The Governor's Gamble Is a Bad Bet

Morrisey's move to primary sitting Republicans is bold. It is also the kind of political overreach that tends to end badly for the person who starts it.

Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced Monday that he is endorsing Pastor Jonathan Comer over sitting Republican Sen. Vince Deeds in the 10th Senatorial District primary, and promised that more endorsements against incumbent Republicans are coming. He called them RINOs. He is calling in for “change agent[s].” He said West Virginia needs fresh faces.

We have a different word for what this is: a mistake.

Let us be clear about what we are watching. A sitting governor, less than 18 months into his first term, has decided that the most productive use of his political capital is to campaign against members of his own party’s legislative majority ahead of the May 12 primary. He is not doing this in one race, but in a series of races. That means he is picking a multi-front internal war against the very caucus he has to work with for the next three years.

We think that is a bad political calculation, and West Virginia Republicans deserve to hear someone say so plainly.

Start With the Math

Morrisey won the 2024 Republican primary for governor with 33 percent of the vote in a six-candidate field. That means two out of every three Republican primary voters in West Virginia chose somebody other than Patrick Morrisey when given the chance. He is the governor. He earned that. But his mandate inside the Republican primary electorate is narrower than his title suggests, and he would be wise to remember it before he starts issuing lists of who is and is not a real Republican.

His approval rating sits in the low-to-mid 50s, which is middling by any measure. Jim Justice, who Morrisey replaced, was consistently among the most popular governors in the country. Morrisey is not Jim Justice. He is a capable attorney and a genuine conservative, but he is not a towering political figure in this state with a reservoir of goodwill to spend. Governors who go to war with their own legislative caucus usually need more of that goodwill than they realize.

Who He Is Targeting

In the 10th District, the incumbent Morrisey wants gone is Sen. Vince Deeds: a retired West Virginia State Police lieutenant colonel with 25 years of service, an FBI National Academy graduate, a pastor, a former law enforcement investigator, and the man who flipped a Democratic Senate seat in 2022 by nearly 20 points. Deeds chairs the interim Children and Families Committee and serves on Health and Human Resources, Judiciary, Education, Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Military committees.

The governor’s endorsement statement calls Deeds, by implication, a RINO who opposes conservative, pro-Trump policies. It cites no vote. It cites no bill. It cites no position. It offers no factual basis for the characterization whatsoever. It simply lifts up the challenger in glowing terms and lets the comparison do the dirty work.

If the governor has a specific grievance with Vince Deeds’s record, he owes the voters of the 10th District the respect of saying what it is. Calling a retired state trooper who pastors a church and flipped a Democratic Senate seat a RINO without clear evidence is not a conservative argument, but a political operation looking for a justification.

The Structural Problem

Here is what tends to happen when governors take this approach: they win some races, they lose some races, and they permanently poison the relationships with the legislators who survive. Every incumbent who beats a Morrisey-backed challenger will have beaten the governor’s candidate. That incumbent then owes the governor nothing and has every incentive to prove it. The governor ends up with a caucus that is either beholden to him or hostile to him, with very little in between.

And the ones he beats? If a Comer or another Morrisey-backed challenger wins a seat and then does not perform as advertised, the governor owns that outcome. He cannot distance himself from candidates he personally endorsed in a press release or X post. If they stumble, he stumbles with them.

There is also the matter of the Senate leadership dynamics this cycle. Senate President Randy Smith is already navigating a complicated intra-caucus battle. Multiple sitting senators are under pressure from multiple directions, including from PAC activity that has been linked, through financial and organizational ties, to Morrisey’s orbit. The governor inserting himself directly into Senate primaries on top of that existing pressure does not simplify the caucus situation. It escalates it. And escalation in an election year, when the goal should be holding Republicans together, is the wrong play.

What This Is Really About

Morrisey’s statement frames this as ideological. He says he wants legislators who will advance his agenda on taxes, energy, and economic development. That is a legitimate governor’s interest. We have no quarrel with a governor who wants a Legislature that will work with him.

But there is a difference between building relationships with legislators and declaring political war on the ones who do not move the way one insists. One of those approaches might actually produce results. The other produces resentment, retaliation, and a Legislature that has a very strong institutional memory about which governor tried to take out their colleagues.

The WV WASP has covered this intra-party warfare since before it had a name. We have watched the factions build, the candidate recruitment operations launch, and the PAC money move. What we have not seen is any evidence that the governor’s approach is disciplined enough, or his political standing strong enough, to actually succeed at remaking the Senate in a single primary cycle. What we have seen is a pattern of escalation that may feel satisfying in the short term and prove costly in the long term.

The Bottom Line

Patrick Morrisey has every legal and political right to endorse in a primary. Governors do it. It is not unprecedented. But doing it well requires standing, relationships, and a target that the voters can actually understand is worth replacing. None of those conditions are clearly present here.

Vince Deeds is not a RINO. He is a credentialed conservative who flipped a seat, serves his district, and has not been given a specific reason to answer for. Jonathan Comer may well be a fine man and a capable candidate. But the case for him is not the case against Deeds, and the governor has not made the case against Deeds.

We expect a series of endorsements is coming. We hope the governor will make better arguments when they arrive. And we hope Republican primary voters in the affected districts will look at who their current senators actually are before accepting the RINO label from an executive who himself won his own primary with just one-third of the Republican vote.

There is a word for someone who calls two-thirds of his own party’s primary electorate wrong. It is not a word that tends to age well.

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