The fact that Justice is free to campaign for Trump, rather than have to fight for a Senate seat, speaks to his success as a candidate.
Erie, Pa. — After spooking Senator Joe Manchin into retirement in a state Donald Trump carried by nearly 40 points in 2020, West Virginia’s GOP governor Jim Justice doesn’t have much going on these days on the campaign front.
Hence the soon-to-be-senator’s decision to help the GOP presidential ticket juice turnout in must-win Pennsylvania in the final days of the race. On Saturday evening, a few dozen Republicans streamed into Erie County’s GOP headquarters to snack on Chick-fil-A sandwiches and hear the governor urge them against electoral complacency as November 5 nears.
“The Democrats are professionals at the elections,” Justice told Saturday evening’s crowd a few minutes after Vermont senator Bernie Sanders had made a similar call to action among Erie Democrats a ten-minute drive away at the local high school. But Republicans, Justice warned, “aren’t very good at it!” Yes, the landscape has changed and things look good for Republicans, he said. “But really, we’ve still got a long ways to go.”
Sitting on a stool with his beloved five-year-old English bulldog Babydog by his side and a Trump-Vance flag draped behind him, Justice urged every Erie Republican in attendance to get ten friends to vote so that this swingy county goes red this cycle as it did in 2016. After his remarks, he nodded along as local Republican residents pressed him about why Democrats are so good at stealing elections, why Joe Biden is still in the White House, and whether he’d ever seen Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules (he has not).
“My dad would have always said, ‘Son, the only shot in golf that matters is the next shot,'” Justice told the crowd. “There isn’t anything we can do, really, about that last election. And really and truly, we can’t probably change the landscape in the next ten days. We’ve got to believe that there’s been gigantic strides to the good side.”
“Will it still not be completely fair? Will it still not be right? I agree with that. I really do. Do you have every right to be frustrated? 100 percent,” he said. But “because none of us can change enough between now and election time,” he continued, “what we’ve gotta do is we’ve got to trust that really and truly there have been improvements made” and that “we just got to get up and get the votes out.”
It’s natural for people to be confident in their own party’s chances, he says in an interview with National Review after taking pictures with Erie County residents. “I’m a firm believer that you always play like you’re behind and try to run through the finish line together.” He adds: “We don’t need to wake up on November 6 and say, ‘Oh, I wish I’d have done this or that.’”
Justice’s ability to campaign for Trump in battleground Pennsylvania highlights the success Senate Republicans have had in recruiting him in the first place. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell traveled to West Virginia following the 2022 midterms — after GOP representative Alex Mooney had already announced his Senate candidacy — to lobby Justice in person about jumping into the race, as NR reported last spring. Those entreaties paid off only a few months later, as Justice announced his Senate candidacy in April 2023, Trump endorsed him in October, and Manchin announced he would not seek reelection in November.
Mooney tried unsuccessfully to tear down Justice’s favorability by pointing to the governor’s more centrist record, former party affiliation as a Democrat, and the hundreds of millions in debt the coal magnate and his various businesses have racked up over the years. Those attacks proved no match for Justice’s high favorability and name identification in the state.
The following May, Justice crushed Mooney in an uncompetitive GOP primary, allowing Senate Republican spending groups to breathe a sigh of relief that the Senate math was already trending in their favor (even as some now privately worry that he’ll have a spotty Senate-attendance record after he’s sworn in, as Politico recently reported). Earlier this year, Justice’s campaign staffer Roman Stauffer boasted that his boss had saved Senate Republican spending groups tens of millions of dollars in campaign funds that they can now use to flip other high-priority states such as Montana and Ohio.
“It would have always been tough” to run against Manchin “because he’s a very formidable guy, and he’s a friend,” Justice told National Review in Erie on Saturday evening while also being sure to point out that he “was polling 20 points ahead of him” before Manchin bowed out of his reelection race.
It should come as no surprise that this coal magnate and businessman is interested in serving on the Senate Committees on Finance as well as Energy and Natural Resources when he arrives in Washington. There may be a day when “we can do without fossil fuels,” he tells Saturday’s audience, encouraging them to embrace other forms of energy whether “it’s solar or hydrogen or wind or whatever,” he said during his remarks to Erie Republicans. “What I’m just saying to you is there’s no way on God’s earth, there is no way on this planet, that we can do without fossil fuels today. To think we can do without gas today — are you out of your mind? And to think we can do without coal and oil today — are you out of your mind?”
He acknowledges that “I’m not going to have a hard time winning” this year’s West Virginia Senate race, “and I’m very honored by that, and I’ll do the job correctly. I’ll be respectful to both sides of the aisle.” He says in an interview, “I’ll carry my conservative values, but I’ll be respectful to others, because I always loved how Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan did it together. That’s what Americans do.”
He says he’s eager to seek others’ advice as soon as he touches down in D.C. “I’m going to have to learn a lot,” he says. “If you were to ask me, ‘What, Jim Justice, do you think is the best trait you have?’ I’d really surprise you, and I would tell you my ability to doubt myself, because I don’t ever want to believe that I’ve got it all figured out. I want to solicit input from you and this gentleman, whomever it may be.”
Babydog is looking forward to heading to Washington, too. So beloved is this pup — who has her own Wikipedia page and social-media following — that she sometimes gets to ride shotgun even when other humans are in the car.
“Babydog gets hot real easy,” the governor told NR when asked about his pup’s car-seating preferences. “Now, that doesn’t happen very often and everything, but it does happen sometimes.”