WV-Gov: On Tuesday, former West Virginia Commerce Secretary Woody Thrasher announced that he would challenge his former boss, Gov. Jim Justice, in next year’s GOP primary. Thrasher joins former state Del. Mike Folk in the contest.
Thrasher declared in his kickoff that that state “deserve[s] a full-time governor who is ready, willing and able, around the clock, to bring us jobs, to fix our roads and to preserve our conservative values” and blasted the incumbent for “lack of leadership.” Those are not-so-subtle references to rumors that Justice senior advisors are running much of the day-to-day operations in the state while the governor resides at his Greenbrier resort, which is 120 miles from the state capital in Charleston. Thrasher also said he’d use her personal funds to provide some “seed money” to his campaign, though he said he’d be raising cash from donors as well.
Thrasher ran a successful engineering firm until Justice appointed him in late 2016, and the two initially got along quite well. Justice said at the time that he’d always felt that if became governor “without any question, the number one guy I wanted to recruit was Woody Thrasher,” while Thrasher said in response, “I wouldn’t have done this for anyone other than Gov.-elect Jim Justice.”
Their mutual admiration had its limits, though. Thrasher remained in the Justice administration after the governor switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP at a Donald Trump rally, and he scored a high-profile win in 2017 when he announced that China Energy was making an $83 million investment in West Virginia natural gas projects as part of a deal he signed in China in front of Trump. However, Thrasher attracted some bad attention a few months later over his department's handling of federal flood-relief money, and Justice forced him to resign over this in June of last year.
Justice’s campaign made it no secret that they plan to attack him over this, declaring that Thrasher “used his appointed position to travel all over the world on the taxpayers’ dime to promote the private companies of his friends” while “at the same time, forgot about the RISE flood relief program and all the West Virginians still recovering from the 2016 floods.” Thrasher defended himself and said in response that the program was managed well, and predicted, “Going forward we will have full and complete explanations of exactly what happened, which is very different from what was portrayed at the time.”
Like Justice, Thrasher was a Democrat until fairly recently. The former commerce secretary, who has never sought elected office before, finally switched his party registration to Republican in February. Thrasher argued on Tuesday, “Like most West Virginians, I was a Democrat, because if you wanted to vote in the primary, you had to be a Democrat.” Thrasher continued, “I’ve never been a strong political person, so I never really got around to changing my voter registration, even through (for) the last couple of decades I have voted predominately Republican.” We’ll see if Republican voters who are skeptical of the party-switching governor buy that excuse.