Ric MacDowell/Appalachian Photography
Smith speaks at the kickoff of his West Virginia Can't Wait campaign in Matewan, a sacred site in the coal-dominant southern section of the state
What’s the most important election of 2020? Which one will have implications that endure the farthest into the future? By the standards of most national media outlets, only the presidential race exists, so you might do the obvious thing and choose that one. But having seen it up close, I’m going to have to go with the gubernatorial election in West Virginia, which just might inaugurate a new kind of people-centered politics in the heart of what’s assumed to be Trump country.
I’ve written previously about the campaign of Stephen Smith, a community organizer with no prior experience in elected office who has spent months building a movement called West Virginia Can’t Wait. He’s done 151 town halls with almost a year to go until the general election. Hundreds of volunteers in all 55 counties organized the town halls, buoyed by 39 separate constituency teams (Coal Miners Can’t Wait, Students Can’t Wait, People in Recovery Can’t Wait) that did the bulk of the organizing for the campaign. To date, 66 candidates have signed a pledge to join the Can’t Wait movement, running as a slate to support labor and reject corporate money.
The county and constituency teams initiated and recorded over 10,000 open-ended conversations with West Virginia voters over the summer, asking questions like “What’s concerning you right now?” and “What are you hoping for?”This rough translation of the public’s wants and needs would eventually become Smith’s platform. “We put out a broad set of policy principles, as most campaigns do,” Smith told me last week. “But we purposefully waited to put together a more detailed platform. We wanted to put out a document that had 10,000 fingerprints on it.”
Smith convened a writing team from the county and constituency groups, which distilled the 10,000 conversations into 32 separate platform planks. Constant feedback from organizers culminated in a one-day platform delegate convention, made up of representatives from all county and constituency teams who logged at least 55 conversations over the summer. “It was one of the most fun days I’ve had in organizing,” Smith says. “We had the people in our movement who had done the most relational work in one room.”
The final “People’s Platform,” written and ratified by the movement and the bottom-up wishes of local residents, are being dribbled out weekly at the West Virginia Can’t Wait website. Thus far it includes a half-penny wealth tax on nonresidential property assets above $2 million, the first state-level non-real estate wealth tax proposal in the nation. Other plans released would bolster workers and small business, combat discrimination and racism, and assist people with disabilities.
If there’s a unifying thread among the plans, it’s individual empowerment against the forces of organized money and extraction that have plundered West Virginia for almost its entire history. “The interest of our movement is to shift wealth and political power away from the people getting rich off our work and our pain and to the people with the greatest burdens,” Smith says. He explains that what kept coming up in the 10,000 conversations when his team analyzed them was the root cause of corruption, which appeared on surveys five times as much as other issues like roads and schools and jobs and the opioid crisis. “There’s a deep and prevalent awareness that the government of West Virginia does not belong to its people,” Smith concludes.
That’s perhaps to be expected when the richest man in the state serves as governor, having switched from the Democratic to Republican Party. Smith’s campaign calls the slice of elites controlling West Virginia “the good ol’ boys,” a coalition of corporate giants and political fixtures who divvy up the state’s resources for their own gain. The platform creates two new divisions in the state police, on Political Corruption and Corporate Crime, to attack the heart of the spoils of the good ol’ boys.
“There’s a deep and prevalent awareness that the government of West Virginia does not belong to its people.”
The plans reflect both national progressive trends and hyper-specific measures that could only come out of deep relational organizing. For example, the robust Workers Bill of Rights includes a $15 an hour minimum wage, guaranteed sick days and paid family leave, an end to right to work, and restoration of collective bargaining rights for public employees. But it also includes detailed safe staffing regulations for nurses and certified nursing assistants to lower the patient/nurse ratio, based on discussions with nurses responsible for 30 patients on an overnight shift.
The disability plan also came out of conversations with people about the state’s intellectual/developmental disability backlog, increased rates for paratransit, and people forced to take on roommates so caregivers can manage multiple patients at once. The anti-discrimination plan also adds detailed elements like a state Truth and Reconciliation Commission to quantify how black West Virginians suffered from substandard pay, credit, and housing, and offer reparations for that injustice.
The Small Business Revolution proposal seeks to turn West Virginia’s lack of an urban core into a virtue, promising to capitalize 3,000 small ventures every year through seed capital, forgivable loans, and stipends for artists and entrepreneurs (a type of basic income program, managed through a state public bank). The plan would also reverse economic development grants previously reserved for large employers promising jobs, with special set-asides for worker-owned cooperatives.
Plus, it would completely overhaul the tax code. “On property, business, and individual taxes, the people in West Virginia who have the least bear the most, and people who have the most bear the least,” Smith says. The plan increases corporate rates progressively, and strikes at corporate tax havens by requiring worldwide combined reporting. The wealth tax, which seems like it starts low at $2 million in nonresidential assets but would only affect “hundreds” of West Virginians, would generate approximately $835 million annually, and would funnel into higher teacher and first responder salaries, more opioid treatment, improved roads, and guaranteed broadband for all citizens.
A menu of potential business levies would hit even harder: placing a 100 percent tax on executive bonuses in cases where companies renege on pensions or wage increases; capping merchant swipe fees in the state to 1 percent, reducing financial rents; building a “retail severance” tax on out-of-state retail chains like Walmart; indexing the minimum wage to executive compensation (so the CEO cannot make more than 100 times the lowest worker); and taxing franchise closures that drive out local business and then shutter.
I asked Smith where the store closure tax came from and he didn’t know. “Some stuff I don’t know the origin story,” he says. Though he’ll run on the platform, Smith didn’t have a vote at the platform convention on the final most contentious questions. He even got outvoted on concepts he felt strongly about. “I support term limits in our particular situation,” he says, noting the entrenched power network in the state. “Our leaders didn’t. So it’s not in the platform.”
For months, Smith was the only Democrat challenging incumbent Jim Justice in the governor’s race. In the fall, state senator Ron Stollings and Kanawha County Commissioner Ben Salango announced they would run. Both have traditional political profiles and are likely to run traditional campaigns.
Smith’s bet, that building a people’s movement will generate a deeper well of support to take back West Virginia from a corrupt political structure, would be transformational. It would deliver a roadmap for how to organize in rural towns thought to be lost to the right wing forever. It would identify how to bring in infrequent voters who have given up on politics. It would lay out how to break a corrupt establishment and return government to its people, on principles that bring people together rather than driving them apart.
If this can work, it opens up an entirely new style of politics, one rooted in something so simple it’s absurd that it seems so novel: respecting the wishes and needs of the electorate. “My whole life, I’ve been told that voters are the problem, they vote against their own interests,” Smith says. “We believe the opposite. Voters are the answer to the problem, not the problem themselves. We think the people closest to the problem should solve it.”
