West Virginia: 5 things to watch

Primary voters going to the polls in West Virginia on Tuesday have a chance to send a message to the two Democratic candidates for president and help set the stage for November’s general election.

Republican Donald Trump has already knocked out his competitors, but that doesn’t mean West Virginia’s primary is meaningless to him. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is still being challenged by Bernie Sanders’s outsider candidacy. Good polls are hard to come by in West Virginia this primary season, but the state’s demographics are a good fit for Sanders. Nebraska Republicans also cast their votes on Tuesday.

{mosads}Here are five questions for the West Virginia primaries:

Can a Bernie Sanders victory help him sway party elites?

Now that Sanders is unable to clinch the nomination at the ballot box alone, he will have to work to convince hundreds of party leaders who have already declared support for Clinton to switch their allegiance to him.

He’s using general election match-up polls against Trump to try to convince the superdelegates — who can vote for any candidate — that he has the best chance of beating the likely Republican nominee in the fall.

A win in West Virginia would help Sanders build an argument that he’s more in touch than Clinton is with the white working-class voters who increasingly feel disconnected from both parties’ establishments. The pitch probably won’t work, but it’s all he’s got at this point.

What would a Hillary Clinton loss say about her vulnerabilities?

West Virginia will offer a better view than most states of how well Clinton is adapting to the angry, anti-establishment mood of the electorate.

No state has more reasons to be anti-establishment than West Virginia. It’s one of the poorest and least diverse states in the country, and the Appalachian region is home to some of the people most neglected by America’s political elite.

West Virginians have soured on the Clintons, who were once beloved figures in the state. Clinton easily defeated Barack Obama in the state’s 2008 Democratic primaries. However, she has since lost the support of West Virginia’s white working class, said Robert Rupp, a political science professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

West Virginia’s most powerful Democratic politician, Sen. Joe Manchin, backs Clinton, but that might not be enough to overcome voter anger and outsider momentum, Rupp said on Monday.

“She is in serious trouble with white working males,” he said, adding that the state’s voters are so fiercely anti-Obama that they voted in large numbers in 2012 for his primary opponent, who was a jailed felon in Texas. West Virginia’s anti-Obama sentiment could penalize Clinton, who has embraced the president far more tightly than Sanders has during the 2016 primary campaign.

Will coal country believe Clinton’s pitch?

Clinton has been trying to walk a political tightrope in West Virginia, a state both economically and psychologically devoted to its once-prosperous coal industry.

West Virginia was a Democratic stronghold for the better part of a century. But over the past decade, voters have moved toward backing Republicans. A big reason for the switch is the decline of the state’s coal industry, which the GOP has successfully blamed on liberal environmentalists waging a “war on coal” with heavy-handed regulations.

Clinton has stumbled into this trap. She made a gaffe when she said earlier this year, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” At an event last week, Clinton apologized to an unemployed coal worker who pressed her about how she can come to West Virginia and make nice with the voters after dismissing their chief industry.

Clinton has tried to overcome this antipathy by promising coal country a lot of money. The Democratic front-runner has pledged a $30 billion government bailout to help coal miners and their families deal with the fallout from the U.S. economy’s transition toward renewable energy sources.

But Appalachians have been burned before and probably won’t buy what Clinton is selling, Rupp said. Voters’ response to her plan could demonstrate the flexibility of her appeal in a general election after having tacked well to the political left under pressure from Sanders.

“Appalachians have a well-earned skepticism when it comes to the offer of government help,” Rupp said. They “don’t believe Hillary’s bailout is coming.”

Can Donald Trump mold his West Virginia victory into a general election weapon against Clinton?

When Trump wins the Republican primary in West Virginia on Tuesday, he will have a national platform perfectly designed to tie Clinton to job losses in a region devastated by a changing economy.

During his Indiana victory speech, Trump foreshadowed his West Virginia attack on Clinton, saying, “We are going to get those miners back to work. We’re not going to be Hillary Clinton. … She was talking about the miners as if they were just numbers. And she was talking about she wants the mines closed and she will never let them work again.

“Let me tell you: The miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania … and Ohio and all over are going to start to work again. … You’re going to be proud again to be miners.”

Over breakfast in an upscale D.C. hotel shortly after Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary, a well-known Republican establishment figure who is no fan of Trump’s told The Hill how thrilled he was to hear the presumptive presidential nominee attack Clinton over coal.

It could be a strategy that helps unite the party.

If Trump launches an effective attack like that on Tuesday night, he will not only be appealing to swing voters but also the corporate wing of the Republican Party that remains resistant to his candidacy. Now that he’s abandoned self-funding and is building a fundraising team for the general election, Trump will need these rich Republican donors for a contest that is likely to cost each side more than $1 billion. 

Will there be a Republican protest vote against Trump?

Tuesday’s primaries are the first opportunity for GOP voters to make their voices heard since Trump became the presumptive nominee.

The billionaire’s final two competitors, John Kasich and Ted Cruz, have already dropped out, but they will remain on both West Virginia’s and Nebraska’s ballots, along with other former candidates including Marco Rubio and Ben Carson.

Given that fact, the remaining primaries give Republicans who hate Trump their clearest chances to register their anger. The size of the GOP protest votes on Tuesday could show how hard Trump will have to work to unite his party and encourage Republicans to go to the polls in November.

Trump’s own request, however, could keep his supporters in West Virginia from turning out. He told thousands at a rally there last week he didn’t need their votes:

“Save your vote for the general election, OK? Forget this one.”