West Virginia’s Governor, an ‘Unusual Democrat,’ Fights a G.O.P. Tide

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/jim-justice-west-virginia-governor.html

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Even by the nontraditional standards of a neophyte politician — a billionaire often compared to the one now occupying the White House — it was a surprise.

Gov. Jim Justice, a Democrat, strode into the Capitol rotunda here, denounced a series of budget cuts approved by Republican lawmakers and lifted the lid off a silver platter to reveal an aromatic pile of fresh bull manure atop a copy of the spending plan.

“We need to be able to not strangle our state into just oblivion,” Mr. Justice said in a booming voice before affixing his veto to an unsullied copy of the budget proposal, which he described as “nothing more than a bunch of political bull you-know-what.”

The episode, in mid-April, was probably not what West Virginians were expecting from their new governor — and not just because of the dung.

Mr. Justice, a businessman who owns mining and other companies, cannonballed into the state’s collapsing Democratic Party, winning the governorship in November with vague promises to prop up the coal industry and turn the struggling state around, and a tendency to mention his friend Donald J. Trump.

Since taking office, however, Mr. Justice has operated from his own political playbook. He has paired his coal-country credentials with an effort to raise some taxes and other revenue to avoid painful cuts, moves that have surprised members of both parties.

As Democrats around the country agonize over their path forward in ever-redder states like this one, Mr. Justice is facing off with Republicans while keeping distance between himself and his party’s tarnished national brand.

“His style may be different,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a former governor who faces an uphill re-election battle next year.

But different is crucial for Democrats in states that are moving to the right as quickly as this one.

“You better tell your story” before someone else does, Mr. Manchin said.

Mr. Justice, 66, put it this way at his State of the State address in February: “You elected me as your governor, a person that had never been a politician, in the wake of me running as a Democrat, at a time when Donald Trump won our state by 17,000 million percent.” (Mr. Trump actually claimed 67.9 percent of the vote.)

And then, saying that West Virginia was “dying 50th” and in the middle of an “18-karat dog’s mess,” Mr. Justice did something unexpected for a man who seemed so similar to Mr. Trump and who had campaigned on not raising taxes: He proposed $450 million in new revenue, mostly through increases in sales and business taxes.

“He did an absolute U-turn,” said Mitch Carmichael, the Republican president of the State Senate, adding: “I think he’s more Republican in his philosophies. Where he has gotten away from that a little bit is his tax-and-spend policies.”

Mr. Justice followed the address in February with a “Save Our State” tour geared toward promoting his budget proposal and a separate infrastructure plan that he said would create 48,000 jobs. The state will need more than coal, he says, to get back on its feet.

He has criticized Republican proposals to cut spending on health care and higher education and brought mayonnaise sandwiches to the Capitol to illustrate what he said the Republicans were offering.

He has called some lawmakers “knuckleheads” and, at one point, compared himself to a grizzly bear and Ryan Ferns, the Republican majority leader of the State Senate, to a poodle, prompting Republicans to say Mr. Justice is embarrassing the state.

“I think the Legislature thought they could control him, but they can’t,” said Terri Ball, 58, a Democrat who said she had voted for Mr. Justice and Mr. Trump. Ms. Ball was buying vinyl wall coating last month in Madison, where campaign signs showing Mr. Justice in a coal miner’s helmet still hung near the center of town.

But when lawmakers return this week for a planned special session, Mr. Justice is expected to push for a compromise that will generate less revenue and eventually lower the income tax, though it is not clear whether it will make it through the State House of Delegates.

“It’s trying to protect education, trying to protect health care, but at the same time, largely anti-environment, and you’re doing tax cuts, changes,” said Simon F. Haeder, an assistant professor of political science at West Virginia University. “He’s in a tough spot. It’s a shifting state; he’s an unusual Democrat.”

Mr. Justice’s supporters say that in a state with a history of conservative Democrats, that is precisely his strength. “Democrats in West Virginia need to create their own identity, much like what Jim Justice is doing,” said Josh Sword, the president of the state’s A.F.L.-C.I.O.

More than six and a half feet tall with a lumbering physical presence, Mr. Justice is worth $1.6 billion, according to Forbes. He owns more than 100 companies in multiple states, including farms, metallurgical coal mines and the Greenbrier, a resort hotel in the Allegheny Mountains. He is also a high school basketball coach.

In 2015, a month before Mr. Trump descended a Trump Tower escalator and vowed to “make America great again,” Mr. Justice held a rally at a civic center down the street from the Greenbrier and announced that he was running for governor with the intention of raising up his much-maligned state. “Why not West Virginia?” he cheered.

The governor’s race certainly seemed to be the Republicans’ to lose. West Virginians, alienated by Democratic orthodoxy on climate change, energy and social issues, blamed President Barack Obama for the coal industry’s struggles. Democrats had already lost control of the State Legislature and most of the delegation to Washington, with all three of the House seats and one of the two Senate seats in Republican hands.

“I would say the Democratic Party in West Virginia is in disarray,” said Stephen Skinner, a former member of the State House of Delegates who lost a race for State Senate in the fall. “Justice has appeared, at this moment in time, to jump into the kind of vacuum.”

Mr. Justice, who has expressed doubts about human-driven climate change and kept his distance from Hillary Clinton, was not anybody’s idea of a party savior. His opponents pointed out that he had only recently joined the party. “I’ve been both” Republican and Democrat, Mr. Justice said in an interview, “but I just feel like that today the common, everyday guy is really hurting, and he needs a voice.”

He declined to release his tax returns, as did his opponent, and his businesses have faced claims of unpaid obligations and safety fines, which NPR tallied at more than $15 million. (In a statement, his son, Jay Justice, said the companies had reduced their outstanding obligations, but he did not provide details.)

But he was a wealthy political outsider whose status as a mining executive insulated him against most of the Republican rhetoric about the Democrats’ so-called war on coal, and he beat his Republican opponent, Bill Cole — the Senate president at the time — by 7 points.

And then, Mr. Justice said, he got into office and realized how bad things were.

“The state of the being for West Virginia today is far, far more dire than I would’ve ever dreamt that it could be,” Mr. Justice said in an interview last month, adding: “You’ve got hopelessness. And you’ve got a drug epidemic. And you’ve got a $500 million hole in the bucket. What are you gonna do?”

Mr. Justice had few kind words for national Democrats.

“We’ve gotten to where we legislate, in a lot of ways, for the exception, and the masses felt left out,” he said. “If we don’t have Democratic leaders that can articulate — and I’m not tooting my horn — but can’t articulate and be down to where everybody gets it and everything — that’s one thing I can really do.”

And he continued to praise Mr. Trump.

“We’re good friends,” Mr. Justice said, “and I think he’s battling the battle and doing all that he can do, or he’s trying as hard as he can try.”

Even if they view Mr. Justice, with his unorthodox style and personal wealth, as an outlier, some in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing feel a measure of relief at the turn of events in Charleston.

“I’m not sure I know what it means to be a Democrat at this time,” said Micah Weglinski, 38, of Morgantown, who organized a town-hall-style meeting this year as part of a swell of activism in the eastern part of the state. “He’s probably the best thing that we could hope for.”