WV SEN 2018: Jenkins loses GOP primary, how vulnerable would Manchin be?

[JerryArkansas]

Can you provide some proof of this?

http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/wv/Dem - Second page has the crosstabs for the "who are you voting for in November?" question.

Y'all just don't get it.

Tons 👏 of Bernie voters 👏 in WV 👏 protest 👏 voted 👏 for him.

I'm not painting any other picture than what is fair, and I'm certainly not using "isolated examples: 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate always planned on voting for Trump. Of the remaining sixty percent or so, 35 percent legitimately supported Sanders and 25 percent legitimately supported Clinton. The overall group of Trump supporters was the plurality among those three groups, and 25% of all WV Democratic primary voters were Trump supporters who voted Bernie despite never supporting him.

They didn't vote for him because they liked him or wanted to see him as President: they voted for him because he wasn't Hillary Clinton - just like a huge portion of the love for Clinton there in the 2008 primary was fueled by her not being Blacky McBlackface.

They are conservatives who are registered Democrats because the Democratic Party has and still does rule WV local politics with an iron fist: they have closed primaries and if you want any say whatsoever over who ultimately runs your local and state politics, you register as a Democrat. This stuff isn't hard: a majority of registered voters in WV are registered Democrats but WV hasn't given a majority of its votes to a [presidential GE] Democrat since 1996; in the past four elections, it [the margin] hasn't even been in the single-digits.

It's not an outlier, it's not an exception: the difference between the picture you and others are trying to paint versus what is the reality is the difference between a solidly-progressive state and a heavily-conservative one; the difference between a legitimate Sanders rout (in both primary and general) and a victory where the primary's margin was fueled solely by protest voting.

And before Griffin is accused of being a Clinton hack by the posters above, just remember he was an actual delegate for Sanders at the Convention last year, unlike you guys.

[JerryArkansas]

^^^ I mean, this is a state where 40% of the Democratic primary voters in 2012 voted for a literal convict sitting in federal prison over the sitting Democratic President. It truly has always bothered me how there are people who are perplexed by the notion of registered Democrats in WV protest-voting. 

It goes back to the notion that many have which states most people supported him because they liked his policy positions when in fact it seems to be that at least a large section of it was based on the fact that he was not Hillary Clinton.  We saw that here in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and several other areas of the country.  If he had not run, that would likely have gone to someone else, maybe even Webb.  That voting block was always going to exist in the primary season, even if some of us overlooked it going into it.