West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Research Podcast copertina

West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Research Podcast

West Virginia Policy and Campaign Finance Research Podcast

Di: Carrie Clendening
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West Virginia Policy, Elections, and Campaign Finance Research. This Substack publication is dedicated to tracking the flow of political money into West Virginia’s elections and policy-making process.

carrieclendening.substack.comCarrie Clendening Politica e governo Scienze politiche
Episodi
  • Happy Birthday, West Virginia. Sorry I’m a Little Late.

    Happy Birthday, West Virginia. Sorry I’m a Little Late.
    Jun 22 2026
    West Virginia turned 163 this week. I’m a couple days late to the party, so let me make it up to the old place with a present worth giving.Here’s some history worth sitting with on a birthday. On June 20, 1863, the western counties did something almost nobody in American history has done: they looked at a government run by people who didn’t represent them — power and policy tilted toward interests on the other side of the mountains, written for somebody else’s benefit, paid for with somebody else’s money — and they said no thanks, and they walked. They built their own state. For themselves. For their neighbors.That’s not a fun fact. That’s the whole reason this place exists. And it’s exactly why I’m launching what I’m launching today.For a while now, this newsletter has done one job: show you the machinery. How the money moves, how it hardens into policy, the pattern you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. And a lot of you keep writing back with the same question — okay, so what do we actually do about it?This is the answer. Welcome to the West Virginia Model Legislation Library.If you already subscribe, you’re in — added automatically, nothing to click. The main feed stays what it’s always been: the investigation. This new one is the workshop. The main feed is where we expose what they’re doing. This is where we beat them at it.The American Legislative Exchange Council runs a model legislation library. I’m not telling you a secret — it’s their whole business model, and they’ll brag about it themselves. Corporations and politicians get in a room, often behind closed doors, and crank out template bills. Then those templates get carried home to states like ours and dropped in barely changed. Same words, state after state, written for the people who paid to be in the room.And it works — for one reason. Our Legislature is part-time. Sixty days. Almost no staff. A lawmaker who wants to do something needs bill text, a fiscal note, and talking points, fast, and usually can’t pull that together alone. So ALEC walks right into that empty space and hands them a finished bill. Tidy. Convenient. Written for somebody who doesn’t live here.So here’s the question I couldn’t let go of. If the whole con runs on the fact that they have a library and we don’t —then why don’t we just build our own? So we are going to. Not for billionaires. For our neighbors.Here’s the thing their money can’t buy: people who actually live here and know how this state works. Retired attorneys. Former county clerks. Folks who’ve spent careers reading the Code. We don’t need to fly in national staff or rent a think tank. We need to organize the people already sitting in our own communities — and aim that talent at laws written for us instead of at us.That’s what this library is. And the first entries start dropping here this week — all public, all free, all yours:* A blueprint for how an in-state policy shop really works — who you need, how a bill goes from idea to introduced, how you pay for it. The instruction manual for doing in the open what they do in the dark.* A straight-shooting brief on Amendment 1, the “Citizenship Requirement to Vote” measure on your November ballot. It won’t tell you how to vote. It’ll show you what that amendment actually changes — which is close to nothing — and what got shoved aside while it ate up floor time and ballot space.* Two real, drafted bills. Not ideas. Not wish lists. Actual legislation. One keeps West Virginia’s photo-ID requirement and fixes the gaps that quietly cost eligible people their vote. The other keeps the state’s voter-roll cleanup intact while making sure that being an occasional voter doesn’t become step one toward losing your registration. Both of them amend real sections of our Code, line by line.Read that list again, because this is the part that matters: neither bill weakens election security. Neither one keeps a single ineligible voter on the rolls. They keep the goal the Legislature said it wanted — and they stop eligible West Virginians from getting run over in the process. That’s what legislation built for your neighbors looks like. You’ll see every line of it this week.One straight word, because straight is the whole point. These are working drafts. Before anything like this gets introduced, it needs checking against the current Code and review by legislative counsel — and I say so right inside the documents. We don’t dress things up as more than they are. That right there is the difference between us and them.Here’s where you come in.ALEC works in the dark because the dark is the only place their game survives. Drag it into the daylight and it falls apart. We’ve got the opposite situation — which is to say, no problem at all. We’ve got nothing to hide, so we’re done acting like we do.* If you’re a lawyer, a retired clerk, a policy nerd, or just someone who knows ...
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    6 min
  • Why I’m Telling My 18‑Year‑Old To Wait Before Registering To Vote

    Why I’m Telling My 18‑Year‑Old To Wait Before Registering To Vote
    Jun 21 2026
    My daughter just turned 18. She’s smart, opinionated, and absolutely ready to vote. And I did something that feels almost sacrilegious for a parent who cares deeply about democracy: I told her to wait. Not forever. Not to disengage. Just to hold off on registering until we’re closer to the deadline this fall.Why? Because right now, our voter registration systems are a mess — a political battlefield where our personal data is being treated like a weapon, passed around between governments and third‑party vendors, and routinely left hanging out on the open internet like a forgotten file on someone’s desktop.I don’t want my kid’s full name, address, date of birth, and partial Social Security number sitting in some unsecured cloud bucket or in the hands of a contractor who treats “security” as an afterthought. And that is not a hypothetical fear. It’s exactly what has already happened, over and over again.This is not about discouraging her — or anyone — from voting. It’s about the adults in charge of this system behaving so irresponsibly with voter data that I don’t trust them with my freshly 18‑year‑old’s information right now.When Your Voter File Becomes a Political WeaponOver the last couple of years, the federal government has been on a crusade to get its hands on complete, unredacted statewide voter registration lists from almost every state and Washington, D.C. These aren’t just the public records versions that include name and address. They want the whole thing: full legal names, residential addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and pieces of Social Security numbers.The Department of Justice has sent demands to at least 48 states and D.C., and has sued Washington, D.C. and 30 states that refused to turn over their full statewide voter registration lists with driver’s license and Social Security information. Some of these lawsuits target states the administration lost in 2020, and the stated justification is “we just want to check whether your rolls are accurate.”Let’s be clear: there is a world of difference between auditing election systems and hoovering up the most sensitive information on tens of millions of voters into federal hands, to be processed by contractors we know almost nothing about. Election officials from both parties have raised alarms because the federal government has never had full, unredacted voter lists at this scale before.Some states have said no. Illinois, for example, refused to hand over dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and Social Security information, citing state law and privacy protections, and instead sent a more limited file like the one it shares with political committees. The DOJ wrote back and said, essentially, “Not good enough. We want the entire database, all fields, including full name, date of birth, residence, driver’s license, and last four of the Social Security number.”Other states have been sued and then vindicated in court. A federal judge in California dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit that sought to force the state to turn over its full, unredacted voter registration list, including addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. In total, at least eight of these cases — including ones against California, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oregon, Maine, and Wisconsin — have already been dismissed, and the DOJ is appealing several of them.So from my vantage point as a parent, here’s how this looks: the federal government is in a legal knife fight with dozens of states trying to pry loose as much sensitive voter data as possible, while courts are saying, “Hold on, you may not be allowed to do that.” That is not a stable, trustworthy environment for me to casually toss my daughter’s data into.The Grown‑Ups Left the Door Wide OpenIf this were just a theoretical debate about who could access what, I’d still be uneasy. But this isn’t theoretical. We have a long, ugly history of voter data being leaked, misconfigured, and left exposed — not by some movie‑villain hacker, but by the very entities that collect and monetize this information.A few greatest hits:* A tech contractor in Illinois left at least 13 databases with about 4.6 million records on the open internet — no password protection — containing names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, voter registration history, absentee and early voting records, even death certificates from multiple counties.* Security researchers found a misconfigured database sitting online that contained information on about 191 million U.S. voters — including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails — accessible to anyone who knew where to look.* A huge dataset compiled by Deep Root Analytics, a political data firm that worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, ...
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    12 min
  • Hunger in West Virginia and the Morrisey–McCuskey–Scott Will Machine

    Hunger in West Virginia and the Morrisey–McCuskey–Scott Will Machine
    Jun 20 2026
    Hunger in West Virginia is not an accident. It is what happens when the same small circle of men controls the budgets, the lawsuits, and the money machine behind our elections—Governor Patrick Morrisey, Attorney General JB McCuskey, and consultant Scott Will.Have you ever been hungry?Not the kind of hungry that nudges you toward the fridge between meals. Not the kind of hungry that has you scrolling through a takeout app on a Tuesday night. I mean truly, stomach-aching, nothing in the cabinet, kids going to bed without dinner hungry.In 2026, the wealthiest country on earth is quietly letting millions of families go without food. At what point did hunger stop being a moral crisis and become just another policy argument? The distance between a full refrigerator and an empty one is the same distance between our leaders and the people they’re supposed to serve.I’ve been thinking about that question a lot lately. Because while lawmakers in Washington and right here in Charleston debate budgets, score political points, and protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, real people—your neighbors, your coworkers, the family down the street—are going without food. This isn’t a hypothetical. This isn’t a distant problem. This is happening right now, in 2026, in the wealthiest country on earth.And when you follow the decisions and then follow the money, you keep landing on the same three names.If you’ve been reading my work on this Substack, you know this isn’t a standalone story. In “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore,” I laid out how RAGA and DAGA turned the AG’s office into a national partisan litigation machine. In “Your Help Really Makes a Difference,” I showed how Patrick Morrisey’s donor world operated at the Greenbrier. And in “Sugar Maple PAC may be buying the ads, but the real story is the small circle of operatives routing, reporting, and managing the machine behind West Virginia’s 2026 Republican primaries,” I traced the same pattern through Scott Will, SW2 Political, Matchstick, Bulldog, Red Curve, and the PAC infrastructure behind West Virginia’s Republican primaries. This piece sits on top of that groundwork. It is about what happens when that same machine meets something as basic as whether kids in West Virginia eat dinner.The Numbers Are Staggering — And They Should Shame UsA new Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis found that food insecurity in America has reached levels higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic. One in ten American households reported not having enough food to eat, or that their children missed meals—more than double the share who said the same in June 2020, at the height of the crisis. More than a third of households are now dipping into their savings just to buy groceries.Meanwhile, food prices in April 2026 were about 3.2 percent higher than a year ago, the fastest monthly spike in nearly four years. Overall inflation has climbed to roughly 3.8 percent, the highest in almost three years. People are not imagining this. It is real, and it is relentless.And yet, Congress passed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” slashing around 186–187 billion dollars from SNAP—food stamps—over ten years. That’s about a 20 percent cut to the one program millions of families depend on to keep food on the table. Before the cuts, children made up roughly 39 percent of SNAP recipients, and older Americans around 20 percent. These are the people lawmakers decided could afford to go without.The Trump administration actually celebrated removing people from SNAP—as if hunger is a victory condition.Right Here in West Virginia: Patrick Morrisey’s Hunger BudgetWest Virginia already knows what hunger looks like. We live it. According to Feeding America, 1 in 5 children in our state faces hunger. In fiscal year 2025, about 272,800 West Virginians—15.4 percent of our entire population—relied on SNAP benefits just to eat. Our state consistently ranks among the most food-insecure in the nation.And now, on top of federal cuts to SNAP, WIC, and school nutrition programs, our state is facing its own budget crisis—one that threatens the programs quietly holding West Virginia families together.Governor Patrick Morrisey recently revealed a 40 million dollar structural gap in West Virginia’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding. His early suggestions for closing that gap? Cutting childcare assistance. Cutting the clothing allowance that helps low-income families buy school clothes for their kids. Putting the futures of 58 Family Support Centers across our state in jeopardy.These aren’t just buildings. Family Support Centers are places where families get parent education, child-development support, after-school programs, GED classes, food and hygiene pantries, and a hand when they need it most. In a single recent year, just four of these centers served nearly 5,000 individuals statewide. They are ...
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    16 min
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