At the polls this past Tuesday night, Republican voters showed up to choose their nominees for some key races in Nebraska and West Virginia.
The Republicans out in West Virginia chose Alex Mooney, a Trump=backed congressman, as the winner of the primary for the 2nd congressional district of the state. Mooney managed to take a solid 54.2% of the vote, while McKinley only managed to garner 35.6%.
The two Republicans are now forced to battle over the same district in the wake of the 2020 Census which caused West Virginia to lose out on one of its congressional seats. McKinley was heavily criticized recently, by Trump, because of his choosing to vote in favor of Presiden Biden’s bloated infrastructure bill, and in the same vein the former president chose to endorse Mooney in the race because he “will always protect our Second Amendment, and of particular importance is the fact that Alex fights for energy and beautiful clean coal — and he will never stop.”
The pair of legislators have been engaged in a long and bitter campaign with McKinley labeling Mooney as a “carpetbagger” because he was previously a prominent figurehead within the GOP for Maryland before making the move to West Virginia in 2014. Mooney, in response, called out his fellow republican as “a total RINO.”
“He voted for the January 6th commission to investigate Donald Trump and his allies,” claimed Mooney at a recent rally held in Pennsylvania. “He was one of 13 so-called Republicans to vote for the Joe Biden-Pelosi non-infrastructure $1.2 trillion spending package.”
McKinley managed to secure the support of both Republican Governor Jim Justice and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. Mooney is now slated to go up against Democratic nominee Barry Wendell, a former official from Morgantown, in the upcoming November elections.
The Republicans of Nebraska chose an official with the University of Nebraska as their nominee for the governor’s office despite there also being on the docket another moderate and a Trump-endorsed option as well.
Jim Pillen, the regent of the University of Nebraska, secured a total of 33.9% of the vote, which ended up letting Trump-backed Charles Herbster finish second sporting 30.2% and State Senator Brett Lindstrom scrape together 25.8%. The campaign for Pillen heavily benefitted from the support of GOP Governor Pete Ricketts on his way out, who donated millions of dollars towards the TV ads in favor of 66-year-old Pillen.
The campaign for Herbster suffered heavily from allegations of groping, and he was the first candidate back by Trump to go down in this election cycle while Lindstrom chose to remove himself from Trump and put more focus on urban voters.
Being well known for his playing for the Cornhuskers, Pillen claimed he would be putting more heavy focus on investing in the youth of his state.
“We all agree, we’re all in unison, we never ever, ever, give up on kids,” he explained. “We’re going to invest the farm in our kids, so all of our kids know, the grass is greenest in Nebraska.”
He is currently slated to go against Democratic state Senator Carol Blood in the midterms.