Rahall isn’t just gonna curl up and die, a gleep like this may be the best candidate. Hell he probably wouldn’t be worse than Capito.
Now I don’t trust anyone who was a democrat only yesterday but IF (I don’t know his record) he’s been a decent boy and isn’t a Leninist it would just mean he’s a typical politician serving as a rat in a state were the rats were in charge. I say consider him, if a better choice runs in the primary, great. Rick Snuffer may run again, he lost by 8 points last election, not bad (but far behind Romney who took 65% which the highest of the 3 districts! And mind you Al Gore won this district 13 years ago), but nominating the same people over and over again in WV hasn’t worked in the past. It’s kinda the MO of the state party.
I disagree with with the Senator that democrat party has changed all that much. They’ve been controlled by socialist scum at the national level since 1896 and IMO were the bad guy’s for the entirety of their history. Everything Obama has done has been tried before, Clinton let queers in the military, raised taxes, banned guns, tried to socialize healthcare. The only real difference from 20 years ago is the recent embrace of gay marriage.
However that kind of rhetoric is useful in getting dumb rubes who still vote democrat “cause my grandpappy was one” (this district in a nutshell) to wake the hell up. Just like it was useful in MA to talk up conservative aspects of JFK even though we politically astute people know he was a damn pinko like the rest of the family.
One argument goes for states heavily one way or another is that you run as a member of the majority party in order to be able to be effective. It’s not exactly an invalid one. Used to be that the states didn’t have as strict an ideological enforcement of their members at that level (in some states, such as NH’s behemoth House, it would be hard to enforce that now, as you get some nutters in). Of course, when Jenkins first ran for the Senate in 2002, he just barely defeated his Republican opponent, so it wasn’t exactly an area thoroughly averse to the GOP (and Huntington elects GOP Mayors). It would’ve been curious to see where he and his opponent differed on the issues, if at all.