The New Uprising on a Country Road

MARLINTON, WEST VIRGINIA – You enter this part of West Virginia under an enveloping green canopy. Known as “Nature’s Mountain Playground,” Pocahontas County is made up of 62 percent state or federal land, dominated by the Monongahela National Forest and the headwaters of eight separate rivers. While a gorgeous backdrop and a delight for tourists (and the timber industry), just 8,414 people live here.

It’s the kind of sleepy, empty place that politicians don’t see much value in paying attention to. Stephen Noble Smith has been here twice.

On this August evening, around 50 Pocahontas County residents have met at the public library in Marlinton, the county seat. Smith, a 39-year-old Democratic candidate for governor, is holding his 108th town hall, 15 months out from the 2020 election. And during a two-hour event that features a potluck dinner, breakout discussion groups, and an interactive game, he says something I’ve never heard from a U.S. politician.

An older man, who informed the crowd that he hadn’t attended a political event since seeing John F. Kennedy walk off a plane in “19 and 60,” had just compared Smith to the charismatic former president. Smith’s response opened some eyes in the room. “One thing I can tell you is I will disappoint you,” he said. “I hope we’re doing something much bigger than me.”

Stranger yet, Smith’s name does not appear on most of his campaign literature. His skeleton-crew paid staff didn’t organize this event; volunteers in Pocahontas County did. Smith does not see himself as merely running for office, but building a movement called West Virginia Can’t Wait. Most of the army of volunteers and candidates who’ve been attracted to the effort have never participated in a political campaign before.

What unites them is a belief that West Virginia’s abundance has been stolen by a corporate and political oligarchy, which extracts from its people as surely as from its land. These activists seek to wake up the fighting spirit that looms over West Virginia’s history, from the Mine Wars a century ago to the #RedforEd teachers strikes last year. They think of West Virginia as a place where people take care of each other, and they want to bring that impulse back to its government, by taking it over.

Smith, a first-time candidate who comes out of community organizing, is promoting this mission by putting his campaign in the people’s hands. He’s assembled a slate of more than 50 other candidates, who are running for everything from U.S. Congress to city councils, on a pledge to reject corporate money, stand behind unions, and never duck a debate. At a convention this fall, West Virginia Can’t Wait members will debate and write Smith’s campaign platform. If he wins, they will choose his cabinet, and help set his budget.

The campaign, one of the most unusual and thrilling in recent memory, is a vehicle, a means to build lasting, long-term grassroots infrastructure, in a state habitually bulldozed by small oligopolies carrying big money. “Never in American history has change happened from one politician,” Smith tells me. “The more of us who sign on, the more we’re able to tell the next candidate, ‘You’re not alone, we can do this together. You don’t have to be rich, you don’t need political connections. We have our own machine.’”

CASUAL POLITICAL OBSERVERS tell an easy story about West Virginia through a half-century of presidential outcomes. As recently as 1996, West Virginia was a fairly reliable blue state, having voted Democratic in 14 of the previous 17 elections. Residual appreciation for New Deal and Great Society programs and a heavily unionized mining sector explained this loyalty. Finally, George W. Bush took 52 percent of the vote in 2000, and the gap gradually widened until Donald Trump’s 69 percent to 26 percent blowout over Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was Trump’s second-largest state margin of victory, after Wyoming.

But framing West Virginia as conservative Trump country shouldn’t be clear-cut. The state hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 1996. (Jim Justice, the current governor and the state’s richest man, won the office in 2016 as a Democrat and then switched parties to ally with Trump.) It hasn’t had two Republican senators simultaneously since 1958. The state legislature was in Democratic hands from 1931 to 2014. Richard Ojeda and Talley Sergent, two Democratic congressional candidates in 2018, improved on Clinton’s 2016 numbers by 36 and 25 points, respectively, the largest vote swing for non-incumbents in the country.

As Stephen Smith explains, the real political divide in West Virginia isn’t between right and left, but between the corporate and political bigwigs (his movement calls them “the good ol’ boys”) and everyone else. “It’s a contest for power,” he says.

He sketches this out for me on a napkin at a diner in Los Angeles, where we first met while he was holding a couple of fundraisers. (All of Smith’s out-of-state fundraisers have been chaired by West Virginia expats.) In 1996, West Virginia’s voter registration was about 65 percent Democratic, 30 percent Republican, and 5 percent other. By 2016, the Democratic number had dropped to 45 percent, but the Republican number stayed virtually the same. “They became independents,” he says. “In West Virginia, the way we talk about it is, ‘I vote for the person.’ What they mean is, ‘I don’t trust either party.’”

West Virginia Democrats’ registration collapse came mostly while their party held the governor’s mansion—during which time, people’s lives didn’t improve and the political leadership grew cozier with corporate interests. The state’s economy relies to an uncomfortable degree on plundering the land: coal, timber, and now fracking companies chop trees, pollute rivers and streams, puncture holes in the earth, and blow the tops clear off of mountains. Most of these companies are headquartered outside the state, so their profits end up outside the state as well.

Constant tax breaks for coal companies and out-of-state businesses also drain resources for public services. “We always let outsiders take all the profit out of the state,” says Terry Steele, a retired coal miner. “We ended up with all the spoils, miners with black lung and bad roads.” The Smith campaign estimates that just getting the wealthy and corporations to pay the same tax rate as everyone else would yield $525 million a year in revenue.

A stunning number of state politicians either own, work for, or hold investments in fossil fuel companies, or get slathered with donations from them. One activist who pointed this out in public testimony in 2018 got forcibly removed from the state legislature. The establishment transcends the party structure, as evidenced by Justice, a billionaire coal magnate who owns over 100 companies, who ran as a Democrat only to change effortlessly to a Republican.

Stories of political graft predominate. A recently signed tax break bailed out a coal plant that had accused one of Justice’s companies of owing it $3.1 million; critics called it a political favor. State Supreme Court Justice Allen Loughry, who wrote a book decrying political corruption, was hit with a 32-count indictment for self-dealing and ultimately removed from office.

Meanwhile, ordinary residents struggle with decaying towns and palpable despair. Median household income is almost $17,000 below the national average. West Virginia is ground zero for an opioid epidemic that has claimed thousands of lives. Millions of pills were shipped into tiny towns, with predictable and tragic results.

Trump’s appeal can be explained by his rejection of the national political establishment, and attacks on a cultural elite who seek to board up coal mines and put Mountaineers out of work. But the establishment inside West Virginia has consigned ordinary citizens to misery while the rich profit. And even with Trump, more people stayed home in 2016 than voted for him. “People are fed up with corruption and the good ol’ boy system,” says James McCormick, a veteran who earned three Purple Hearts serving in Iraq. “The people that preach the loudest about lazy people on welfare, they are the biggest entitlement suckers in the world.”

In his Marlinton town hall, Smith dramatizes the state’s power relationships in a striking way. He assembles six chairs and brings up five volunteers from the audience. “The chairs represent the natural resources and wealth for this state, enough for each one of our people to live with dignity,” he says. Indeed, measured by real gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, this is the wealthiest time in West Virginia history. Its GDP growth in the first quarter of 2019 was tops in the nation, at 5.2 percent.

Then, Smith calls up Phil Rolleston, who helped organize the town hall, to play an out-of-state landowner. “Phil saw this bounty and said, ‘I’m going to take care of myself,’” Smith says, directing him to spread himself out on two chairs. The situation is precarious for Phil, so he hires one of the other volunteers to be his governor, to protect his chairs and take two of his own. “If you’re a politician in West Virginia long enough, you get paid,” Smith explains.

So now there are two chairs and four people left, and Smith tells them, “Find a place to sit.”

What happens next is kind of a remarkable psychological experiment. The four volunteers position themselves so everyone gets a share of the chair, an analogue to poorer West Virginians making room for one another: multiple families living under one roof, churches setting up food pantries. But this cycle of living with less also creates tension. “We end up fighting each other for a corner while the people that have enough get theirs,” one of the volunteers says.

Indeed, Smith tells me, desperate West Virginians, under the thumb of corporate robber barons and corrupt politicians for so long, react in one of two ways. “It can go towards the worst strands of American history, where that desperation gets turned into the most virulent racism and criminal levels of exploitation and nationalism,” he says, “or it can go towards the greatest moments in our history.”

STEPHEN SMITH HAS BEEN trying to build those historic moments in West Virginia since 2012, when he moved back to the place where he was born. As head of the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Families Coalition for six years, he built campaigns that came out of ideas solicited from within local communities. One of them, called Our Children Our Future, produced 28 legislative victories, including raising the minimum wage and expanding the school breakfast and lunch program. Another, Try This, has delivered 257 micro-grants (around $1,500 each) across the state to improve communities through local gardens, boat ramps, bike lanes, and walking trails. After the 2016 flooding that killed 23 people and destroyed 1,200 homes, Smith took part in a shoestring nonprofit coalition that he says rebuilt 100 homes in its first year; the state government had nearly $150 million in federal grants and only built 50.

“We learned that the people of the state are ten times smarter and more passionate and more courageous than the lobbyists who run our government,” Smith says.

By contrast, a typical gubernatorial campaign in West Virginia is driven by money, not people. In 2016, Justice and his millionaire auto dealer Republican opponent, Bill Cole, spent about $5.1 million and $2.8 million, respectively, on the race. Justice financed most of his spending out of his own pocket. As Smith describes it, Justice and Cole each had a tiny staff, maybe 20 advisers, and just threw a bunch of money at advertising. “That [type of] campaign will be safe, not brave,” Smith told supporters on a national organizing call in August. “It’s going to be run to the benefit of the interests that paid for it, the lobbyists and corporate backers … They’re not going to give a damn about people power.”

In town halls, Smith talks about those campaigns by holding up his index finger; he describes West Virginia Can’t Wait as having fists.

As Stephen Smith explains, the political divide in West Virginia isn’t between right and left, but between the “the good ol’ boys” and everyone else.

West Virginia Can’t Wait begins with captains in each of the state’s 55 counties. As of September, the campaign boasted 270 county captains, with each county building an independent political organization that, by the 2020 election, will match the size of a typical statewide gubernatorial campaign. The county captains plan and organize the town halls that Smith attends, which thereby become a leadership development moment for new or inexperienced organizers thrown into the fire.

“We want to meet the people feeling the most pain,” said Sarah Hutson, West Virginia Can’t Wait’s field director, who works closely with the captains. Every county team comes up with different events, and learns from one another through internal Facebook groups and twice-monthly conference calls. Everyone contributes their talents. Phil Rolleston, the Pocahontas County captain, does online database work, and designed a program to organize volunteers.

Smith tells me about an older couple in Fayette County, who for one town hall picked a black church in a lower-income area. Intent to represent a cross-section of the community, they went door to door in housing complexes, bringing voter registration cards and an invite to the coming event. In the end, 86 people showed up. “We never said, ‘You need to go door to door in a low-income community,’” Smith says. “It was just by giving people the problem of, how are we going to organize this.”

Kayla McCoy, a former professional chef who founded the nonprofit to assist people affected by the devastating 2016 flood, heads up Greenbrier County Can’t Wait. “When we started I was the only person in the county,” she says. “I live a mile and a half from Jim Justice, it’s probably one of the more difficult counties to be campaigning in. I now have three co-captains, and I’m having as many conversations as I can.”

The conversations are part of a strategy to mine the collected knowledge of West Virginians, listening to people’s concerns instead of dictating solutions to them. West Virginia Can’t Wait set a goal of holding 10,000 such conversations throughout the summer, all of them logged through an app called Reach. Not only does this raise campaign awareness and gather intelligence about pressing issues, but it also breaks down walls constructed for a polarized age. The sample script, borrowing a technique from labor organizing in working-class communities, begins not by asking people whom they will vote for, but what they want to see in a better West Virginia: “What’s concerning you right now? What do you care about that’s impacting your life or someone you love? What are you hoping for?”

McCoy tells me about a conversation she had with a diehard Republican, a business owner she knew but never talked with about politics. “The commonality we found was on the legalization of pot,” she says. “It brings in tax revenue and it’s a great way to combat the opioid epidemic. By the end of the conversation he was at ease.” The business owner isn’t a surefire vote for Smith, but for that moment, McCoy says, they shared a common purpose. “We both live here, we want to see the area and the state thrive, and we care about our friends and neighbors.”

WEST VIRGINIA CAN’T WAIT also has constituency captains, organized across 39 different issue areas, from Coal Miners Can’t Wait to Social Workers Can’t Wait to Students Can’t Wait to People in Recovery Can’t Wait. “None of those teams has anybody’s name on it,” Smith says. “What our state needs is not 1,000 veterans who believe in one guy. We need 1,000 veterans who will fight like hell for veterans no matter who is in office.”

James McCormick is part of Veterans Can’t Wait. An ex-Republican turned independent, he describes himself as “not a fan” of partisan politics. “Me being a veteran, I can’t keep the politicians off me during election time—but after that, you can’t find them.” McCormick wants adequate health care for senior-citizen veterans, the construction of a new state veteran’s nursing home, and direct licensing certification for military police and medics to fill state jobs as police officers and EMTs. He wants to revive a “troops to teachers” program that has withered.

Polla Rumberg, a 71-year-old retired psychiatrist and school counselor, runs Seniors Can’t Wait. She eschewed politics most of her life, considering it distasteful. “I was happily retired until I met this man [Smith]. He has set us on fire,” she says. “It’s daunting for people who are inexperienced, but that’s offset by being exhilarated.”

Rumberg has lived all over the state, and has already assembled 200 senior volunteers to help identify and promote a senior-focused platform. “I have generated a questionnaire, where people tell me what their experience has been and what interests they have in making the state better for seniors,” Rumberg says. “I’ll call and say, I know you have experience in music, I need you to do this event. I have a 90-plus year old member canvassing door to door.”

Mike Weaver, a Trump voter and former chicken farmer from Pendleton County, quit the business in disgust with exploitation by out-of-state processing companies, who keep farmers on contract and dictate all the terms. He now grows industrial hemp. “They’re shamefully abusive to farmers, it should be illegal,” said Weaver, a past president of the Organization for Competitive Markets, which seeks to tame Big Ag monopolies.

Weaver signed up with Farmers Can’t Wait, recruiting colleagues from across the state. “Most of them agree that corporate America and contract agriculture is the wrong way to go,” he says. He wants more opportunity within West Virginia for its many local farmers, like markets for their goods in schools and state hospitals.

The idea generation that the campaign is producing goes beyond a mere exercise. Each county and constituency team must reach a goal of 55 conversations, which earns them a ticket into a platform convention meeting in November. This meeting will create the platform that Smith will carry into the election, taking input from his core volunteers and really from thousands of opinions they’ve solicited across the state. It’s hard to think of another major candidate for higher office who crowdsourced the ideas behind their campaign.

Should he get elected, Smith has promised to create people’s councils to help choose heads of state agencies, and budget and policy priorities, in a similar democratic fashion. “Stephen Smith gives every group of citizens a seat at the table,” adds James McCormick. “Not a dang one of us have been promised a job, just [the opportunity] to fix the horrible stuff in our state.”

In town halls, Smith talks about those campaigns by holding up his index finger; he describes West Virginia Can’t Wait as having fists.

It’s not that Smith doesn’t have ideas of his own. He wants to initiate an anti-corruption unit within the state police, punishing those who loot West Virginia’s people. He favors single-payer health care and direct negotiations for state-purchased prescription drugs. He supports ending tax giveaways for giant out-of-state landowners and monopolies, diverting the money to infrastructure investment and support for small businesses and co-ops. He wants to use the state’s small-town atmosphere as an asset, rather than paying dearly to attract big business. “Then you make the market work in your favor,” he tells me, “by saying, if you are a family farm, if you’re a family-owned business, if you’re a union shop, if you’re a co-op, come to West Virginia: We’re the only economy that’s rigged in your favor.”

But it’s Smith’s inquisitiveness that defines the campaign. “The foundational lie of modern politics is: Here I am, I can fix it, vote for me,” he says. “What I personally believe and learned from the trail is: That lie is what keeps people home. The thing about mass politics, it’s far more life-giving for everybody involved. Our liberation is tied up in each other.”

THE COUNTY AND constituency teams offer the promise of a giant army to drown out the typical money power of top-down campaigns. But it also improves communication to voters, eschewing most campaigns’ reliance on paid advertising and canvassers with no connection to the community. The campaign plans to borrow a relational organizing idea used in 2018 to great effect in Jefferson County, West Virginia, called “100×35.”

The county party, which wanted to flip two state legislative seats, identified 3500 low-turnout Democrats and found 100 volunteers, giving them each responsibility for 35 voters. They could text message, email, call, write a postcard or letter, door-knock, do whatever it took to get out those 35 voters. And when early voting began, the party published rankings for each volunteer, creating a friendly competition. Turnout doubled within this universe of Democrats, and the two seats flipped.

With the exponentially larger universe of volunteers for West Virginia Can’t Wait, replicating 100×35 could pay real dividends. “With this infrastructure, we can make it so that every single voter we need will have heard about the campaign, one-on-one, face-to-face from someone they know,” Smith says. “If we’re at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and I come up to you afterwards and I say, ‘I’m part of this group, People in Recovery Can’t Wait. And we’ve spent the last year talking to people like you and me and we’ve even got people like you and me running for office. If I give you a ride to the polls next week, will you come with me?’ That’s just fundamentally different than some stranger leaving a piece of trash on your front doorstep.”

West Virginia Can’t Wait kicked off its campaign in Matewan, a sacred site in the coal-dominant southern section of the state. In 1921, ten thousand miners, a multiracial coalition including newly arrived European immigrants and Southern blacks, confronted three thousand state and local police and hired-gun detective agents at Blair Mountain. It was the culmination of a decade of violence between mine bosses and union workers, including a shoot-out in Matewan the year before that left ten dead and amped up tensions. For five days, police deployed machine guns and even commissioned private planes to drop homemade explosives on the mine workers at Blair Mountain. President Harding sent in federal troops to break up the skirmish, the largest domestic uprising since the Civil War.

The miners wore red bandanas to signify themselves in battle. “The mine bosses tied it into ‘Russian, communist, union organizers, these people are outsiders, these people are communists,’” says Wilma Steele, founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, which still sports bullet holes from the 1920 massacre. “But when the miners tied that bandana and marched to Blair, they said, ‘We are workers, we are rednecks, we are marching together to fight for each other.’ The term redneck is about solidarity between brothers.”

Steele, in front of a crowd clad in red bandanas, told that story nearly 100 years later at the campaign kickoff, describing how miners from disparate backgrounds struggled as one. Stephen Smith spoke about having the courage to wear the bandana, the weight of that symbol. “It was something special, like a gathering or a calling,” Steele tells me. “People traveled from every part of this state to come together.”

While West Virginia Can’t Wait isn’t using guns and ammunition to take on corporate rule, its members know the history and are animated by it. “I think a lot of people hearken back to those roots,” says Brittney Barlett, a teacher and movement organizer who was active in the 2018 #RedforEd strikes.

Across the state, teachers were fed up with some of the lowest salaries in the nation, ever-increasing health insurance premiums, and a wellness app that forced them to track steps and reduce their body mass index or incur fees of up to $300 a year. Despite a state law preventing public-employee strikes, teachers walked out in February 2018, wearing bright red as they picketed. Other unions, including the United Mine Workers, bused people to the protests. Smith also got involved, helping a grassroots coalition raise $332,000 in a week for a strike fund.

After a nine-day walkout and countless demonstrations at the state capitol, teachers received a 5 percent raise and triggered a wave of other teachers strikes across the nation. But Brittney Barlett had unfinished business in the House of Delegates. “The incumbent in my area was not supporting education,” she says. “Someone had to take him out. Why not a teacher?”

THE 94 COUNTY AND constituency teams of West Virginia Can’t Wait are joined by a third component: candidates. West Virginia Can’t Wait fashioned a pledge that political hopefuls could sign on to, with five core elements: rejecting contributions from corporate PACs or executives of large corporations; standing with working people and never crossing a picket line; meeting with constituents at least once a month; engaging in at least 25 face-to-face town hall meetings; and promising “to remember that our fight is with the Good Old Boys and not with each other.”

So far, 53 candidates have taken the pledge, including Democrats, Republicans, Mountain Party people (West Virginia’s version of the Green Party), and independents. In some sense, it’s kind of a throwback to the political machines of yesteryear, which would run candidates as a slate. Only this time, the machine is allied with the people, over the powerful.

Brittney Barlett is one of those candidates. Running for delegate in Lewis County in the center of the state, she has been holding Facebook Live events to survey her constituents on what they want out of government. “People tell me it’s not the smartest way of doing things,” she laughs. “But people can get to know the ins and outs of how I feel rather than a five-second soundbite.”

Paula Jean Swearengin, an anti–mountaintop removal activist who challenged Joe Manchin in the Democratic Senate primary in 2018 and took 30 percent of the vote despite having no money and little name recognition, has taken the pledge for her second run for Senate, this time against Republican Shelley Moore Capito. Cathy Kunkel, a congressional candidate, also took the pledge, stating on her website that “it will take all of us to build a West Virginia that works for all of us.”

Can’t Wait candidates are vying for seats at all levels of politics, and come from all walks of life. Rosemary Ketchum of Wheeling, a civil rights activist, would be the first transgender city councilmember in West Virginia history. Ketchum is running to end a growing homeless problem in Wheeling, to fight the opioid epidemic (her mother and father are addicted), and to engage the community to aid in decision-making.

“I think it’s a movement of the people, much more than a campaign,” Ketchum says. “The values of the community are not reflective in the actions of its leadership. I honestly believe that change is most possible where ground has already broken, and we’ve broken ground.”

Not all Can’t Wait candidates are challengers. Danielle Walker, an incumbent delegate from Morgantown, is also running on the slate. She’s an African American single parent who moved to the state from Louisiana nine years ago, depending initially on food pantries and health care clinics. She still works two jobs; the first starts at 3 a.m. every day. She was asked to run for office after speaking at a vigil for the activist who died in Charlottesville. “I want equality and equity for every single Mountaineer,” she says. “I truly believe everyone deserves a second chance. West Virginia is my second chance state.”

Having the candidates run together allows them to share volunteer resources, with constituency and county teams joining forces behind the candidates. LGBT leaders and Kanawha County Can’t Wait teamed up for a fundraiser to support Mercer County delegate candidate Tina Russell, who entered the race after her opponent, Eric Porterfield, intimated he would drown his children if he learned they were gay, weeks after he’d likened the LGBT community to the KKK.

Russell, a black social worker and first-time candidate, is a co-chair of the West Virginia Working Families Party, the progressive grassroots organization that recruits and trains candidates. The state WFP made news by sweeping the entire Morgantown City Council in April. The national party leadership has formed a deep partnership with Smith’s campaign, highlighting him to its members and assisting with daylong candidate training events.

“We’ve been championing a movement-based politics,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. “If you want to organize people, you need to inspire them with a politics deeply aligned with their needs, that meets the scale of their problems with structural solutions. That’s the heart of what is happening in West Virginia.”

To Mitchell, none of it could work without a candidate at the top of the ticket generous enough to believe in a politics bigger than himself. “Stephen is an organizer, he’s running like it’s a grassroots organizing campaign,” Mitchell says. “He’s a true believer of the politics he’s trying to introduce you to. It’s very infectious.”

STEPHEN SMITH WAS BORN in Charleston; his father helped found a homeless advocacy group and the family took in foster kids. (Smith and his wife are now also foster parents.) The family moved to Texas when he was nine; he subsequently attended Harvard. “I think for the first 18 years of my life I sort of felt like the world basically worked,” he tells me. “And I got to school and the first real fight I was part of was a student-labor solidarity fight for a living wage at Harvard, [for] janitors, food service, security guards.”

Smith spent three years doing what he says were all the right things to build support, holding rallies and engaging the student body. And the university responded insultingly, by offering the workers museum passes. “We said we have to escalate,” Smith explains. “So that meant 52 of us taking over the president’s office for three weeks.” The high-profile occupation got those workers a living wage.

“It was the most clear moment of my life where I realized not only that the world and the economy is fundamentally broken,” he says. “It was the moment I learned that you don’t get power to concede anything unless you have more power than them.”

After graduation, Smith moved to Chicago, helped start a bakery run by formerly homeless people, and organized with an immigrant rights organization. But he felt the pull back to West Virginia, the desire to raise his kids there.

Smith’s main role is obviously as the candidate, but he approaches it more like a recruiter. Every day, his campaign blocks out three hours when he takes calls from curious potential voters and volunteers. He gives out his personal email address at town halls, and promises to respond. In Pocahontas County, Smith asked residents if they wanted to run for office, or if they knew anyone who did. He texted random people he didn’t know, based on rumors that they might want to run. “He’s putting himself in the midst of everything,” says Danielle Walker.

So far, this people-powered campaign, launched in January 2019, has legs. In the first half of the year, Smith raised more money than the other three candidates in the race, combined. He received 2,449 small-dollar donations; Jim Justice had 13, and Justice’s main Republican primary opponent, Woody Thrasher (formerly Justice’s commerce secretary), had eight.

Smith has announced that 10 percent of all his donations will go back into communities in West Virginia, through events and actions that assist people. “You guys will be the ones who decide” what events to do, Smith told the town hall in Marlinton, but he suggested ideas like busing people across the border to Canada to buy prescription drugs, or running a naloxone training (it’s a nasal spray that reverses the effects of opioids during an overdose).

Senator Joe Manchin, a good ol’ boy icon of the political establishment, flirted with a run for governor (an office he’d already held) but ultimately opted out, ceding the Democratic field to Smith. In early September, Smith’s campaign was bolstered by an endorsement from senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. “West Virginia can’t wait any longer for big, structural change,” she said in her statement, echoing the movement’s moniker.

“Stephen is an organizer, he’s running like it’s a grassroots organizing campaign. He’s a true believer of the politics he’s trying to introduce you to. It’s very infectious.”

None of Smith’s staff, the first political campaign to unionize in state history, came out of politics. None of them even live in the same part of the state; they keep in touch online. Campaign manager Katey Lauer did issue-based work at the grassroots. “I was interested in the campaign because of the movement-building potential,” she says. Johnna Bailey, the finance director, met Smith in a coffee shop. “I was thinking of leaving West Virginia,” she tells me at a fundraiser in Santa Monica.

Avery Thrush, a campaign intern, had a similar reaction. “I told [Smith] that I didn’t feel West Virginians leave the state because they want to,” she says. “Their families are here, their roots are here. It’s a beautiful state that’s been held hostage by the extraction industry. But by coming together, we can take it back.”

THE EVENTS IN MARLINTON included a sit-down with local Democratic committee members; a few one-on-one conversations with some local teachers; a potluck with sandwiches, homemade salads, and lemonade; and a town hall. The 50 people in the room represented almost 1 percent of the total registered voters in Pocahontas County.

Dane Sizemore, a county captain wearing a trademark red bandana, greeted the crowd. “Maybe we don’t agree on some things, but there’s 80 percent of stuff that everybody in the state wants to see,” he says. “Better jobs for families, good schools, good roads, clean water.”

Smith’s approach at these town halls is both pedagogical and participatory. He walks people through his story, through the story of how the state faltered, and how it can renew itself. He asks participants to fill in the blanks. “We may have the worst leaders but we have the best people,” he says, ticking off the areas where West Virginia ranks high among the states: time spent with neighbors, charitable giving, volunteer service.

The chair game is just one of his teaching tools. Once it’s done, he splits everyone in the room off into groups of two, to engage in conversations about what kind of state they want to have, and record the exchange on paper. As I stroll around the room, the conversations are real, and sometimes deep. People are talking about their families, their communities, and their fears. It’s difficult for Smith to get them to wrap up. Asked how the experience went, one participant says she wished they had more time. “I find it so energizing to hear from people,” says another. “It’s a gift.”

At the end of the night, as he does at all these events, Smith asks those assembled to commit to engage in more conversations with friends and neighbors, or donate dollars, or both. Each person offers their commitment out loud, and the rest of the room is instructed to respond, “Thank you.” Overall, the campaign took in $1,300 and got commitments for more than 100 conversations.

Smith doesn’t sugarcoat the enormity of the task they’re undertaking, warning that the good ol’ boys won’t give up without a fight. He asks people to raise their hand if they think politics is dirty, and every hand shoots up. But in the worst-case scenario, he says, 15 or 20 of his slate will get into office, and a thousand new leaders will be trained (“A thousand leaders, not one” is a major campaign slogan). After the 2020 election, the participants can build their own campaigns or run for office or organize their communities. The movement was always intended to outlast the election cycle, to build a generation of leaders in the Mountain State. “We’re trying to get people to buy into themselves,” says Katey Lauer. “We keep helping people believe it’s possible, while doing the work to make it possible.”

As people stack chairs and clean up, I walk up to Dane Sizemore, one of the county captains. He tells me that he didn’t know if five people would show up when he was driving in from work. “I want us to remember that we’re a community: That defines us more than who we voted for in the last election,” he says. I ask him about his red bandana, about West Virginia’s ancient spirit. “I come back to Matewan. That’s where West Virginia stood up. The whole state is built on that. People stood up to out-of-state coal bosses and said we’re not going to take it anymore.”