Stephen Smith Campaign
He ran on a New Deal for West Virginia, seeking to stir up old passions of miners who took on their bosses.
“If momentum is a real thing, and I’m not sure it is, then we’re doing great,” Stephen Smith told me about an hour before polls closed in West Virginia on Tuesday. Unfortunately for Smith, it wasn’t. A community organizer and first-time candidate, Smith’s unconventional, anti-corruption campaign for governor came up short, taking about one-third of the vote but finishing a little over five points behind Kanawha County commissioner Ben Salango in the Democratic primary. Salango will take on incumbent Republican Jim Justice, who switched parties early in his term.
Smith brought an organizer’s mentality to the race. A phalanx of volunteers who mostly had never participated in a campaign before put together all of his events and devised his campaign platform, which focused on ending corrupt self-dealing in government, making “out-of-state monopolies” pay their fair share, and revitalizing entrepreneurship. Smith told me that volunteers contacted a little over 300,000 West Virginians in the latter stages of the race, and his people-centered campaign raised the most money—nearly all from small contributions—of anyone running for governor.
In the end, a candidate who ran in opposition to the “good ol’ boys” who have dominated state politics for decades couldn’t surmount them. Salango earned the support of Sen. Joe Manchin and much of the party establishment. That included the state AFL-CIO chapter, despite Smith foregrounding labor throughout his campaign.
However, Smith wasn’t just running by himself; much of his campaign literature didn’t even bear his name. The West Virginia Can’t Wait slate, a coalition Smith assembled of 93 candidates running on a pledge to reject corporate money and stand behind unions, advanced at least 32 to the general election as of late Tuesday night, with several other races still to be determined. Victorious candidates ranged from U.S. Senate hopeful Paula Jean Swearengin to people running for the state Senate and House of Delegates, and local mayoral, city council, county commissioner, and board of education seats.
It was always going to be difficult for Smith, whose platform looked more like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
That’s a beachhead for change, without even counting all the new volunteers trained in organizing and politics. If Stephen Smith wanted to build a movement, he at least got it rolling downhill on Tuesday.
It was always going to be difficult for Smith, whose platform looked more like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (who endorsed him), to become the Democratic standard-bearer in a state that has trended so red at the federal level (though it hasn’t actually elected a Republican for governor since 1996). But the coronavirus crisis had a particular effect on a candidate who hoped to parlay person-to-person contacts and big organizing into electoral success. Though Smith held hundreds of town halls prior to the pandemic, his campaign, like many, had to go into virtual mode by March. His only public in-person appearances in the few months before the primary were at five Black Lives Matter protests in the past week throughout the state, including in small rural communities where hundreds turned out to commemorate the death of George Floyd.
The transformed Smith campaign turned into a kind of mutual aid operation. Four hundred neighborhood captains adopted 100 voters in their communities, and not only did they nudge them to register and vote, they checked in to see if they were coping during the crisis. “There’s a big difference between bugging a neighbor to fill out their voter registration, and helping them get access to food or renegotiate an electric bill or get through to the unemployment office,” Smith said. “It surprised us how people wanted to have those conversations. It was the moment where we got to test out the idea of a people’s government.”
You might say it worked too well. Until the last weekend of the campaign, volunteers were having conversations with residents and helping them through their problems, rather than straight get-out-the-vote operations. “I think we did the right thing for the moment, which is all you can ask for,” Smith said, and he’s right. But if you’re running for office, you do need to ask for people’s votes, and the big bet placed on showing leadership instead of telling people about it didn’t quite succeed.
Smith also chose not to directly attack Salango, or his more conservative rival Ben Stallings, as props for the political establishment. “We don’t think they’re our enemies,” he said. “Our enemies are the people behind the politicians. We always had aims on the whole system.” Of course, the system wasn’t on the ballot, Ben Salango was, and that’s who won.
Salango is unlikely to receive much support from national campaign groups, and he faces an uphill battle unseating a Republican in a year with Trump, who beat Hillary Clinton by over 41 points in 2016, on the ballot. To be fair, Stephen Smith’s road wouldn’t have been easy either. But we know that Salango’s more conventional path has a history of failure. Smith’s race would have at least been something different, something untested.
He ran on a New Deal for West Virginia, seeking to stir up old passions of miners who took on their bosses. He supported universal broadband, a wealth tax, a Corporate Crime and Public Corruption division of the state police, a new Homestead Act to empower local residents over out-of-state landholders, public negotiation on pharmaceutical prices, legalized cannabis, paid family leave, and more. And Smith built the platform by taking suggestions from across the state and even having his supporters write the position papers.
We won’t see if you could get an anti-corruption, people-led campaign for governor going in West Virginia in 2020. But Stephen Smith planted seeds that will take root across the state, making his campaign slogan of “a thousand leaders, not one” mean something. If deep organizing does change places Democrats have written off recently, places like West Virginia, most won’t remember that people like Stephen Smith kicked it off. But they should.
