By all indications, Shrewsbury, a 32-year-old Marine Corps veteran and community organizer, faces a difficult, if not impossible, road to victory. West Virginia gave Donald Trump his second-biggest margin of support of any state in the nation three years ago, and Manchin is the last Democrat holding a statewide office. Political analysts do not expect voters to elect the Democratic candidate – whoever that turns out to be – and predict Manchin will be replaced by either Governor Jim Justice or Congressman Alex Mooney, the two leading Republicans in the Senate race.

Shrewsbury’s message to them is: not so fast.

“People were really sold on the fact that Joe Manchin could be the only Democrat that could win in West Virginia, and I very much disagree,” Shrewsbury told the Guardian a week after the senator made his announcement.

    • pixelscript@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      I’m glad the first comment I saw here was thinking the exact thing I was.

      If I could get some sort of filter for Lemmy that blocked all news headlines that contained question marks, I’d be a happier fella.

      Bonus points if it could also filter any headline that contains the following words/phrases: “slams”, “blasts”, “may”, “might”, “could”, “possibly”, “probably”, “should”, “must”, “need to”, “[profession] says”.

    • misterundercoat@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      When a headline is phrased in the form of a yes/no question, the answer is always no. Because the real story isn’t interesting, and they need to have the reader imagine something interesting and click on it.

      If anything interesting happens, the headline will just say what happened.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Charles Town, West Virginia, was where state authorities executed the abolitionist John Brown after he led an attack on a federal armory a few miles down the road in Harpers Ferry, a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the civil war.

    In recent years he has used his power as a swing vote in Congress to stop several of Joe Biden’s legislative priorities – attracting the ire of progressives and prompting Shrewsbury to mount a primary challenge.

    Political analysts do not expect voters to elect the Democratic candidate – whoever that turns out to be – and predict Manchin will be replaced by either Governor Jim Justice or Congressman Alex Mooney, the two leading Republicans in the Senate race.

    In the years that followed, he guarded the perimeter at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, and was deployed to Japan, Malaysia and South Korea before eventually moving to Seattle and then returning to West Virginia, where he realized how bereft his home state was of the prosperity he saw elsewhere in the country and overseas.

    Since 2020, Shrewsbury has helped towns dig out from flooding, door-knocked in the narrow Appalachian valleys – known as hollers – to find out what residents were looking for from the state legislature, and talked to mayors and city councils about the opportunities presented by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes consumer usage of renewable energy, including home solar panels.

    Despite the state’s conservative leanings, Sam Workman, the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, believed Manchin may have had a path to victory had he decided to run.


    The original article contains 1,291 words, the summary contains 272 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • HowMany@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Any person with the American citizen’s best interests at heart would be better than this self serving cretin. How do we transition from fossil fuels to green energy while coal, oil and gas are running the show?

    We don’t.

  • Ergifruit [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
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    8 months ago

    as much as i would love for this to happen, i don’t think he could get a Senate seat… we’ve gotten actual hard leftists in more local positions before, but state-wide? especially when the WV Dem party is practically Republican, and would never back him. like, they’re so far from the national party line, it’s fucking wild that they’re still accepted as Democrats.

  • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    The Democratic party of West Virginia a will do anything they can to make sure this guy can’t win. The DCCC/DNC will not give this guy a single dollar. Not because they don’t think he can win, but because the only thing the Dems fear are people further to the left then the republican party. Because as soon as leftist candidate wins, the currently existing democratic party has no reason to exist.

    • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Because as soon as leftist candidate wins, the currently existing democratic party has no reason to exist.

      Sure they do, the right-wing of the Democratic Party can become the new, saner right-wing party. With the existing GOP being treated as the toxic waste dump it’s become. It’s always good to have reasonable opposition in government. They opposing sides force each other to think critically about their positions and consider them from angles that they might not have. The problem is that this needs to happen between parties which are committed to the betterment of the country and upholding democracy. Right now, we have a fractured Democratic Party which is having that push and pull happen inside the party, weakening it while the GOP has turned into a cancer which is being led by bullshit. Unfortunately, the cancer is currently too popular to effectively cut out and our political system makes the rise of a third party incredibly difficult.

      • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        The right wing democrats can join the GOP instead when the leftist vanguard kicks them out and takes all their funding.