Fearful W.Va. Dems plead for help

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Politico:

WHEELING, West Va. — If you want a feel for Democratic desperation these days, look no further than panhandle West Virginia, crammed between Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Democrats feel crushed between their president and a populist uprising.

Democratic Sen. John Rockefeller and the man he wants to join him in the upper chamber, Gov. Joe Manchin, spent Saturday night pleading with a small conclave of Democrats here to wrangle every breathing body on their reliable-voter lists — to overcome a huge enthusiasm gap with the GOP.

“We either vote or we lose. … Act from fear,” Rockefeller told the Ohio County Democratic Women's Club Northern Regional Jefferson Jackson Dinner at the McLure Hotel on Saturday night.

“If we are not making people who are Democrats — but who are at this point sufficiently unhappy that they don’t want to — go out and vote, then we are talking about the wrong things,” he told the room, 13 tables set with plates of palm salad and 3-inch buttons commemorating the late Sen. Robert Byrd.

Ten tables were occupied, three were empty.

“I talked this afternoon with Chuck Schumer, who is one of the leadership of the Democratic Party, and he said. ‘Look, the Senate is going to be Democrat or Republican based on what happens in West Virginia,’” added Rockefeller.

Over the past few days, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has begun robo-calling 30,000 of the state’s 665,000 Democrats “who have voted in recent years … but until this point had not shown an instinct to go vote because of their frustration” in 2010, the senator said.

The state of 1.8 million has always been regarded as a quirky microcosm of national trends, and this year is no different.
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Quirky is good. It keeps those in power on their toes...

I think Byrd's death has created a huge vacuum that both sides are now trying to fill. Also, WV has long been a state seemingly caught in between the union-based Democratic politics of the North and the conservative Democratic politics of the South.