This year, West Virginia’s Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and its Senator Joe Manchin, both Democrats, would not say whether they would vote for President Obama, laying bare the fact that the president faces an uphill climb even among members of his own party.
But the president’s campaign took a more bizarre blow during Tuesday night’s primaries in West Virginia, when a prisoner in Texas won more than 40 percent of vote in the Democratic race.
Keith Judd is serving a sentence of more than 17 years at Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas for extortion charges related to threats he made at the University of New Mexico in 1999.
According to unofficial primary results on the state’s election Web site, Mr. Judd earned 42.73 percent of the vote – 57,081 votes. Mr. Obama won 57.27 percent of the vote, with a final tally of 76,510 votes.
West Virginia has more registered Democrats than Republicans – 52.25 percent to 28.72 percent, at last count – but this state voted for Senator John McCain of Arizona in 2008 and has never warmed to Mr. Obama.
The administration’s clean-energy policies have not played well in the state’s huge coal and energy industry, and the state has frequently locked horns with the Environmental Protection Agency over its mine permitting process and, more recently, new reductions in carbon emissions standards.
“I voted against Obama,” said Ronnie Brown, 43, an electrician who says he is a conservative Democrat, to The Associated Press. “I don’t like him. He didn’t carry the state before, and I’m not going to let him carry it again.”
Despite Mr. Judd’s impressive performance, he will not get any delegates at the Democratic National Convention this summer because, according to The Charleston Gazette, nobody has volunteered to be one.
Mitt Romney, who, with 58,651 votes in West Virginia’s primary, barely edged out Mr. Judd, commented on the election earlier on Wednesday, according to ABC News. “I think they got more problems on that side of the aisle than we do on ours.”
