If You Kill the King, You'd Better Kill the King
West Virginia's primary war is nearly over. The governing war may be just beginning.
The title of this piece borrows from a line commonly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” Governor Patrick Morrisey’s political operation has spent the better part of this primary season doing something no West Virginia governor in recent memory has attempted: systematically targeting members of his own party’s legislative majority for defeat.
The question worth asking is this: what happens if he doesn’t finish the job?
It is a question worth sitting with on primary eve, before results render it either moot or urgent.
The Scale of the Operation
The numbers tell the story plainly. Sugar Maple PAC and School Freedom Fund, two independent expenditure committees operating in the Morrisey orbit and sharing infrastructure with the governor’s Black Bear PAC, together spent more than two million dollars in Republican-only primaries for the House of Delegates and State Senate. Roughly $440,000 of that was directed explicitly against incumbent Republicans, members of the governor’s own caucus.
Sugar Maple alone drew $450,000 from a single donor, Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, a major national school choice advocate. David McKinley, son of the late Congressman, launched a counter-PAC called the Mountaineer Conservative Alliance-Action Fund, but it spent less than $400,000 total, concentrated in only six Senate races.
The scope here was a broad-front offensive, not a surgical strike. And broad-front offensives carry consequences whether they succeed or fail.
The iron law of political warfare holds that a campaign of this kind either breaks the opposition or hardens it into something far more dangerous than it was before.
The Scenario Nobody Wants to Model
Consider the range of outcomes possible when results come in Tuesday night.
In the most favorable scenario for the governor, a near-total sweep of his hand-picked battles: Takubo, Deeds, and most of the targeted incumbents are gone. The new caucus, shaped by Morrisey-backed challengers, is compliant. Legislation flows. The 2027 session proceeds with the governor holding the kind of legislative leverage West Virginia executives rarely possess.
But even in that scenario, the method is now established. Every future Republican legislator in West Virginia now knows that crossing the governor invites a well-funded primary challenge. That knowledge cuts both ways. It disciplines some. It radicalizes others. And it produces a caucus that behaves not out of conviction but out of fear, a notoriously unstable foundation for governance.
The more complicated scenarios begin where the sweep falls short.
If Morrisey knocks out two or three high-profile targets, Takubo and Deeds among them, but eight or ten targeted incumbents survive, something historically predictable follows. Survivors of near-death political experiences do not emerge chastened. They emerge emboldened, with nothing left to lose in their relationship with the governor and a personal grievance to fuel them through the next two years.
The incumbents who barely survive will return as an organized oppostion faction to Patrick Morrisey, not as cooperative members of a supermajority. Who could blame them? The governor will have created, at significant expense, exactly the legislative problem he set out to solve. Only now the problem will have a personal edge that simple policy disagreement never carries.
West Virginia Has Seen This Before
The closest historical parallel in West Virginia politics is not a comfortable one for anyone drawing lessons from it.
In 1996, Joe Manchin, having lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary, joined with conservative Democrats in the Legislature to form Democrats for Underwood, actively supporting Republican Cecil Underwood over his own party’s nominee, Charlotte Pritt. The intra-party warfare of the primary spilled directly into the general election and ultimately into the organization of the chamber itself.
The parallel is imperfect. Republicans hold a supermajority of a kind that makes a general-election defection scenario far less consequential numerically. Democrats simply do not have the seats to benefit from Republican fracture in November the way Underwood did in 1996.
But the legislative session is a different matter entirely. Supermajorities are only functional when members vote together. A supermajority whose members are actively working to frustrate the executive’s agenda, while remaining Republican enough to survive their own re-elections, functions as a vehicle for stalemate dressed in partisan unity rather than any kind of governing coalition.
You do not need a Democratic resurgence to produce a governing crisis in West Virginia. You only need ten Republicans who remember what was done to them this spring.
The Question of What Comes Next
The Morrisey operation has operated on the theory that the primary threat is sufficient to produce compliance. That theory has empirical support in some contexts. Legislators who watched a colleague lose in a primary for opposing the governor are likely to think twice before casting a similar vote.
What the theory does not adequately account for is the difference between legislators who are persuaded and legislators who are cornered. A persuaded legislator becomes an ally. A cornered legislator becomes a problem that money alone cannot solve.
That arithmetic matters because political capital is not replenished by winning primaries. A governor who expends this level of resource and personal credibility primarying his own caucus has placed a very large bet. If the targeted incumbents survive in numbers sufficient to organize, the governor enters the 2027 session having spent down his leverage without having eliminated the resistance. The operation will have demonstrated its reach without establishing its dominance, which in legislative politics is often the worst of both worlds.
The 2027 session will arrive with budget pressures, economic development priorities, and an education funding structure that requires ongoing legislative maintenance. The governor will need a functional working majority to accomplish any of it. Whether he has one will depend not merely on how many challengers win Tuesday, but on what the survivors carry out of this primary with them.
That is the question worth watching when the results come in: not just who won and who lost, but who survived, and what they now owe nobody at all.
The WV WASP is a West Virginia political news, satire, and commentary outlet. Follow us on X: @wvwasp | wvwasp.com 🐝