Republican who voted to fix roads and potholes is called a sell-out RINO
Donald Trump ran on fixing America’s crumbling infrastructure (because he is a “builder”) and the Republicans cheered and cheered. But he couldn’t get the job done. Biden got it passed in the first year and now they are all against “government spending”, natch.
A few Republicans did vote for the infrastructure bill and they are being hammered by Trump and his minions:
On the eve of the House vote to pass a massive infrastructure bill last year, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) received a pointed call from a Donald Trump adviser: If he voted for the package, the former president would endorse his primary opponent.
But McKinley, a civil engineer by trade, had been waiting 11 years for this moment. He couldn’t be persuaded, setting into motion a contentious primary that is bound to break a big rule of politics no matter who wins on May 10.
Either McKinley loses after bringing home a major federal investment in crumbling local infrastructure, or he manages the rare feat of knocking off a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary — in this case, fellow GOP Rep. Alex Mooney, who was drawn into the same district as McKinley after West Virginia lost one of its three seats in redistricting.
Their clash has turned into one of the most hard-fought Republican primaries of the midterms, testing everything from Trump’s influence and the potency of ideological purity to small government to whether a GOP congressman can sell his primary voters on the merits of a bipartisan compromise in a hyper-polarized climate.
In an interview, McKinley declined to name Trump’s messenger but recalled telling the adviser: “We have the worst conditions. Some of the roads and bridges are 50, 70 years old. We have water lines built in 1880. I can’t do this. This is not a time to play politics. I’m voting for West Virginia.”
Mooney cast the vote another way: “I’m willing to fight for conservatism. I think he enables and cooperates with the Democrats’ liberal agenda,” said Mooney, who did not support the the infrastructure bill, citing its cost. “He’s caving in. He’s selling out. He’s doing their bidding.”
You would think that the West Virginians whose roads are falling apart would want to vote for the guy who wants to fix them but it’s far from a sure thing. Voting on the right is especially performative and they no longer see the connection between government and any meritorious work to help their material well being. It’s all negative. So, I would imagine they will vote for the Trump guy.
And there’s one more big contrast roiling the race. McKinley is a 7th-generation native of West Virginia’s northern panhandle and a former state GOP chair, who has represented most of the people in the newly drawn district for years. Mooney has represented far less of the current district, and he is a former Maryland state senator whose ambition helped propel him across state lines shortly before he ran for Congress in 2014.
“I don’t know the conditions of the roads and bridges in Maryland, but I do know what conditions are in West Virginia,” McKinley shot back, in an oft-repeated dig at Mooney’s roots.
McKinley’s support for the infrastructure bill helped earn him a surprise endorsement from Republican Gov. Jim Justice, a popular figure and Trump ally. And former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to endorse McKinley this month and visit the state next week to fundraise for him, his campaign told POLITICO.
Sparsepolling has shown mixed results. A pro-McKinley group released a survey last month showing him leading Mooney by 5 points. An internal Mooney poll from early April found him leading by 11 points, a margin similar to surveys conducted in January and February.
And the ads have been negative from the start, with McKinley slamming Mooney as an interloper from Maryland under investigation from the House Ethics Committee for potential improper use of campaign money. Mooney has shot back, calling his opponent a RINO who voted for a bipartisan committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attacks.
Yet its the pros and cons of President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package and Trump’s influence that have dominated the final stretch of the race. The anti-tax Club for Growth, which is backing Mooney, launched a $1.1 million ad buy last week going hard on both topics — though the spots notably lacks any directreference to infrastructure, calling it only “Biden’s spending binge.”
McKinley said he never considered voting against the bill, despite the pressure, and he touts it constantly in his campaign stops. He’s living out his political dream, traversing the state trying to help the governor determine the best uses for some of $6 billion in funds he estimates West Virginia will receive, tapping both his engineering degree and legislative experience.
At a roundtable with business and manufacturing leaders Monday morning in Clarksburg, McKinley was rattling off the benefits the state was already seeing from the legislation. Some examples: After two years of talks, Nucor Corp. announced in January it would build a steel mill in Mason County — a decision McKinley said it felt comfortable making because of the improvements in the state’s sewage, roads, bridges and broadband enabled by the infrastructure bill. The state will also get $200 million to finish Corridor H, a highway in the eastern region of the state, where construction began in the 1970s.
“I’m not worried about Idaho and Montana,” McKinley said. “I’m worried about West Virginia. So I want to make sure we get our fair share.”
But Mooney, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, is a limited government hardliner. He said he supports investing in infrastructure (and has voted for smaller bipartisan bills in the past), but Mooney saidthis particular bill was padded with superfluous nontraditional initiatives driving up the cost. Fellow GOP Rep. Carol Miller, West Virginia’s other House member, also voted against it.
“The answer is to defeat this bill. Come back with a bill that’s less than half the amount and do roads or bridges on it. Pass it,” Mooney said. “We’re for infrastructure. We’re just not for bankrupting our country.”
The bill passed the Senate in August with 19 Republicans voting in favor, including Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.).
“I’ve supported the infrastructure package and I’m glad that Congressman McKinley did as well,” Capito said in a brief interview in the U.S. Capitol. “There’s a lot of pluses to it. And for me, the pluses outweigh the minuses.”
Still, Republican polling from the Club for Growth suggests infrastructure is not popular. And the group’s president, David McIntosh, said their data suggests GOP voters see McKinley’s support for the bill not as a way to bring money to the state, but as a sign of his willingness to capitulate.
“It’s a good test for which direction the party is going to go in,” McIntosh said of the primary. “The whole establishment likes someone like that,” he said, referring to McKinley, “where they can count on him voting for the compromise bills, the infrastructure bills and working with the Democrats.”
Mooney said he believed he would have secured Trump’s backing regardless of McKinley’s infrastructure vote. When he visited the former president to ask for an endorsement, he was armed with a 15-page memo on the race that included the two candidates’ statements about Trump dating back to 2016.
“Given my voting record, and McKinley’s honestly, I think it would have been, it would have been more noticeable if he didn’t endorse me,” Mooney said.
Trump has yet to schedule a campaign rally or cut a TV ad for Mooney — which would amplify his support. Mooney did say Trump’s team had been in contact with chief of staff, Maryland state Sen. Michael Hough, to ask how they could be helpful.
On the stump, Mooney leans heavily into his Trump endorsement. While knocking doors, he told voters about the time he spent with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last year, and his campaign literature prominently features a photo of the two standing side-by-side.
“As long as you got Trump on there, you got my vote,” one man said after looking at the paper Mooney handed to him.
Yep.