In the end, it wasn’t his policy positions, party affiliation, or experience that made for Joe Manchin’s strongest argument to remain the senior senator from West Virginia.

It was familiarity.

“I don’t think Patrick’s lying,” Joe intoned with almost an ah-shucks delivery during his debate with West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, “I don’t think he’s dishonest. I think he’s confused and he doesn’t understand West Virginia because he hasn’t been here that long.”

Morrisey won two statewide elections for attorney general, but Manchin — former two-term governor and carrier of the dynastic Manchin name in WV politics—treated him like an outsider. Harsher critics threw around the term “carpetbagger.” Morrisey failed to win a congressional seat in New Jersey before migrating south.

The Republican’s strategy of hitting hot-button national GOP issues in ads and speeches while wrapping himself in the vestitures of President Trump, right down to the talking points, unwittingly did the same. Immigration, border enforcement, and sanctuary cities might bring in GOP money, but they’re not pressing issues in the Mountain State.

However, as attorney general, Morrisey joined 17 other state attorneys general and two governors to challenge the Affordable Care Act, which is very popular in West Virginia. Forty percent call health care their top issue, and second place isn’t close.

They like Obamacare and they like Donald Trump. According to Morning Consult’s tracking poll, 61 percent of West Virginians approve of Trump, making it the third most pro-Trump state.

And thus, you start to get into the murky paradox that is the West Virginia electorate.

“People haven’t changed here. People are still the same.”

West Virginia was a solid blue wall for 100 years. The Democratic party had a hammerlock with a base of unionized labor in the state’s coal industry. Most homes in southern West Virginia proudly displayed their version of the Trinity on the walls of their homes: Jesus Christ, JFK, and John L. Lewis.

As late as my first voter registration in 1998, party affiliation was not asked when you went to the courthouse because it was assumed. Straight ticket Democrat was the fourth Christian ordinance behind communion, baptism, and pot luck dinners.

But change came — quite suddenly for many outside observers — to this notoriously hard to poll state. George W. Bush carried West Virginia in 2000, catching the Gore campaign off guard. The state’s five electoral college votes have gone for the Republican in every election since.

Somewhat notoriously, President Obama only cleared Keith Judd, who couldn’t campaign because he was serving a prison sentence, by just 16 percentage points in a primary. That was a somewhat comical outlier in a primary that was never in doubt, but the Obama/Biden ticket managed only 42 percent in 2008 and 35 percent in 2012.

Shelley Moore Capito’s Senate win in 2014 marked the first Republican in the upper chamber since 1958. The state legislature went Republican that year for the first time since the 1930s, and its congressional delegation remained all red this cycle.

Sitting Governor Jim Justice was recruited by, among others, his good friend Joe Manchin to run as a Democrat despite being a lifelong Republican. Justice won in 2016 but promptly used a rally in Huntington for President Trump to publicly switch parties back to his default.

And then, there is Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Their distrust went too deep, and the weight of history was too heavy.”

Trump didn’t win West Virginia by 42 points on his own. At a townhall during the 2016 campaign, his Democratic opponent made these comments that turned into a soundbite she would very much regret and later apologize for:

The context was immediately lost, not that it would have helped much, and the brackets of “helping people” went unheard among the thundering tone deafness of the middle part. To be fair to Clinton, she did try to walk it back, explain what she meant, and — to her credit — physically showed up in southern West Virginia coal country to take the criticism of it in person. But after eight years of what most folks in the coal fields took as a hostile Obama administration via EPA regulations, it was a death knell.

If the Democrats felt President Obama winning 35 percent in 2012 was disappointing, the 26 percent Clinton managed in a state her husband easily won 20 years earlier was an unmitigated disaster.

The incident merited its own chapter in Clinton’s book What Happened?, including this tidbit of reflection which comes off as genuine frustration at the contradictions of West Virginia politics.

Just look at Don Blankenship, the coal boss who joined the protest against me on his way to prison. In recent years, even as the coal industry has struggled and workers have been laid off, top executives like him have pocketed huge pay increases, with compensation rising 60 percent between 2004 and 2016. Blankenship endangered his workers, undermined their union, and polluted their rivers and streams, all while making big profits and contributing millions to Republican candidates. He should have been the least popular man in West Virginia even before he was convicted in the wake of the death of twenty-nine miners. Instead, he was welcomed by the pro-Trump protesters in Williamson. One of them told a reporter that he’d vote for Blankenship for president if he ran. Meanwhile, I pledged to strengthen the laws to protect workers and hold bosses like Blankenship accountable — the fact that he received a jail sentence of just one year was appalling — yet I was the one being protested.

She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to be baffled by the unexplainable in West Virginia. The answer to her complaint has the complex layers of an onion, but the onion is called “outsider.” Blankenship was in, despite having been convicted on charges stemming from the deaths of miners, living in Las Vegas most of the time, and shortly after this mentioned incident, being a guest of the federal government in prison.

And Hillary wasn’t.

It was as simple as that to many West Virginians, whatever else folks thought of it.

Clinton pointing out Blankenship’s hypocrisy fell on deaf ears — not because it wasn’t true, but because the coal industry’s relationships with the people and politicians are already baked into the cake.

Hillary and others could, correctly in some cases, point to racial prejudices and sexism to explain West Virginia’s presidential votes. But the Democratic party controlled the state during the coal companies’ worst abuses. Though they billed themselves as champions of union labor during campaigns, little actually changed.

Now the debate has shifted to the loss of coal jobs, which are never coming back regardless of rhetoric. Being honest while still appeasing those not ready for the new reality is more treacherous than ever.

The one politician with a D beside his name who seems to have found the way across that high wire is Joe Manchin.

“I’m not changing. Find somebody else who can beat me …”

“I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t realize how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet,” Clinton wrote as an epitaph to her campaign’s shortcomings against Trump’s all-consuming media monster. All this changing political ground occurred under the feet of Joe Manchin too, but in the two years since watching HRC flounder, Joe had time adjust. And the course he settled on was to keep dancing with what had brought him.

As Senator, Manchin made enemies of the progressive left as much as the hard right, but neither are large segments of the mountaineer electorate. During a conference call with supports of Bernie Sanders who were challenging Manchin from the left, the Senator got contentious:

What you ought to do is vote me out. Vote me out! I’m not changing. Find somebody else who can beat me and vote me out.

In the 2018 Democratic primary, Manchin faced a challenger from the left, and won 69.8 percent of the vote.

Long-time Manchin aid Larry Puccio echoed West Virginians’ answer to most outsider’s questions:

I explained to the folks in Washington who had the concern, ‘You don’t live here, and you just don’t understand how people feel about Joe Manchin.’

This was a race of Joe Manchin vs Joe Manchin. Of candidate fatigue and local issues. The national narratives have a place in the voting, but they were less relevant than most outside the state realized.

In the end, Manchin is reflective of a peculiar electorate. The old blue dog label — socially conservative, but progressive regarding labor, entitlements, and government’s role — remains visible under the fresh coat of red paint the state’s been sporting on recent electoral maps.

Having recruited his buddy Justice to Team Blue for the governorship, campaigning for Clinton seemed like a smart play for a Democrat. While no one reasonably thought she would win the state, few people foresaw her national defeat.

But Trump won, and what was planned out as a hedging of bets and smart politics nearly became an albatross to Manchin’s re-election in 2018. Morrisey relentlessly hammered it, playing to West Virginia’s pro-Trump majority.

It didn’t work. Joe survived.

West Virginia did away with straight ticket voting in 2015, so folks were free to give Joe one last go in the Senate while voting Republicans into the House in all three districts.

Outside money bought ads that hit national themes of sanctuary cities, immigration, and gun control, but they didn’t help Morrisey. The first two are not pressing issues in West Virginia, and the third is absurd against the most pro-2A Democrat remaining in Congress.

Manchin’s NRA endorsement may have ended, and his rating may have dipped from a lifetime “A” to a “D” after sponsoring legislation on background checks, but his constituents don’t mind that. The two most popular ads of his career both feature him shooting.

In his first campaign for Senate, Manchin took a rifle to the “Cap-and-Trade” bill. More recently, he used a high-end shotgun on a copy of the ACA lawsuit Morrisey had signed onto as the state’s attorney general. To the uninitiated, such ads would seem gimmicky and overly theatrical. To West Virginians, they come off as endearing.

Democrat in a Trump State

Tump’s more populist notions play well in a state that loves being the recipient of government spending. As the late Senator Robert C. Byrd’s famously put it, “One man’s pork is another man’s job.” That’s immortalized in the West Virginia’s 29 centers, seven roads/interchanges, two libraries, two community centers, high school, and telescope that bear Byrd’s name and were built with federal funding.

Trump promised help, and the people of West Virginia ate it up. The question was, would that enthusiasm carry over to other candidates when Trump was not at the top of the ticket.

Trump campaigned personally for Patrick Morrisey multiple times, and Morrisey embraced Trump as close as he could, but that didn’t get him across the finish line. It is arguable whether Trump, or Morrisey for that matter, are traditional conservatives, but they play them on TV and enjoy the conservative PAC money that comes with it. So inevitably, Morrisey sounded like a traditional conservative on the campaign trail in painting Manchin as a member of the party of Clinton, Pelosi, and various other undesirable Democrats.

But small government appeals have a fatal flaw in this state, while at the same time playing to the strength of an old blue dog like Joe Manchin. Many folks in the mountains want the government to leave them alone, and be the butt of their jokes and scorn. …

As long as the checks and benefits keep coming.

Manchin understood this dynamic, and despite some voters tiring of him, they know, or at least believe, that he cares about them and is still one of them. “Give a damn” is not a measurable analytic but it might be the most valuable of attributes in West Virginia.

Manchin’s constant messaging on “pre-existing conditions” wasn’t just one of policy, but a multi-layered statement. On its face it was a health care defense, but subtly it was telling the people of the state ol’ Joe from Farmington was going to take care of them. It told the retired and laid-off miners he would be there for them. It told not just patients but healthcare workers, now the largest non-government employee block in the state, that he would take care of them. It told the teachers, who had shut down the state government over their own healthcare and pay issues earlier in the year, he would take care of them. It told the elderly, the bulk of votes in this state that is demographically bleeding to death, he would take care of him.

Such subtlety is lost on outsiders like Clinton and Morrisey. Clinton had the right idea in messaging but no touch to deliver it. Morrisey didn’t even bother trying, foolishly relying on Trump’s MAGA banner to bridge the personal gap so vital to this peculiar electorate.

Joe Manchin didn’t have to learn it, or focus group test it, or be advised to do it. Relating to the people of West Virginia is who he naturally is. Cross-purposes votes, his much discussed “yes” votes for Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, EpiPens scandals, and all the rest of politics go through that filter. Until the people get tired of the man himself, there is no political strategy that will undermine his position, or his Senate seat.

Trump will not be on the ballot the next time Joe Manchin’s exiled brand of Democrat comes up for a reelection, should he choose to run. But in the meantime, Manchin navigates the unique situation where both he and President Trump are popular in his state:

The last time I talked to the president a couple weeks ago and he said, ‘how are you doing?’ I said, ‘It’s going to be fine, we are OK,’ and I guess he thinks he has to do what he has to do. That’s his prerogative. The thing I do know the polls in West Virginia, people like Donald Trump and they like Joe Manchin. So I think that we ought to work together.

It will be a fascinating experiment, watching a throwback Democrat navigate the troubled waters ahead, and the escalating war between the president who likes Joe but knows he doesn’t own him, and a Democratic party who doesn’t trust Joe, but needs his vote and must tolerate his occasional forays off the blue reservation.

“It’s West Virginia,” Manchin said after hobnobbing at a hotdog stand with die-hard Trump supporters who love him too. And then with a shrug: “What can I say?”