforcement.” Buyers would undergo the same background checks required for any other firearm purchase in West Virginia. The state would charge a $250 surcharge per gun plus up to $50 in administrative costs. Private transfers between qualified owners would also be facilitated through the office for a $275 fee.

The bill’s legislative findings ran for pages, citing District of Columbia v. Heller, Article III, Section 22 of the West Virginia Constitution, and historical sources dating back to the founding era to argue that the right to bear “arms of modern warfare” is constitutionally protected and practically necessary for state defense.

If it worked, West Virginia would become the first state since 1986 to put new, select-fire weapons into civilian hands at prices ordinary people could actually afford.

GOA Goes All In

From the moment the bill dropped, GOA treated SB 1071 as a flagship campaign. National alerts went out. State-level calls to action urged supporters to flood the Senate Judiciary Committee email inboxes and voicemail boxes. Social media lit up with posts framing West Virginia as the state that could “lead the nation” on Second Amendment restoration.

GOA’s Senior Vice President Erich Pratt put it in sweeping terms, arguing that Congress had included an explicit exemption for state transfers and that West Virginia was simply demonstrating that states have both the authority and the responsibility to defend the Second Amendment.

The messaging was deliberate. GOA emphasized repeatedly that this was not nullification, not a fringe stunt, but a “smart, lawful approach” built on existing federal language. They also pitched the bill as an economic development tool, arguing it could generate revenue for the state, attract firearms manufacturers, and relieve budget pressure without raising taxes.

At the committee hearing on March 2, GOA’s volunteer state director Alex Shay told lawmakers directly that West Virginia was not flying in the face of federal law, insisting the bill simply applied the statute as written.

Not everyone in the Capitol was buying the urgency. A source familiar with Capitol lobbying dynamics described GOA’s approach as a familiar playbook: come in late in the session with a high-profile bill, and when the inevitable procedural speed bumps arrive, blame everyone, bash the legislators, attack any competing pro-gun group that might dilute loyalty, and then ask followers for money to help ensure passage next year. Whether that characterization is fair or cynical depends on your vantage point, but it is a reading of events that more than a few people inside the building shared last week.

What is less debatable is the result. According to the same source, GOA’s aggressive public attacks on legislators, leadership, and people with trusted relationships inside the Capitol did not build the coalition the organization needed. They did the opposite. Senators and leadership who might have been persuadable were instead put on the defensive, and the pressure campaign that was supposed to move the bill may have contributed to burying it.

The Lobbyist in the Room

But the first signs of trouble emerged days before the hearing.

On February 25, GOA published an alert with an unusual target: not anti-gun Democrats, not the Biden administration, but what GOA called a “so-called pro-gun lobbyist” operating inside the Capitol. According to GOA, this lobbyist was telling senators that SB 1071 violated federal law, a claim GOA called flatly untrue. They attached a legal fact sheet and urged supporters to counter the lobbyist’s influence by flooding Senate phone lines and inboxes.

GOA never named the lobbyist or the organization. But in the online gun community, the speculation was immediate and pointed almost entirely in one direction: the West Virginia Citizens Defense League, the state’s established, well-respected, homegrown gun-rights organization.

AmmoLand writer John Crump later reported that a lobbyist working for WVCDL had verbally threatened to kill the bill in front of multiple lawmakers, expressing concern that if SB 1071 passed, State Police officers transferring machine guns could be federally prosecuted. According to Crump, the same lobbyist threatened to kill similar legislation in other states, including Kentucky.

The narrative that took hold online, fueled by GOA’s alerts and Crump’s reporting, was that WVCDL was an obstacle to machine gun rights in West Virginia. But the full picture is considerably more complicated than GOA’s version of events.

For starters, WVCDL had no official position on SB 1071. The organization confirmed to The WV WASP that it neither endorsed nor opposed the bill. What WVCDL did support was House Bill 4185, introduced by Delegate Charles Horst on January 14, more than five weeks before SB 1071 even existed. HB 4185 took a fundamentally different approach to the same goal: instead of creating a new state office, turning the State Police into arms dealers, and testing an untried federal loophole theory, it simply repealed West Virginia’s state-level ban on machine gun possession. One page. One section of code. Done.

In other words, the state’s largest homegrown gun-rights organization was not opposing machine guns. It was backing a cleaner, simpler bill that had been filed weeks earlier, a detail that GOA’s national alerts never once mentioned.

WVCDL’s primary legislative focus this session was elsewhere entirely: the expansion of constitutional carry to all law-abiding adults, a priority the organization had championed for years. Those bills passed both respective chambers and were awaiting further action in the opposite chamber at the time SB 1071 was consuming all the oxygen in the building. As one source put it, their [WVCDL] “laser focus and long-standing relationships” ensured movement on those bills, a quiet reminder that the organization’s influence in Charleston is built on years of relationship-based lobbying, not last-minute national pressure campaigns.

None of this definitively settles whether WVCDL or its lobbyist actively worked to sink SB 1071 behind the scenes. The allegations from GOA allies are specific and detailed. But the framing that WVCDL was somehow anti-Second Amendment or hostile to machine gun rights does not survive contact with the legislative record. The two organizations simply had different theories about how to get there, and very different styles of operating inside the Capitol.

Willis: Gatekeeper and Candidate

No one was more central to SB 1071’s fate than Tom Willis, and no one had more competing incentives.

Willis, a first-term state senator from Berkeley County, had already made a name for himself by defeating incumbent Senate President Craig Blair in the 2024 Republican primary, a result that shook the Capitol establishment. He was rewarded with the Judiciary chairmanship late in 2025, an unusually powerful perch for a first term lawmaker, and Senate President Randy Smith publicly praised his ability to manage heavy, controversial legislation.

But Willis is also, simultaneously, running for the United States Senate. He officially launched his campaign in July 2025, positioning himself as a constitutional conservative and “no-compromise” Second Amendment champion challenging incumbent Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. He loaned significant personal funds to his campaign. His campaign website explicitly touted his pro-gun bona fides, including opposition to red flag laws and weapons bans.

SB 1071 put all of those identities into direct conflict.

As Judiciary chairman, Willis controlled whether the bill got a hearing, when it moved, and how the committee vote was conducted. As a self-described “no-compromise” Second Amendment candidate, he had every reason to champion the most aggressive pro-gun bill in modern American history. But as a political realist running in a statewide primary where electability matters, he also had reason to worry about owning a “novel legal concept” (his own words) that could blow up spectacularly if the ATF refused to process a single transfer.

The result was a performance that looked, to supporters and critics alike, like a man trying to have it both ways.

On the record, Willis spoke warmly about SB 1071. After the March 2 evening floor session, he told reporters that West Virginians could freely buy machine guns before 1986, that the state was “trying to get back to that state of being,” and that this was “the proper state for the Second Amendment.” He also acknowledged, in the same breath, that the bill relied on “a loophole created in the federal law” and represented “a novel legal concept” under federal statute, language that practically invited doubt.

Behind the scenes, the picture looked different. According to GOA, Willis initially pulled the bill from the Judiciary calendar on Friday, February 27, before the committee ever heard testimony. GOA accused him of denying gun owners a recorded vote. Their alert that day reminded supporters, with unmistakable meaning, that Willis “will rely upon” those same gun owners “when he tries to be your next U.S. Senator.”

Then came the whiplash. GOA published an update saying Willis was scheduling a vote. Then another update saying he had pulled the bill again, citing lack of “consensus.” Then the chaotic March 2 committee meeting where the bill seemingly passed by voice vote, Willis left for a back room, and the whole proceeding dissolved into confusion.

The Vanishing Act

GOA claimed unequivocally that SB 1071 passed out of Judiciary on March 2 by voice vote. Willis himself told reporters the bill had been “reported out” and was now “in the wheels of the Senate.”

But by March 3, the bill had not arrived in the Finance Committee. The Legislature’s bill-tracking system showed it leaving Judiciary but going nowhere. GOA published another alert, this one titled “Unprecedented Attack on our Machine Gun Sales Bill,” accusing Willis of failing to properly report the bill out of committee despite every other bill being reported that night.

Did Willis not report the bill out of his committee? Did leadership not accept the report? Whether this was a procedural error, a deliberate act, or something in between remains genuinely unclear. What is clear is the result: SB 1071 never reached Finance before the Crossover Day deadline, was never read on the Senate floor, and was, for all practical purposes, dead.

Sen. Laura Wakim Chapman (R-Ohio), a constitutional lawyer and vocal Second Amendment supporter, went to the floor to deliver a blunt postmortem. She called the outcome a disgrace, saying the bill had been killed without transparency and without consensus, with the decision made in the dark despite what she characterized as overwhelming support from the body. “This is exactly why the public doesn’t trust politicians,” she said.

Lead sponsor Chris Rose conceded that, absent extraordinary action like a suspension of the rules requiring a two-thirds vote, the bill was dead for the session.

Willis, for his part, told WV MetroNews that whether the bill could be revived “will be a question for the caucus to see what the political will is,” adding that he would personally like to see it become law.

The Troopers Spoke Up, Too

Lost somewhat in the GOA-versus-Willis narrative was a quieter but significant concern raised during the committee hearing itself.

Lonnie Faircloth, president of the West Virginia Troopers Association, testified briefly and didn’t mince words. He expressed personal misgivings, noting that the bill would involve transferring machine guns to private citizens, potentially making both those citizens and the troopers facilitating the transfers into federal felons. Faircloth pointedly observed that SB 1071 claimed to have found a loophole that neither the NRA, the Citizens Defense League, nor anyone else had previously identified, and that it proposed turning the State Police into firearms dealers.

The Troopers Association’s concerns were not political posturing. They represented the practical reality that the men and women who would actually be responsible for executing the program, storing weapons in existing barracks, processing transfers, navigating ATF paperwork, had real doubts about whether they would be on the right side of federal criminal law.

Sen. Ryan Weld (R-Brooke) raised his own legal concern during the hearing, pointing to another provision of federal code that limits machine gun transfers by state agencies to other government entities for law enforcement purposes, not to private citizens. That provision, if a court found it controlling, could gut the entire legal theory underpinning SB 1071.

What This Means for Willis’s Senate Campaign

The SB 1071 saga may end up being a footnote in the 2026 legislative session, but it has the potential to become a recurring headache in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.

Willis is running against incumbent Shelley Moore Capito, a two-term senator with a $4.35 million war chest, a Trump endorsement, and a long track record of avoiding unnecessary fights. His entire theory of the race depends on convincing Republican primary voters that he is the more authentically conservative choice: the Green Beret, the outsider who knocked off a sitting Senate president, the no-compromise constitutionalist.

SB 1071 complicates that narrative in several ways.

For the grassroots gun community that GOA has mobilized nationally, Willis is now associated with the death of the most ambitious pro-gun bill in the country. GOA’s alerts explicitly connected his handling of SB 1071 to his Senate ambitions, and their polling (which should be taken with appropriate caveats about methodology and sample) claimed 96 percent of West Virginia gun owners would be more likely to support a legislator who backed the bill, while 93 percent would be less likely to support one who worked to kill it.

National gun media has picked up the storyline. Bearing Arms published a piece pointedly noting that Willis’s campaign website describes him as “no-compromise” on the Second Amendment, while he is not a sponsor of SB 1071. The writer observed that opposing gun control is not the same thing as being pro-Second Amendment, a distinction that cuts directly at Willis’s campaign brand.

Capito, meanwhile, can afford to ignore the entire episode. She was never involved, bears no responsibility, and can continue running on her record and Trump’s endorsement without engaging in the machine gun debate at all. Willis’s challenge from the right just got harder, because a significant and vocal segment of the pro-gun base now has a specific grievance with his name on it.

Whether primary opponents choose to exploit this remains to be seen. The Republican primary field has been fluid, with several challengers positioning themselves as more conservative alternatives to Capito, and the machine gun bill gives any of them a ready-made line of attack: if you won’t fight for the Second Amendment when you have the chairman’s gavel, why should voters trust you’ll fight in Washington?

The Bigger Picture

Whatever one thinks of SB 1071’s legal theory (and reasonable people on both sides of the gun debate disagree sharply), the bill’s journey through Charleston exposed fault lines that matter well beyond machine guns.

The first is the growing tension between national gun organizations and state-level groups. GOA came into West Virginia with a bill it drafted, a legal theory it developed, and a national grassroots machine it could deploy on command. The state’s own pro-gun infrastructure had been working the machine gun issue through a different vehicle, HB 4185, since January, but that bill and that approach were never acknowledged in GOA’s messaging. Instead, the local group was painted as an obstacle. That dynamic, an outside organization with national ambitions pressuring a state legislature while local groups with actual Capitol relationships get vilified for not falling in line, is playing out across the country on a range of issues, and it is not going away.

The second is the structural problem of West Virginia’s 60-day session. SB 1071 was introduced on February 23, referred to two committees, and needed to clear both plus the full Senate before Crossover Day on March 5. That is an almost impossible timeline for any bill with two committee referrals, let alone one raising a “novel legal concept” under federal law. Whether SB 1071 was killed by political maneuvering, run-of-the-mill calendar math, or some combination of both is a question that may never have a clean answer.

The third is the oldest tension in representative government: the gap between what activists demand and what legislators calculate they can safely deliver. GOA wanted a recorded vote. Willis wanted consensus. The troopers wanted assurance they wouldn’t become federal defendants. Republican leadership wanted to avoid owning a test case that could generate national headlines of exactly the wrong kind. None of those positions is inherently unreasonable. All of them were irreconcilable in the final week of session.

GOA has already signaled that this fight is not over. Wyoming lawmakers are reportedly exploring similar legislation. Kentucky has already seen a companion bill introduced. The legal theory will be back, probably in multiple states, and probably with GOA leading the charge.

As for Willis, the question is whether the voters he needs most, the ones who answer GOA alerts and call their senators at 8 p.m. on a Monday, will remember how SB 1071 died when his name appears on the May 2026 primary ballot.

Based on the volume of phone calls and emails Senate offices fielded last week, they probably will.🐝

The West Virginia WASP is a West Virginia political news, humor, and commentary outlet. Follow @wvwasp on X. 🐝

The WV WASP takes no editorial position on SB 1071. This article is a reported account of the bill’s legislative journey and the political dynamics surrounding it.