As campaign launches go, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s was conventional until it became unconventional. Cathy Justice kicked off her husband’s Senate run announcement by introducing Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV). To drive home the point that the GOP powers that be in the upper house have made their choice, she then introduced Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who got right to the point of the festivities: “This is the highlight of my life,” South Carolina’s senior senator admitted. “I get to introduce … Babydog.”
Babydog, for the uninitiated, is the Justice family’s ever-present English bulldog, described by Jim as “a 60-pound brown watermelon.” Graham leaned into the moment, no doubt wanting a better crowd response than he got solely by being Lindsey Graham: “I’ve been with presidents, kings, and potentates, but I met Babydog and Babydog’s a winner and Babydog is going to the Senate — might as well take Jim and Cathy with her.” The crowd, as all crowds do, popped big for Babydog.
By the time Graham introduced “Gov. Jim Justice, the next senator from the great state of West Virginia,” the conventional portion of the festivities was over and the unconventional went on full display. The hulking frame of the 6-foot-7, nearly 400-pound Justice passing the 5-foot-7 Graham onstage made for quite the optic. To announce his candidacy for Senate, entering the race to unseat West Virginia’s remaining Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, Justice bypassed the lectern his introducers had been using in favor of his typical onstage stool.
The thanking of his wife and other speakers had barely begun before the candidate interrupted himself with a chuckling “well, OK” as an aide came onstage to help Babydog, who had wandered in from stage left, up into a red wingback chair to put her in frame with the governor. “I know who always takes center stage,” Justice quipped. “How’d you get in here? OK, well, we’ll move right along from that.” Which was wise, not just because Babydog doesn’t go anywhere by accident and the canine tableau was obviously planned but because there was the duty at hand to say the words everyone was gathered to hear.
“Let me just tell you this. First of all, I’m not into teasing anybody about anything. You know I hate like crazy it’s taken this long to make a decision because really and truly you didn’t deserve being teased and you never have deserved being teased,” he said. “Politicians do that all the time. I don’t want to be that. … You know, with all that said, I want to tell you that tonight I am officially announcing my candidacy for the United States Senate, and I absolutely will promise you to God above that I will do the job and I will do the job that will make you proud. God bless each and every one of you.”
It was quintessential James Conley Justice II. Staged in a chandeliered room in the legendary Greenbrier resort he owns and treasures, Justice presented himself as a plain-spoken truth-teller, all the while dressing his political and professional accomplishments with his usual rhetorical flourishes, made-up sayings, and heaping helpings of hyperbole.
The vibe of Justice is hard to articulate without experiencing it. He is an Appalachian Dickensian character who talks with the endless metaphors and descriptors Faulkner would utilize, lumbering about in Gorilla Monsoon’s body with the vocal stylings of Ben Matlock after a few old fashioneds. The characteristics of Justice — businessman, politician, community leader, basketball coach, dog lover — are perfectly ordinary. The sum total is anything but.
“Gov. Jim Justice has consistently proven himself to be an unconventional politician, but your conventional West Virginia voter has come to identify with Justice despite being wealthier than your average West Virginian,” explained Ogden Newspapers’s West Virginia state government reporter Steven Allen Adams. “He lives in a normal house in Lewisburg, he drives himself to the State Capitol building, he loves his dog, and he comes across as folksy.”
That “normal house” is the unassuming rancher he’s lived in for years with his wife, their two children when growing up, and their dogs. Justice loves it so much, or more to the point, loves his routine so much, he had to settle a lawsuit that insisted on the governor of West Virginia at least nominally act like he stayed in the Governor’s Mansion once in a while. He still coaches the Greenbrier East High School girls varsity basketball team and plays up his coaching persona so much that he’s broken out the whiteboard during the State of the State address. The folksy is no act: Every “God’s sakes a’livin’” and “any way, shape, form, or fashion” is just how he talks, often at length and almost never taking the direct route to his point.
The whole package has worked out fabulously for Justice, who managed to stay among the most popular governors in the country despite COVID-19, the usual woes of West Virginia, various scandals, and questions about his business dealings. Under the folksy, the shrewd businessman emerged as a governor who, style notwithstanding, always has a lengthy set of bullet points handy for media hits about his tenure in Charleston.
A popular governor in a state that went for Donald Trump by 40 points twice, it was a political no-brainer for the GOP to turn to Justice in an attempt to knock off the last Democrat remaining in statewide office. Manchin is the last man standing, himself a former governor of the Mountain State and longtime friendly enemy of Justice. It was Manchin, among others, who talked Big Jim into switching from the Republican Party to the Democratic in 2015 for the 2016 gubernatorial race. The plan looked good, at least on paper: Manchin in the Senate, Justice in Charleston, Hillary Clinton as president, and perhaps a revival of lagging Team Blue fortunes in West Virginia.
Then Trump happened. Clinton’s disastrous run-in with miners in West Virginia was so bad she took an entire chapter in her book What Happened to try and explain it. Trump won West Virginia by the largest margin of any state in 2016. On Trump’s first post-election visit, his rally’s opening act was Justice coming onstage to revert to his previous Republican affiliation. Justice is both the first Republican governor to win reelection in West Virginia since 1972 and probably the last Democratic governor for the foreseeable future.
The comparisons with Trump are inevitable. Justice and The Donald do have plenty of similarities: the wealth, the businesses, the heterodox populist rhetoric driving their electoral successes. Both men keep the family business confined to mostly family and family friends. Both inherited their companies from their fathers. Both Trump and Justice turned those companies over to their children upon entering politics. Both stopped short of doing an official blind trust in doing so. Both use high-profile properties they own for official business.
Justice has publicly called himself a friend of the Trump family. His 2017 party switch was preceded by a White House visit and time spent with his hunting buddy, Donald Trump Jr. While not guaranteeing an endorsement of his Senate campaign by Trump, Justice did much to hint at it, declaring he had “plenty” of big-name endorsements lined up. That confidence was emphasized with Capito being onstage. West Virginia’s Republican senator was representing not only the GOP Senate leadership but her own West Virginia political dynasty that will proffer son and state Del. Moore Capito for governor and nephew and state Treasurer Riley Moore for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024. For his part, Justice made sure to praise Trump in his campaign announcement, making the verbal case for one big, happy, successful Republican family.
Shrewd observers note that Justice’s primary opponent, Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV), who is backed by the Club For Growth, which has pledged millions, owns the unique position of having placed Trump ally and friend Justice on the same page with the GOP Senate leadership. Justice, for his part, called Trump’s endorsement of Mooney in 2020’s primary “a mistake,” and the current donor proxy war that has already drawn sides in West Virginia is clear both in ideology and expenditures. Justice has managed the rare feat of being Trump-endorsed without coming off as subservient or requiring it. The governor has managed to maintain his own brand and political equity, separate from the usual MAGA brand that often turns candidates and officials into Trump caricatures.
“He’s an Appalachian Donald Trump, except far friendlier unless provoked,” explained Adams. “Despite his numerous business debts and fines, people relate to him and see themselves in him.” As was the case with Trump, Justice’s various business dealings haven’t dented his popularity. Litigation follows Justice and his businesses around, including a current spat with his longtime bankers in Virginia over loan repayments. Various fines, lawsuits, regulatory movements, settlement payments, garnishments, and other legal comings and goings over the years have mostly gone over the heads or under the radar of concern for West Virginians.
That lack of public notice is by design. Unlike Trump, whose very name is perhaps his biggest business asset and adorns everything he owns, the Justice family business is remarkably low-key. No buildings with names on them, no sprawling organizations, no real flash or opulence outside of The Greenbrier itself. By various measures, Justice and family own over a hundred delineated businesses, all of them run by a tight circle of family members and long-term associates with almost no real public-facing presence. A larger-than-life character in public, Justice runs his businesses with an effectiveness bordering on ruthless combined with a dedication to discretion that his friend Trump would have been well-served to emulate.
Sent by the Washington Post to write up pre-politics Jim Justice’s rescue of The Greenbrier in 2011, writer Neely Tucker was surprised to see Justice and his girls basketball team pile into the booths of soon-to-be closing Applebee’s for a postgame meal. The orders were food for the players and paperwork for their coach, signing contracts to close on a nearly $25 million land deal by himself among the din before a midnight deadline. Truthfully, it was Justice’s purchase of The Greenbrier that was the first time most West Virginians paid any attention to him at all. His local reputation for bringing the resort back to prominence, along with the attention and business that comes along with it, has been noted and appreciated. So has his community involvement, not just in money but in his time coaching and living among his neighbors and constituents.
Not that there won’t be plenty of controversial and questionable things for the millions being spent on the West Virginia Senate primary to cover in negative ads. Just because his business dealings haven’t caught the public’s attention doesn’t mean a steady stream of attack ads can’t do some damage. A developing state police scandal during his announcement run-up and questions about how COVID-19 money wasn’t always used, and in some cases was used wrongly, are out there for folks wanting to hear about it. While his attachment to living in his house and coaching his team has been hand-waved as endearing for a governor, questions about how that would work in the Senate, a much less forgiving and faraway place, are valid. Even his basketball coaching isn’t smooth sailing, as Greenbrier County’s school board voted 3-2 against hiring Justice to continue as the boys basketball coach as he had done previously, citing his lack of availability. That decision provoked more outrage from Justice than almost anything political that has happened to him, a telling anecdote about a man usually on the giving end of such narratives more than the receiving.
But to date, nothing or no one has attacked Justice with anything that wasn’t deflected by Babydog and a well-timed rambling metaphor that leaves his audience wishing the rhetorical country roads would just get on home. For every question about how funding for COVID-19 measures wound up in a baseball stadium for Marshall, the university Justice is a double graduate of, there was the statewide campaign of “Do it for Babydog,” a sweepstakes offering everything from luxury cars to scholarships to dream weddings for those who got vaccinated. A few of the big-ticket winners even got a visit from Babydog herself, who conveniently brought the governor along for the photo-ops. During the biggest peacetime political crisis in recent American history, Babydog became the most important political tool in West Virginia since the end of straight-ticket voting.
West Virginia has always been more complex than the occasional national attention gives it credit for. The Mountain State’s traditionalism is often mistaken for by-the-book conservatism when there is far more nuance at play. While undeniably socially conservative, the state’s move from blue to red was lubricated by a long-running populist streak that overarched between being one of the most Democratic states in the nation for a century to plus-40 Trump. The secret sauce of succeeding at statewide politics in West Virginia has always been in utilizing the two-handed method: With one hand, shake a fist at those no-good such and suches in Washington, D.C., who have done the good people of West Virginia so much wrong. With the other hand, make sure to milk as much money as possible from those same no-good such and suches by whatever means necessary. Robert C. Byrd perfected the method, Joe Manchin mastered it, and Jim Justice clearly took plenty of notes.
Manchin ascended the political mountaintop by balancing the shifting politics of his home state and insulating his personal likability by keeping those federal dollars flowing back home. But recent events have him looking more Much Afraid politically than Hinds’ Feet on High Places. The Inflation Reduction Act, nominally a piece of legislation that would add dollar signs brought home to Manchin’s political ads, has become a self-made minefield.
His status as the make-or-break vote in Washington, D.C., has come back to haunt the West Virginia senator, who now finds himself explaining why he is now against the IRA when he was for it. Manchin shocked many in West Virginia and Washington last year when he supported, and helped author, the Biden administration-backed bill. Now he is threatening to join Republicans in an attempted repeal of the bill. Manchin has vocally criticized the administration’s use of the IRA to focus on climate change and environmental programs, such as electric vehicle incentivization, at the expense of promoting U.S. manufacturing jobs, which was the reason for his original support of the bill. The fact that Manchin is suffering in the polls back home, due partly to his backing the law but made worse by his flailing public walk back, is also in play.
Increased flailing at President Joe Biden is further testing his Democratic colleagues’ patience, and all the while, his GOP friends smell enough weakness to indulge their “favorite” Democratic senator no longer. Having maneuvered himself to the center of the political universe, Manchin finds himself pushed out of the Senate by a centrifugal force mostly of his own making.
When he survived his 2018 reelection, Manchin did so with the unofficial motto that West Virginians like both Trump and Manchin. If that’s true, then the homespun self-made chimera of Justice might just be the perfect bridge between the two electorally. It’s a combination that could spell the end of a political institution in Manchin, who hasn’t lost a West Virginia election since 1996.
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Manchin has hinted he won’t announce his intentions on running again until the end of 2023, and why would he, with millions of dollars and what looks to be a very ugly GOP primary shaping up? Manchin can take the conventional political route of letting your opponents beat up on each other for a while, then assess and move from there. He also knows that with a state Democratic Party that is a shell of its former self, it’s either Joe vs. Big Jim or the end of the Democratic Party holding any statewide seat in West Virginia. And, crucially, a Manchin loss would not only solidify West Virginia’s red turn but might well prove to be the deciding seat for the GOP majority in a tightly contested Senate.
By any conventional measurement, Justice is favored to win his primary and will be favored to win election to the Senate even if facing his longtime friend-turned-opponent Manchin. Closing his announcement event with his family onstage to his right and Babydog’s brown-and-white majesty raised up on the red wingback chair to his left, Justice quoted a recently passed family friend: “Any frog that’s not proud of their own pond isn’t much of a frog. … This family, me, and even Babydog, we’re doggone proud of the United States of America, this great state, and absolutely you better dadgum always remember that.”
Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) is a widely published writer and is the host of Heard Tell.
