A group called Black Bear PAC released a survey earlier this week arguing that Attorney General Patrick Morrisey would be the Republican primary frontrunner if he ran for governor of West Virginia, and MetroNews’ Hoppy Kercheval reports that the group has some serious money behind it thanks to one very familiar mega donor. Black Bear (not to be confused with the movie “Cocaine Bear”) says it has $2 million on-hand, and Kercheval writes that about half of that comes from Dick Uihlein.
Morrisey has spent the last several months mulling whether to run to succeed termed-out Gov. Jim Justice or seek a rematch with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who beat him 50-46 in 2018, and Kercheval says we can expect news “in a few weeks.” Uihlein’s beneficiaries at Black Bear, though, are unsubtly trying to steer the attorney general towards the governor’s race with the aforementioned poll from National Research Inc: That survey, which did not mention the Senate contest at all, found Morrisey beating state Delegate Moore Capito 28-15 for the GOP nod.
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Uihlein is also the top funder for the Club for Growth, which also likely wants Morrisey to do something other than run for the Senate. Justice, who is termed-out of his current post, is looking at a bid against Manchin, but Club head David McIntosh in January dismissed the governor as “more moderate” than it likes. The Club, by contrast, is close to Rep. Alex Mooney, who announced a bid for the upper chamber in November. While McIntosh said this year that his group was interested in both Mooney and Morrisey for Senate, the two Justice alternatives could be chasing after the same group of supporters if they both competed in the same primary.
The governor’s race, by contrast, has no obvious frontrunner. The GOP primary currently features two members of prominent Mountain State political families: Capito, who is the son and namesake of Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, and auto dealer Chris Miller, whose mother is Rep. Carol Miller. The other notable candidates are state Auditor JB McCuskey and Secretary of State Mac Warner, who also have relatives in state politics. The same cannot be said for the New Jersey-reared Morrisey, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the Garden State in 2000.