Follow the Power

Listen, nobody asked me to become the person who explains why a fourth-grade holiday party is actually a microcosm of late-stage capitalist failure, and honestly, I wish I didn’t have to be that person. But I was standing in a Five Below on Thursday, vibrating with a specific frequency of rage usually reserved for cable news chyrons, and I realized I can’t let you walk into this blind.

I had a “State of the Union” breakdown. It didn’t happen in a briefing room or a lecture hall. It happened while staring at a wall of sensory toys that smell like chemically induced strawberries and supply chain exploitation.

My son needed a gift for a school exchange. The hard cap was $10.

We live in an economy where “Five Below” is now legally distinct from “Five Dollars,” and finding something that isn’t immediate landfill-fodder for under a Hamilton requires a PhD in logistics and a complete abandonment of aesthetic standards.

I realized I was standing there, clutching a squish-ball like it was a stress grenade, not because I hate fun. I was vibrating because my brain—cursed with the inability to turn off the “structural analysis” filter—was calculating the opportunity cost of that ten dollars for every single family in his class.

If you are currently feeling like a bad parent because a $10 limit feels heavy, stop. You aren’t cheap. You are reacting to a macroeconomic environment that is gaslighting you.

Let’s look at the data, shall we? (Because when I panic, I pivot to analysis to keep from screaming in public).

In the “Before Times” (you know, that hazy nostalgic period where eggs didn’t require a financing plan), a $10 limit was a safe, low-stakes barrier. It was “grab a coloring book and go.”

But we are currently living through an era of inflation that feels personally targeted. That $10 bill isn’t just paper anymore.

* It’s a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread.

* It’s a quarter of a tank of gas to get you to the job that underpays you.

* It is a tangible chunk of survival.

And yet, here we are, participating in the School Gift Exchange—a ritual that demands parents perform financial ease when most of us are sweating the grocery bill.

I looked around that store. I saw other parents doing the same “Mental Math Squint.”

If I buy the giant candy cane, does it look cheap? If I get the slime kit, will the other parents judge me for the mess? Why am I stressing about social stratification via fidget spinners when the world is on fire?

We talk a lot about “invisible labor” in parenting circles—usually referring to who remembers to buy the toothpaste or schedule the dentist appointments. (I have entire spreadsheets dedicated to this, and yes, they haunt my dreams).

But the heaviest labor isn’t logistical. It’s Theatrical.

The real work I was doing in that aisle wasn’t finding a gift. The real work was the Academy Award-winning performance of a mother who isn’t terrified of the future.

We are exhausting ourselves acting as the Atmospheric Scrubbers for our children’s reality. We inhale the toxicity of the economy, the stress of the headlines, and the panic of the bank balance, and we filter it all out so that what they breathe in is just “holiday excitement.”

That is the labor that kills you.

It’s the split-second calculation where you look at a price tag, feel your stomach drop, and then immediately pivot to a smile and say, “Oh, that looks cool, buddy!” because you refuse to let them inherit your scarcity mindset.

I was standing there protecting his innocence with my own blood pressure. I was paying a Stress Tax so he wouldn’t have to pay an emotional one. We are holding up a heavy velvet curtain between our kids and the world, trying to keep the “Real Things” (the struggle, the inequality, the sheer cost of existing) backstage, while we push them toward the spotlight to just be kids for five more minutes.

And let me tell you, as someone who’s been holding up that curtain for years: My arms are getting really, really tired.

My son held up a plastic something-or-other—I think it was a glow-in-the-dark pooping flamingo—and asked, “Is this good?”

And I almost lost my ever-loving mind.

Not at him. God, never at him. He just wants to participate. He just wants to belong to the tribe. I was mad at the Cognitive Dissonance.

I was furious that we are all pretending this is normal. We are asking families—who are already stretched so thin you can see through them—to perform this ritual of abundance. We are taking $10 away from family budgets that need that $10, to swap plastic junk that will end up in a landfill by New Year’s, all to maintain the illusion that the system works.

Spoiler: It doesn’t. The emperor has no clothes, and he also has no money for the gift exchange because rent went up 30%.

I am not the Grinch. I love joy. I want my kid to have the magic. (I literally ration my own sanity to buy that magic).

But I want us to stop pretending that the “magic” doesn’t have a cost.

So, this is me, standing in the parking lot, sending a psychic distress signal to every other parent hyperventilating over a Secret Santa limit: You aren’t crazy.

You aren’t “being negative.” You are reacting appropriately to an environment that demands you spend resources you are desperately trying to conserve.

I bought the gift. Because I’m a mom, and the social contract is a shackle I haven’t figured out how to pick yet without my kid getting hurt. But I bought it with the grim determination of someone paying a ransom.

If you are feeling that chest-tightening stress over the “little things” this week, please know: It’s not the little things. It’s the weight of everything, squeezed into a $10 limit.

Take a breath. You’re doing the impossible. And honestly? The kid probably just wants the candy anyway.

Happy Holidays,

Carrie

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

A note on why I am publishing this now: I have had a number of people reach out wanting to engage with this work—to collaborate, to contribute, to produce their own analysis in a similar vein. I appreciate the interest. It is validating to know this work reaches people.

However, I have also observed a pattern. Many who are attracted to systems analysis are not yet equipped to do it. They have absorbed the conclusions and the vocabulary, but not the methodology. Engaging with them—gently redirecting, explaining why a particular approach will not hold up, sometimes urging them not to publish something that will be easily discredited—takes time I do not have. It bogs down the actual work.

This field guide is my attempt to address that problem at scale. It codifies what I have learned about how to do this work well, and it names the failure modes I have seen repeatedly. My hope is that it will serve as both an invitation and a filter: an invitation to those who are prepared to meet the standard, and a filter that saves both of us time when collaboration is not the right path.

After several years of investigating how power operates in West Virginia, I have developed an approach that distinguishes between the journalism that makes us feel good and the analysis that actually maps the machine. I am publishing this framework now because I have watched too many people mistake one for the other—sometimes from inexperience, sometimes from impatience, and sometimes from a desire to skip the hard work and jump straight to the conclusions.

The work I do is slow and unglamorous. Tracing money through donor-advised funds, reading 990 forms, mapping personnel overlap between think tanks and legislative bodies—none of this makes for exciting reading. The temptation to shortcut it, to reach for an emotional hook that makes the audience feel something without showing them the architecture, is constant. But shortcuts do not build understanding. They build reactions. And reactions fade.

This field guide is my attempt to codify what I have learned. It is also, frankly, a filter. I have learned that not everyone who is attracted to this work is prepared to do it.

Most investigative journalism fails to create structural change because it focuses on scandals—individual bad acts—rather than systems—incentive structures.

The press covers the “crime” but ignores the “design.” Individuals are punished, but the machinery continues uninterrupted.

The Dichotomy

The Scandal (Narrative Mode)

Focus: Individual bad actors. Timeline: Days to months. Causation: Linear. Resolution: Climax and closure. Legality: Usually illegal. Outcome: Emotional satisfaction.

The System (Structural Mode)

Focus: Incentive structures and legal frameworks. Timeline: Years to decades. Causation: Circular feedback loops. Resolution: None—the machine keeps running. Legality: Usually legal. Outcome: Understanding.

Why We Miss The System

Systems lack villains. Narratives need a face. Systemic capture is a decentralized network of faceless nonprofits and legal frameworks. No single “bad guy”—just a web of aligned interests.

The timescale mismatch. News covers what happened this week. Systems evolve over decades. The arc from Buckley v. Valeo (1976) to AFP v. Bonta (2021) is a 45-year story. No newsroom covers 45-year arcs.

The expertise gap. Mapping a system requires specialized knowledge in campaign finance law, tax law, and network analysis. The economic model of news cannot support this.

The lack of closure. Systems do not end. A dark money network capturing a court is not breaking the law—it is using the laws it helped write. There is no climax, only ongoing function.

Common Failure Modes

Over the years, I have watched many people attempt systems analysis and slip back into narrative mode without realizing it. The failures follow predictable patterns.

The Borrowed Villain

When an analyst lacks the evidentiary foundation to demonstrate how a current system operates, they reach for a historical comparison that carries pre-loaded emotional weight. “This is like the robber barons.” “This is like the company towns.”

The tell is extensive disclaimers. “I am not saying they are the same, but...” If you have to spend paragraphs explaining what you are not saying, you have already lost the argument. The disclaimers signal that you know the comparison is problematic, but you made it anyway because you did not have anything stronger.

The Vague Menace

Words like “dark money,” “corporate slush funds,” “manipulation,” and “shadowy networks” gesture at systemic problems without identifying specific mechanisms. They are the vocabulary of systems analysis without its substance.

Systems analysis names things precisely. It identifies the specific statute, the court case, the donor-advised fund, the personnel who moved from think tank to regulatory agency. If you find yourself using vague terms, stop and ask: Can I name the specific mechanism? If not, you are doing atmosphere, not analysis.

The Missing Feedback Loop

Narrative analysis is linear: bad actors do bad things, we should be upset. Systems analysis asks: How does this outcome make the next iteration easier?

A network funds a judicial campaign. The judge wins. The judge rules on donor privacy in a way that makes the network harder to trace. The network funds more campaigns. This is a feedback loop. If your analysis has a beginning and an implied end, you are telling a story, not mapping a system.

The Aesthetic of Rigor

The most dangerous failure mode. Some writers adopt the vocabulary—”architectures,” “mechanisms,” “structural capture”—without the underlying work. The language sounds sophisticated, but the evidence is absent.

The only test: Where are the receipts? Where are the tax filings, the court documents, the traced funding streams? If these are absent, you are looking at performance, not analysis.

This failure mode is dangerous because it discredits the methodology. Sloppy work that claims to be systems analysis provides ammunition to those who want to dismiss all such analysis as conspiracy theorizing.

Building On This Work Versus Appropriating It

I welcome collaboration. But collaboration requires shared standards.

Building on this methodology means engaging with the evidentiary standard. It means doing your own primary research—filing your own FOIA requests, reading your own tax documents. It means extending the analysis with new evidence, citing sources, acknowledging intellectual debts. It means being willing to be wrong.

Appropriating this methodology means taking conclusions and repackaging them in less rigorous form. It means borrowing the emotional resonance without contributing to the foundation. It means skipping the hard work and jumping straight to proclamation.

If you read this field guide and think “I am already doing this,” look again at the failure modes. The people most confident they have mastered the methodology are often the ones most deeply embedded in narrative thinking.

The systems I map are defended by sophisticated communications operations. These professionals find the weakest criticism and treat it as representative.

When someone publishes sloppy analysis that claims to be systems work, they hand ammunition to those whose job is to discredit all criticism. A poorly reasoned comparison, an unsupported assertion—any of these can be isolated and used to dismiss not just the individual writer but the entire enterprise.

This is why I am protective. Not gatekeeping for its own sake, but recognition that underdeveloped analysis actively harms the broader effort.

Methodology: How to Map a System

Phase 1: Map the network, not the incident. Do not start with the scandal. Start with the power node. Who decides who holds this power? Trace the commission, the appointments, the affiliations, the funders. Find the connective tissue—shared addresses, shared board members, shared funding sources.

Phase 2: Follow the money backward. Standard reporting: Donor → Candidate → Favor. Systems reporting: Outcome → Who benefited? → Who funded the actors? → Where did the money originate?

Phase 3: Identify the feedback loop. Stop looking for a beginning and end. Look for the circle. The output of the system becomes the input for its next iteration.

Phase 4: Name the architecture. Do not describe corruption as moral failing. Describe it as legal framework. “These politicians are corrupt” invites outrage. “The combination of Citizens United, McCutcheon, and AFP v. Bonta allows unlimited anonymous spending” identifies the levers that must be pulled.

The Citizen Investigator Checklist

When reading political news, ask:

* Does this story have a villain? Look for the people behind the villain who are not in the headline.

* Is the behavior illegal? If legal but harmful, it is a system. Systems operate within laws their beneficiaries helped write.

* Who wrote the rules? Who funded the people who wrote the laws that allow this?

* What is the timescale? If framed as recent, look for deeper history.

* Where is the feedback loop? How does this outcome make it easier for the same group to act again?

“Systems change when enough people can see them.”

The machine runs in the dark. It relies on complexity, opacity, and the assumption that nobody has time to trace all the connections. It relies on our preference for narratives over systems, for villains over architectures, for closure over understanding.

I have been doing this work for several years. I intend to continue. If you are prepared to meet the standard—to do the slow work, to build the evidence, to resist the shortcuts—I welcome your collaboration. If you are not yet there, I welcome your readership and your support. Both matter.

But I will protect this methodology from those who would dilute it. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

The 2024 West Virginia election cycle wasn’t just another primary season—it was a masterclass in campaign finance innovation. Two federal Joint Fundraising Committees quietly transformed obscure county party organizations into powerhouse financial vehicles, flooding rural committees with six-figure transfers from Major League Baseball owners and national conservative donors.

This is the story of how “Team Mooney” and “Team Morrisey” turned Morgan and Upshur Counties into something their founders never imagined: sovereign financial entities capable of bypassing contribution limits, launching independent expenditure campaigns, and asserting autonomy against their own state party.

The strategies produced starkly different results. One built a fortress that crumbled. The other built a transmission tower that broadcast a winning message statewide.

The Political Landscape: Why 2024 Was Different

West Virginia’s 2024 cycle marked the final act in the state’s decades-long transformation from Democratic stronghold to Republican monolith. With Senator Joe Manchin’s retirement, the last statewide Democrat departed the stage. The Republican primaries became the de facto general elections.

This raised the stakes enormously. The simultaneous opening of the Governor’s mansion (Jim Justice was term-limited) and the Senate seat created a vacuum that drew millions in outside spending. The contests pitted different Republican factions against one another: Jim Justice’s populist, personality-driven brand against Alex Mooney’s Club for Growth-backed ideological conservatism, and Patrick Morrisey’s aggressive, litigious conservatism against the establishment represented by Moore Capito.

In this environment, the Joint Fundraising Committee emerged as the critical vehicle for capital accumulation. But the 2024 cycle introduced a structural innovation: the elevation of specific county executive committees to the status of primary JFC partners.

The math made it irresistible. By including a party committee in the JFC, campaigns could solicit larger checks from wealthy donors—one portion allocated to the campaign (subject to the $3,300 limit) and another portion allocated to the party committee (subject to a separate $10,000 combined limit for state and local parties). Funds transferred to the county party could then be used for “party building” activities that, while technically independent, often aligned perfectly with the candidate’s electoral goals.

Team Mooney: The Morgan County Fortress

Morgan County sits at the tip of West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, functioning economically as an exurb of Washington, D.C. Unlike the southern coalfields, it’s characterized by higher median incomes, a growing population, and a conservatism more libertarian and fiscal-focused than the populist strain dominating the state’s interior.

For Alex Mooney, Morgan County was political bedrock. Having represented the 2nd Congressional District—which encompassed the Panhandle—Mooney viewed this region as his firewall against Jim Justice’s overwhelming popularity. The selection of the Morgan County Republican Executive Committee as his JFC partner was a calculated defensive maneuver: resource the home base heavily, ensure maximum turnout and organizational discipline.

“Team Mooney” comprised Mooney for Senate, Inc. (his principal campaign committee), Americans for Legislating Excellence PAC (his leadership PAC), Club for Growth Action (the major conservative super PAC), and the Morgan County Republican Executive Committee - Federal.

The inclusion of the Club for Growth signaled the ideological orientation: this was an insurgency against the “establishment” represented by Justice, funded by national anti-tax activists and channeled through Morgan County’s local infrastructure.

The financial records reveal consistent and substantial capital flows:

In Q4 2023, Team Mooney raised $136,790, with significant portions allocated to partners. In Q1 2024, as the primary intensified, Team Mooney raised $140,800 and transferred $24,080 directly to the Morgan County Republican Executive Committee.

But the donor profile tells the real story. Notable contributions included $15,000 from Robert H. Castellini (owner of the Cincinnati Reds) and $10,000 from Charles Johnson (owner of the San Francisco Giants) directly to the Morgan County REC federal account.

A county committee that would typically rely on local fundraising dinners and small-dollar donations was instead receiving five-figure checks from professional sports owners via a sophisticated federal vehicle. The Morgan County REC had been effectively nationalized, its budgetary power far exceeding its demographic weight.

Despite this financial fortification, the political reality proved impervious to Team Mooney’s engineering.

Jim Justice won the statewide primary with 137,959 votes (61.9%) to Mooney’s 59,202 (26.5%)—a margin of nearly 79,000 votes. In the general election, Justice carried Morgan County with 6,662 votes (75.35%).

The electorate’s preference for Justice’s brand overwhelmed the organizational advantages purchased by the JFC transfers. The Morgan County REC, while flush with cash, could not alter the fundamental dynamics of the race. Financial engineering met its match in an established political brand.

Team Morrisey: The Upshur County Offensive

While Team Mooney’s coordination followed a logic of geographic defense, Team Morrisey’s partnership with Upshur County represents something more tactically complex. Upshur County, located in central West Virginia around Buckhannon, is not Patrick Morrisey’s home—he resides in Jefferson County in the Eastern Panhandle.

The selection appears driven by the ideological and operational composition of its local committee. The Upshur County REC was staffed by activists closely aligned with the party’s “hard right” faction, willing to engage in aggressive independent expenditure campaigns that the state party might have avoided. Key among these figures was Caiden Cowger, a young operative and president of the Family Policy Council of West Virginia, whose involvement linked the committee to broader culture-war operational capabilities.

The Legal Breakthrough: FEC Advisory Opinion 2023-07

The coordination between Team Morrisey and Upshur County required a protracted legal battle. In 2023, the Upshur County REC sought an advisory opinion from the Federal Election Commission to clarify its ability to act as a JFC partner independent of the State Party’s contribution limits.

The state party bylaws contained provisions technically asserting authority over county committees, suggesting a “connected organization” status that would aggregate their contribution limits. Upshur County argued it exercised “exclusive authority” over its funds, officers, and operations, and didn’t engage in joint fundraising with the state party.

The FEC ruled in Upshur County’s favor. The Commission found that the theoretical powers in the state party bylaws were not exercised in practice and that Upshur County operated with sufficient autonomy to be treated as a distinct entity.

This ruling was the keystone of the entire strategy. It meant a donor could give the maximum $10,000 to the State Party and another $10,000 to the Upshur County REC via Team Morrisey—effectively doubling the “soft money” capacity of the campaign’s extended network.

The Financial Pipeline

Following the FEC victory, Team Morrisey activated the pipeline with immense volume. The transfers to Upshur County were staggering for a rural committee in a county with fewer than 25,000 residents:

* Late 2023: $14,326 transferred

* Q1 2024: $75,717 transferred

* By July 2024: Total of $185,117 distributed to the Upshur County Republican Executive Committee

For context, many county executive committees in West Virginia operate with annual budgets in the low thousands. The injection of nearly $200,000 transformed the Upshur REC into a formidable statewide financial power player.

The funds didn’t sit in a bank account. The committee engaged in aggressive Independent Expenditures—spending money on communications expressly advocating for a candidate’s election or defeat.

In the final weeks before the May primary, the Upshur County REC spent $125,669 on independent expenditures supporting Patrick Morrisey.

The tactics raised eyebrows. Investigations by independent journalists linked members of the Upshur REC—specifically Caiden Cowger—to anonymous websites such as The Pittsburgh Observer. This site published salacious and unverified attacks against Morrisey’s primary opponent, Moore Capito, alleging personal details intended to damage his standing with social conservatives.

The Team Morrisey JFC structure had effectively subsidized what critics called a “black ops” wing of the campaign. By washing federal funds through a county party committee, the campaign could facilitate aggressive negative campaigning that appeared to originate from a “grassroots” local party entity rather than the candidate himself.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Despite the Upshur County REC spending over $125,000 to promote Morrisey, the voters of Upshur County rejected him in the primary.

Moore Capito won Upshur County with approximately 1,570 votes (36%) to Morrisey’s 1,323 (30%)—a margin of 247 votes.

Superficially, this looks like a failure. But this interpretation misses the broader strategic utility. The independent expenditures funded by the committee—TV ads, digital buys, mailers—permeated media markets far beyond county lines.

The Upshur REC was never a mechanism to win Upshur County. It was a mechanism to spend money statewide.

Morrisey won the nomination with 33% of the vote in a crowded field. The aggregate impact of his financial machine—including the Upshur node—proved decisive, even though the specific node itself was electorally hostile to him.

The Defensive Consolidation (Mooney/Morgan):

Team Mooney utilized the Morgan County REC as a fortification. The goal was to resource the candidate’s home base to ensure high turnout and loyalty against a popular challenger. Direct transfers funded local GOTV and organizational maintenance.

The outcome was failure. The strategy assumed that financial resource dominance could overcome the “retail” political deficit Mooney faced against Justice. The voters of Morgan County, despite the influx of funds, aligned with the statewide trend.

The Offensive Projection (Morrisey/Upshur): Team Morrisey utilized the Upshur County REC as an offensive platform. The goal was not to win Upshur County but to use the committee’s legal status—confirmed by the FEC—to bypass state party limits and unleash independent expenditures.

The outcome was success. While the local battle was lost (Capito won Upshur), the broader war was won. The funds channeled through Upshur contributed to Morrisey’s statewide plurality.

The Nationalization of Local Politics

A defining feature of both operations was the reliance on non-West Virginian capital to fuel local committees. The donor rolls read like a who’s who of national conservative mega-donors.

Robert H. Castellini, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, gave $15,000 to Team Mooney in March 2024 and had previously given $5,000 to Team Morrisey in November 2021. Charles Johnson, owner of the San Francisco Giants, gave $10,000 to the Morgan County REC directly in March 2024.

These donors funneled funds through the JFCs or directly to the federal accounts of county parties, bypassing local fundraising limitations. The Morgan and Upshur County RECs essentially acted as landing pads for national elite interests—often aligned with the Club for Growth’s anti-regulation, anti-tax agenda—to intervene in local primaries.

The most lasting legacy may be FEC Advisory Opinion 2023-07. By affirming that county parties can operate independently of state parties for contribution limit purposes, the FEC has arguably encouraged the Balkanization of state party structures.

Future federal candidates will likely “shop” for county committees with favorable bylaws and ambitious leadership to serve as personal JFC partners. This could systematically weaken state parties as funds are diverted to specific county fiefdoms allied with specific factions.

The aggressive use of the Upshur County REC as a pass-through for independent expenditures raises ethical questions. When a county committee receives $185,000 from a federal JFC and spends $125,669 on ads for that candidate—while simultaneously being linked to anonymous attack websites—it begins to resemble a shell company more than a grassroots democratic organization.

This risks alienating local volunteers who may feel their party infrastructure has been hijacked by mercenaries from outside their community.

Governor: Patrick Morrisey (R) defeated Steve Williams (D) in the general election with 62% to 32%, validating his primary strategy.

Senate: Jim Justice (R) defeated Glenn Elliott (D) in the general election with 69% to 28%, proving that personal popularity remains the ultimate political currency in West Virginia.

The coordination between Team Mooney and Morgan County, and Team Morrisey and Upshur County, defines the sophisticated financial engineering of modern American politics at its most localized level. These counties functioned almost as sovereign financial entities, asserting their independence to facilitate the flow of federal cash.

But this analysis demonstrates something important: while financial coordination can purchase organizational capacity and media time, it interacts unpredictably with local political culture.

Alex Mooney’s fortress in Morgan County crumbled because his product didn’t match the market demand for Jim Justice. Conversely, Patrick Morrisey’s offensive platform in Upshur County succeeded because it utilized local infrastructure as a mere transmission tower for a statewide message, ignoring the specific preferences of the local electorate.

As West Virginia moves deeper into its era of one-party rule, these internal factional battles—fought with JFC transfers and county party proxies—will likely become the primary venue for political competition.

The county parties, it turns out, were never really about the counties at all.

This analysis draws on FEC filings, FEC Advisory Opinion 2023-07, local election results, and investigative reporting from West Virginia Public

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

My father once told me something that stopped me cold.

He said the coal miners of West Virginia were treated like property. That they were bought and sold, worked until they broke, and discarded when they had nothing left to give. And then he said something harder: that nobody cares about their suffering the way they care about others’.

It was a controversial comparison—miners to slaves—and I bristled at it. But sitting with his words over the years, I’ve come to understand something important. He wasn’t making a historical argument. He was articulating a feeling—a sense of erasure that runs bone-deep in Appalachian communities. The feeling that your family’s pain doesn’t count. That it doesn’t make the history books. That nobody’s coming to tell your story.

This essay is my attempt to tell it.

The Disconnect Isn’t About Policy. It’s About Pain.

If you want to understand the socio-political landscape of West Virginia, you have to stop thinking about policy and start thinking about wounds.

The white coal miner’s perception of being treated as property isn’t historically equivalent to chattel slavery—but the feeling of being used up, discarded, and forgotten is real. And that feeling has been deliberately exploited.

Here’s the dark irony: the coal companies themselves benefit from this resentment. By fostering competition between different groups over whose suffering matters more, they divert attention from their own practices. While miners argue about recognition, nobody’s looking at the company books. Nobody’s asking why the people who did the dying stayed poor while the people who owned the mines built dynasties.

It’s psychological warfare dressed up as culture war.

This Isn’t Ancient History

There’s a comforting myth that the worst abuses of coal mining are relics of a distant past—grainy photographs of child laborers, stories from the 1920s.

My grandfather, Jiggs McKnight, worked the mines from the 1950s to the late 1980s.

That’s not the distant past. That’s within living memory. That’s the man who bounced me on his knee.

The family moved between Fayette, Wyoming, and Jackson counties, chasing work. That instability—the constant uprooting, the chase for the next seam of coal—defined generations. You went where the work was. You took what they gave you. You kept your mouth shut about the rest.

In 1984, Jiggs survived a mine collapse.

Physically, he recovered. Psychologically, he carried it until the day he died. And he made one thing clear to his son, my father Bill: Don’t go into the mines.

That’s the real inheritance. Not pride in coal country. Fear of it.

The “Friends of Coal” Fantasy

You’ve seen the bumper stickers. Friends of Coal. Coal Keeps the Lights On. There’s a whole mythology built around the brotherhood of miners, the dignity of the work, the pride of Appalachian identity.

And look—there is something real there. The solidarity of men who trust each other with their lives underground. The skill and courage the work demands. I’m not here to mock that.

But for families like mine, the reality was different. It was fear when the men went down. It was injuries that never fully healed. It was lungs that gave out decades later. It was widows left with a folded flag and a settlement check that wouldn’t cover the funeral.

The “Friends of Coal” narrative is a story the industry tells about itself. It’s not the story the miners’ families lived.

Defending Your Abuser

My grandmother Carrie lived in Skelton Coal Camp in Raleigh County.

She defended the coal company until her dying day. They provided the house. They provided the store. They provided the doctor. How could she speak against them?

I used to find this baffling. Now I understand it as survival.

If Carrie admitted that the company was exploiting her family—that the company store was a debt trap, that the housing kept them dependent, that the whole system was designed to extract maximum labor for minimum cost—then she’d have to admit something unbearable: that she had no control. That her whole life had been lived inside a cage she couldn’t see.

It’s easier to believe your captor is your benefactor. Psychologists call it Stockholm Syndrome. Prisoners call it institutionalization. In coal country, we just called it life.

The Generational Toll

My great-great-grandfather died of typhoid.

That might sound like ancient history too—but typhoid doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes from contaminated water. From poor sanitation. From the conditions the coal camps provided for their workers and their families.

The company didn’t pull the trigger. They just built the conditions where disease could thrive, and then expressed condolences when it did.

Generation after generation, the pattern repeated. Men died underground or died slowly above it, their lungs full of dust. Women were left to raise children alone, to stretch nothing into something, to mourn without support.

What did the widows get? A folded flag, if they were lucky. A settlement that wouldn’t last the year. And the expectation that they’d be grateful.

The Insult of the Hall of Fame

West Virginia University has a Coal Hall of Fame.

Take a guess who’s in it.

It’s not the miners. It’s not the men who went down into the dark and didn’t come back. It’s not the widows who held families together with nothing.

It’s the coal barons. The owners. The executives. The men who got rich while other men got buried.

This is institutional memory laid bare. This is who we’ve decided to honor. And every time someone romanticizes the “coal rush”—every time there’s a cute game or a nostalgic exhibit—it lands differently for families who lived the reality.

You want to honor coal miners? Tell the truth about what happened to them.

What Was Really Stolen

The coal companies took a lot from West Virginia. They took the wealth buried in the mountains and shipped it out of state. They took the health of generations of workers. They took fathers and husbands and sons.

But they also took something harder to name: they took the narrative.

They convinced families like Carrie’s that the company was their protector. They convinced miners that their enemy was other workers—other races, other regions—anyone but the men signing their paychecks. They convinced a whole culture that exploitation was tradition, that suffering was heritage, that questioning any of it was betrayal.

And then they built a Hall of Fame for themselves.

Breaking the Cycle

I don’t know how to fix West Virginia’s economy. I don’t have a policy platform or a five-point plan.

But I know this: healing starts with honesty.

It starts with refusing to romanticize abuse. It starts with naming what happened—not as ancient history, but as recent trauma that still echoes in families today. It starts with recognizing that the resentment so many feel isn’t irrational; it’s the predictable result of being exploited and then erased.

My father’s anger wasn’t crazy. It was the inheritance of generations of men who were used up and thrown away. The tragedy is that his anger was pointed at the wrong targets—at other suffering people instead of at the systems that created the suffering.

The coal companies won when they got us fighting each other. They win every time we compete over whose pain matters more.

The only way to break the cycle is to see it clearly. To tell the truth about who did what to whom. To stop defending our abusers and start defending each other.

That’s the inheritance I want to leave.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be grateful if you’d share it. These stories don’t get told enough

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

I’ve spent several years investigating how West Virginia’s government was systematically captured by out-of-state interests. In that time, I’ve watched dozens of legitimate news stories break about the same ecosystem I’m documenting—and I’ve watched almost all of them miss the point entirely.

Not because the journalists were lazy. Not because they were biased. Not even because they lacked resources.

They missed it because they were trained to see narratives, and what they were looking at was a system.

This distinction might sound academic. It’s not. It’s the difference between journalism that changes things and journalism that fills airtime until the next scandal arrives.

The Scandal Model of Journalism

Here’s how most investigative journalism works:

* Something bad happens.

* Reporter documents the bad thing.

* Public is outraged.

* Someone resigns or gets indicted.

* Story ends. Reporter moves to next scandal.

This is the narrative model. It has protagonists (victims, whistleblowers), antagonists (corrupt officials, greedy executives), a climax (the exposé), and a resolution (accountability, or at least the appearance of it).

It’s satisfying. It wins awards. It feels like justice.

And it almost never changes anything structural.

The West Virginia Case Study

Let me give you a concrete example.

In 2018, West Virginia’s entire Supreme Court was impeached—the only time in American history that’s happened. Justice Allen Loughry was convicted on 10 federal counts. Justice Menis Ketchum pled guilty to wire fraud. The scandal involved $32,000 couches, $42,000 antique desks taken home, and $3.7 million in office renovations originally budgeted at $900,000.

The press feasted. And rightfully so—it was genuinely outrageous.

Here’s what the coverage looked like:

“WV Supreme Court Justice Convicted of Federal Crimes” “Impeachment Proceedings Begin for All Four Justices” “Loughry Sentenced to 24 Months in Prison”

Good stories. Important stories. Stories that held individuals accountable.

Now here’s what the coverage didn’t look like:

“Dark Money Network That Elected These Justices Continues Operating” “Same Donor Coalition Now Funding Their Replacements” “System That Produced Corruption Remains Structurally Unchanged”

The scandal was covered. The system was not.

Loughry went to prison. The Republican State Leadership Committee—which spent $2.6 million electing justices to that same court in 2016—kept spending. The Judicial Crisis Network kept funding. The same donor ecosystem that had captured the court before the scandal continued capturing it after.

The narrative ended. The system continued.

Why This Happens

Journalists aren’t stupid. So why do they keep covering scandals while ignoring systems?

1. Systems Don’t Have Villains

Narratives need antagonists. “Don Blankenship spent $3 million to buy a Supreme Court justice” is a story. It has a bad guy. You can put his face on the screen.

“A decentralized network of ideologically aligned nonprofits, funded through donor-advised funds that legally obscure the identity of contributors, coordinates spending across multiple election cycles to shift the composition of state judiciaries toward outcomes favorable to corporate defendants” is... not a story. It’s a dissertation.

The truth is that most systemic capture doesn’t have a villain. It has incentive structures. It has legal frameworks. It has coordination mechanisms. None of these things photograph well.

2. Systems Operate on Different Timescales

A scandal happens on a timeline that fits a news cycle. Someone does something bad → it gets exposed → consequences follow. Days to months.

A system operates on a timeline that fits an era. Legal doctrine shifts → funding networks form → personnel pipelines develop → policy outcomes emerge. Years to decades.

The Buckley v. Valeo decision that created the “money equals speech” doctrine was in 1976. The McCutcheon decision that removed aggregate contribution limits was in 2014. The AFP v. Bonta decision that constitutionally protected donor anonymity was in 2021.

That’s a 45-year arc. No news organization covers 45-year arcs. They cover what happened this week.

3. Systems Require Expertise the Newsroom Doesn’t Have

To understand how dark money flows through the political system, you need to understand:

* Campaign finance law (FEC regulations, state equivalents)

* Tax law (501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(4) vs 527 organizations)

* Corporate structure (donor-advised funds, fiscal sponsorship)

* Network analysis (identifying shared personnel, accountants, addresses)

* Court procedure (how judicial selection actually works)

How many reporters have that combination of expertise? How many newsrooms can afford to let someone spend three years developing it? The economic model of journalism selects against systems coverage. It’s expensive, it’s slow, and it doesn’t generate the clicks that scandal coverage does.

4. Systems Don’t Provide Closure

The narrative model promises resolution. The bad guy goes to jail. The corrupt official resigns. The company pays a fine. Story over.

Systems don’t offer that satisfaction. You can document a system perfectly, expose every mechanism, trace every dollar—and the system keeps operating. Because systems aren’t illegal. They’re designed.

The dark money network capturing West Virginia’s judiciary isn’t breaking laws. It’s using laws. Laws that were written, interpreted, and defended by people the network helped put in power.

There’s no climax to that story. There’s no resolution. There’s just... the machine, running.

What Systems Coverage Actually Looks Like

So what’s the alternative? How do you cover systems instead of scandals?

Map the Network, Not the Incident When I started investigating West Virginia’s judicial capture, I didn’t start with a scandal. I started with a question: Who decides who becomes a judge?

That question led me to the Judicial Vacancy Advisory Commission. Which led me to the people appointed to it. Which led me to the organizations they work for. Which led me to the donors funding those organizations. Which led me to the other organizations those donors fund. Which led me to the personnel moving between all of them.

By the time I was done, I had a map. Not a story about one bad actor—a map of an entire ecosystem.

Follow the Money Backward Scandal coverage follows money forward: Donor gives to candidate → candidate wins → candidate does favors for donor.

Systems coverage follows money backward: Outcome occurs → who benefited? → who funded the people who produced that outcome? → who funded them? → where did that money originally come from?

Think in Feedback Loops, Not Linear Causation Narratives are linear. A causes B causes C. Systems are circular. A causes B causes C causes more A.

The dark money system isn’t just influencing judicial selection. It’s capturing the mechanisms that would provide oversight of judicial selection. The same network that funds judicial campaigns also funds the think tanks that train judges, the media campaigns that defend judges, the advocacy groups that oppose judicial reform, and now—as of June 2025—the commissioners who screen judicial candidates.

Name the Legal Architecture One of the most important things systems coverage can do is name the laws that make the system possible. Not “dark money is corrupting our politics.” That’s a complaint.

This: “The combination of Buckley v. Valeo (1976), Citizens United v. FEC (2010), McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), and Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta (2021) created a constitutional framework in which unlimited money can be spent on elections with legally protected anonymity.”

That’s a diagnosis. It tells you what would have to change for the system to change.

The Citizen Investigator Model

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Traditional journalism may not be capable of covering systems effectively. The economic model doesn’t support it. The training doesn’t prepare for it. The format doesn’t accommodate it.

That’s why I’m experimenting with something different.

The Sold-Out State isn’t just an investigative series. It’s a training program. Every article includes puzzles that teach readers how to trace dark money themselves. How to read IRS Form 990s. How to cross-reference donor lists with litigation databases. How to identify the shared accountants that reveal network connections.

The theory is simple: If newsrooms can’t afford to have reporters spend three years mapping systems, maybe we can distribute that work across thousands of readers who each contribute pieces of the puzzle.

What We’re Actually Up Against

When you investigate a scandal, you find a crime. Crimes can be prosecuted. Criminals can be punished. There’s a path to justice, even if it’s imperfect.

When you investigate a system, you find a design. Designs aren’t crimes. The people who built the system—the lawyers who argued the cases, the donors who funded the campaigns, the operatives who coordinated the spending—they didn’t break laws. They wrote laws. They interpreted laws. They defended laws.

The West Virginia judicial capture I’ve documented isn’t illegal. It’s the system working exactly as it was designed to work. The design just happens to be: whoever has the most money gets to pick the referees.

That’s not a scandal. That’s an architecture. And architectures don’t go to prison.

The Real Question

So here’s what I keep asking myself:

If traditional journalism covers scandals while systems keep running—if the narrative model produces accountability for individuals while leaving structures intact—if the economic model of news selects against the slow, expensive, expertise-intensive work of mapping systems—

Then what’s the actual theory of change? How does systemic capture get reversed?

I don’t have a complete answer. But I have a hypothesis:

Systems change when enough people can see them.

Not see the scandals they produce—see the systems themselves. The legal architecture. The funding flows. The personnel pipelines. The feedback loops.

The machine runs in the dark. It relies on complexity, opacity, and the assumption that nobody has time to trace all the connections.

What if we made the connections visible? What if we mapped the network so thoroughly that it couldn’t operate in shadow anymore? What if we trained thousands of people to read the documents, trace the money, and identify the patterns?

I don’t know if it would work. But I know that covering scandals hasn’t worked. The scandals keep coming, and the system keeps running.

Maybe it’s time to try something different.

If this framework is useful to you, consider sharing it with someone who covers politics for a living. The narrative model isn’t going to break itself.

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The Laboratory of Oligarchy

West Virginia, historically the battleground of labor rights and the engine of American industrialization, has been repurposed. It is no longer merely a state struggling with post-industrial transition; it has become a “laboratory of oligarchy,” a testing ground where national special interest groups, funded by untraceable capital, deploy radical policy experiments that dismantle the public commons to benefit a distant donor class. The Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia (AFP-WV) 2026 Legislative Agenda, euphemistically titled “Pathway to Prosperity,” is the operating manual for this transformation.

This report offers an exhaustive, forensic critique of this agenda. It argues that the slate of proposals—ranging from the elimination of the personal income tax and the dismantling of civil service protections to the privatization of public education and the erection of bureaucratic barriers to the social safety net—is not a grassroots product of Mountaineer necessity. Rather, it is a syndicated franchise of a national playbook, financed by a “dark money” ecosystem that has been legally fortified by a half-century of Supreme Court jurisprudence, from Buckley v. Valeo to Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta.

By triangulating the legislative text with financial disclosures, court opinions, and comparative data from other states like Kansas and Utah, this analysis reveals a synchronized assault on the institutions of West Virginia governance. We demonstrate how the elimination of the income tax risks a Kansas-style fiscal collapse; how “universal” school vouchers act as a wealth transfer mechanism that accelerates rural community erasure; and how the “One Door” welfare policy reform weaponizes bureaucracy to purge the poor from state rolls. Ultimately, this report serves as a roadmap for citizens to trace the influence from the opaque reservoirs of DonorsTrust directly to the drafting tables of the West Virginia Legislature, exposing the puppeteers behind the curtain of state politics.

Part I: The Architecture of Capture

1.1 The Legal Fortress: The Buckley Trajectory and the Erosion of Sovereignty

To understand the AFP-WV 2026 agenda, one must first interrogate the legal infrastructure that permits its financing. The current political landscape in West Virginia is not an organic development but the downstream consequence of a deliberate, multi-decade judicial campaign to deregulate campaign finance. This legal lineage, which we term the “Buckley Trajectory,” has methodically dismantled the levees holding back a flood of unaccountable capital, converting the state’s political marketplace into an auction house for out-of-state interests.

The foundational fracture occurred in 1976 with Buckley v. Valeo. In this seminal case, the Supreme Court established the axiom that “money equals speech,” a doctrine that fundamentally altered the physics of American democracy. By ruling that the only legitimate governmental interest in regulating campaign finance was the prevention of quid pro quocorruption—essentially, direct bribery—the Court stripped the legislature of the power to regulate spending for the purpose of equalizing political influence. This created a constitutional safe harbor for wealthy interests to amplify their voices to decibel levels that drown out the average citizen.

However, for a small state like West Virginia, the true turning point was McCutcheon v. FEC (2014). Prior to McCutcheon, aggregate contribution limits prevented a single donor from maxing out contributions to every candidate and party committee simultaneously. West Virginia, with its historically low individual contribution limits ($1,000 from 1978 until recently), had been somewhat insulated from the tsunami of national mega-donor cash. McCutcheondemolished this seawall. The Court’s plurality opinion, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, invalidated aggregate limits, allowing a single donor to funnel millions into joint fundraising committees that could then distribute funds downstream to state races. The impact was immediate and devastating: outside spending in West Virginia elections exploded from a baseline of $5.6 million in 2012 to $19.2 million by 2016—a nearly fourfold increase in a single cycle.

This flood of capital fundamentally altered the incentives of West Virginia politicians. As the cost of campaigns skyrocketed, candidates became increasingly dependent on the “donor class” capable of writing five- and six-figure checks to Super PACs and party committees. The data bears this out: recent filings show that over 80% of Governor Patrick Morrisey’s gubernatorial donations came from out-of-state political activists, and Senator Shelley Moore Capito raised 99.38% of her campaign funds from outside West Virginia. The constituency has effectively shifted from the voters of Kanawha and Cabell counties to the check-writers of Texas, Florida, and Virginia.

The final brick in this fortress of influence was laid in 2021 with Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court struck down California’s donor disclosure requirement for charitable organizations. Chief Justice Roberts, invoking the civil rights protections established in NAACP v. Alabama (1958), ruled that compelled disclosure of major donors violates the First Amendment right to freedom of association. This ruling placed a “bull’s-eye” on all disclosure laws, as noted in Justice Sotomayor’s dissent. It provided the ultimate shield for “dark money” groups: not only could they spend unlimited amounts (via Citizens United and McCutcheon), but they could now do so with a constitutionally protected right to anonymity.

This legal trilogy—Buckley, McCutcheon, and AFP v. Bonta—created the operational environment for the AFP-WV 2026 agenda. It allows a network of out-of-state billionaires to finance a radical policy overhaul in West Virginia without ever having to reveal their identities to the people whose lives they are restructuring. The agenda is thus not a democratic mandate but a purchased outcome, insulated from public accountability by the very courts that are supposed to protect the public trust.

1.2 The West Virginia “Freedom” Franchise: A Subsidiary of National Interests

The organizations propelling the 2026 agenda—AFP-WV, the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, and their legislative allies—present themselves as indigenous champions of West Virginian values, using the iconography of the mountaineer and the rhetoric of “freedom.” However, a forensic audit of their affiliations, funding structures, and personnel reveals a different reality: they function as local franchises of a national corporate-political conglomerate.

The Cardinal Institute: While nominally an independent 501(c)(3) think tank, the Cardinal Institute operates as the intellectual engine for the Koch network’s state-level priorities. Its refusal to disclose donors is protected by West Virginia’s SB 16, the “Protect Our Right to Unite Act”—a piece of legislation that Cardinal itself championed, which codifies the AFP v. Bonta anonymity protections into state law. Despite this opacity, fragmentary tax filings and grant disclosures reveal tell-tale funding streams from the State Policy Network (SPN), Donors Capital Fund, and the Atlas Network.

The Atlas Network connection is particularly illuminating. Atlas serves as a global incubator for free-market think tanks, providing “seed funding” and strategic mentorship to organizations that push deregulation and privatization. The Cardinal Institute has received funding and programmatic support from Atlas, linking it to a global network of ideologues who advocate for the dismantling of environmental regulations and social safety nets from London to Buenos Aires. Furthermore, Cardinal’s policy papers—particularly regarding the “One Door” welfare reform and education savings accounts—are near-replicas of model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), betraying their external origins. The Institute is not generating West Virginian solutions; it is importing a standardized product line.

Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia (AFP-WV): As the primary lobbying arm, AFP-WV is a direct subsidiary of the national Americans for Prosperity organization, founded and funded by the Koch brothers. The integration of AFP-WV into the state’s governing apparatus is absolute. This was starkly illustrated by Governor Patrick Morrisey’s appointment of Jason Huffman, the AFP-WV State Director, to the Judicial Vacancy Advisory Commission. This commission is the gatekeeper for the state judiciary, vetting candidates for judgeships. By placing the state’s leading corporate lobbyist in this role, the Governor has effectively merged the advocacy apparatus with the state itself. Huffman is no longer just petitioning the government; he is the government.

The Intermediaries and the “Dark Money ATM”: The flow of funds fueling this ecosystem is obscured by a sophisticated network of “pass-through” entities. The primary vehicle is DonorsTrust (and its affiliate Donors Capital Fund), a donor-advised fund that has been described as the “Dark Money ATM” of the conservative movement. DonorsTrust allows wealthy individuals to contribute appreciated assets (stocks, real estate) and receive an immediate tax deduction. DonorsTrust then distributes these funds to groups like the Cardinal Institute, SPN, and ALEC, listing the donor simply as “DonorsTrust.” This “Russian nesting doll” structure ensures that by the time a dollar is spent on a mailer attacking a rural school levy or supporting a tax cut, its origin—whether from a Texas energy tycoon, a New York hedge fund manager, or a tobacco conglomerate—is successfully laundered.

This interconnected web of think tanks, lobbying groups, and funding conduits constitutes a “shadow government.” It drafts the bills (ALEC), writes the white papers justifying them (Cardinal), lobbies for their passage (AFP-WV), and funds the campaigns of the legislators who vote for them (Mountaineer PAC/RAGA). The 2026 Legislative Agenda is the output of this machine.

Part II: The “Kansasfication” of Tax Policy – A Blueprint for Insolvency

2.1 The Agenda: Accelerating the Phase-Out to Zero

The cornerstone of the AFP-WV agenda is the “reduction of taxes and spending,” specifically calling to “Enact further Personal Income Tax cuts” and “Review the existing phase out triggers to ensure a swift... phase out”. This proposal is framed as a competitive necessity to attract population and business, citing zero-income-tax states like Tennessee and Florida as models. However, the mechanics of this proposal bear a haunting resemblance to the disastrous “Kansas Experiment” of 2012-2017, and the comparison to Florida ignores critical structural differences.

West Virginia’s current law, enacted in 2023 (HB 2526), already slashed income tax rates by 21.25% and installed “triggers” that automatically reduce rates further if revenue collections meet certain thresholds. The AFP-WV agenda explicitly seeks to accelerate these triggers to eliminate the tax entirely. The peril lies in the mathematics of the triggers themselves: they are designed to capture nominal revenue growth—often driven by inflation or volatile severance tax spikes—and permanently commit it to tax cuts rather than base budget needs or inflation adjustments for services.

2.2 The Severance Tax Mirage and the Structural Deficit

The fiscal foundation of this tax cut strategy is built on sand. Much of West Virginia’s recent budget surplus, which fuels the tax cut triggers, is derived from severance taxes on coal and natural gas—revenues that are notoriously volatile and currently inflated by global energy market instability. Anchoring permanent tax cuts to temporary energy windfalls is fiscal malpractice. When energy prices inevitably correct, the state will face a gaping structural deficit, having surrendered its most stable revenue stream (the income tax) while the bills for the tax cuts remain due.

This is precisely what happened in Kansas. In 2012, Governor Sam Brownback slashed income taxes, exempted pass-through businesses, and promised a “shot of adrenaline” to the economy. The result was not growth, but collapse. State revenues plummeted, creating a $700 million deficit. The state suffered multiple credit rating downgrades, and the legislature was forced to make savage cuts to education and infrastructure, raid the highway fund, and delay pension payments. The experiment was so disastrous that a Republican supermajority legislature eventually voted to repeal the tax cuts over Brownback’s veto.

West Virginia is positioning itself to repeat this failure with even less margin for error. Unlike Kansas, which had a relatively diversified economy, West Virginia relies heavily on the very energy sectors whose volatility creates the illusion of surplus. Furthermore, West Virginia has a shrinking, aging workforce with the lowest labor force participation rate in the nation (~55%). “Supply-side” tax cuts assume that lower rates will induce work; however, in an economy constrained by poor health outcomes, substance use disorder, and infrastructure decay, the primary barrier to work is not the marginal tax rate but the lack of “employability” support—support that relies on the very state revenue being slashed.

2.3 The Regressive Shift: Who Pays the Bill?

The inevitable endgame of eliminating the personal income tax—which accounts for approximately 40% of the state’s general revenue—is a massive shift toward consumption taxes (sales tax) and property taxes, or the obliteration of public services. The math allows for no other outcome.

If the income tax is eliminated, the revenue must be replaced. This invariably means expanding the sales tax base to include services (haircuts, legal fees, car repairs) and raising the rate, as was proposed in previous failed tax reform attempts. Sales taxes are inherently regressive; they consume a much larger percentage of the income of poor and working-class families than of the wealthy. By swapping a progressive income tax for a regressive sales tax, the AFP-WV agenda effectively redistributes the tax burden from the high-net-worth donors in the “Billionaire Club” to the checkout line at the Dollar General.

Furthermore, the “starve the beast” strategy of tax elimination cripples the state’s ability to fund public services. The agenda’s call to “eliminate unnecessary... Boards and Commissions” is a euphemism for stripping regulatory oversight, but the savings from such cuts are a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue lost. The real savings required to offset billions in lost income tax revenue can only come from the “big ticket” items in the state budget: public education (K-12 and higher ed), Medicaid, and the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA).

Insight: The tax policy is not designed to spur economic growth for the median worker; it is designed to structurally starve the state government of the resources needed to maintain public institutions, thereby forcing the privatization of those services by default. It is a liquidation of the public commons.

Part III: The Privatization of Education – A Wealth Transfer Disguised as “Freedom”

3.1 The Hope Scholarship: From Safety Valve to Budgetary Black Hole

The second pillar of the agenda is “Education Innovation,” which demands the “expansion of the Hope Scholarship to all school-aged children”. The Hope Scholarship is an Education Savings Account (ESA) that allows parents to withdraw their child’s state funding allowance (approximately $4,400 to $5,000) to use for private school tuition, homeschooling curriculum, or other educational expenses.

Initially sold to the public as a “safety valve” for students bullied or failing in public schools, the universal expansion transforms the program into a massive entitlement for the wealthy. By opening eligibility to all students—including the ~16,000 students already in private schools and the ~25,000 homeschoolers who have never attended public school—the state is creating a new financial liability where none existed before.

The fiscal implications are staggering. When the program was restricted to public school switchers, the cost was theoretically “revenue neutral” because the money followed the child. However, paying for students the state was not previously funding creates an immediate, massive new cost. Estimates for the program’s cost have ballooned from an initial ~$25 million to projected costs exceeding $315 million by FY 2027 as eligibility becomes universal. This $315 million must come from the General Revenue Fund—the same fund that is being depleted by the proposed income tax cuts.

3.2 “Right-Sizing” as a Euphemism for Rural Erasure

The agenda explicitly calls to “work to right-size West Virginia’s school buildings”. In the technocratic language of the AFP, “right-sizing” is a euphemism for mass school consolidation and closure. This policy is the inevitable downstream consequence of the Hope Scholarship’s drain on public resources.

Public schools have high fixed costs—utilities, building maintenance, transportation, administrative salaries—that do not decrease linearly with enrollment. If a school loses 10% of its students to vouchers, it loses 10% of its funding, but it cannot cut 10% of the electricity bill or 10% of a bus route. This creates a “death spiral” for public districts: as funding drops, they are forced to cut optional programs (art, music, AP classes), which lowers the quality of education, prompting more families to leave, which further reduces funding.

For rural West Virginia, this is catastrophic. In counties like Roane, Wetzel, and Clay, the public school is often the sole remaining community institution—the site of voting, emergency shelter, friday night football, and community identity. We are already witnessing a wave of closures: Roane County recently voted to close Geary and Walton schools; Wetzel represents a similar consolidation trajectory. The AFP agenda accelerates this process by draining the funds necessary to keep these small, rural schools viable.

3.3 The Inequality Engine: Segregation by Zip Code

The “choice” promised by vouchers is a mirage in rural West Virginia. Private schools are heavily concentrated in urban and suburban centers like Charleston, Morgantown, and Wheeling. For a family in rural McDowell, Calhoun, or Clay County, a $4,500 voucher does not create a private school option where none exists. There are simply no private schools to choose from.

Therefore, the universal Hope Scholarship acts as a reverse wealth transfer. It taxes the citizens of rural counties—who have no private options—to subsidize the private school tuition of families in wealthy suburbs who were often already paying for private education out of pocket. It is a mechanism that extracts wealth from the poor to subsidize the preferences of the affluent. Furthermore, because private schools can select their students (unlike public schools which must accept everyone), this policy encourages a segregation of the student body, where students with special needs or behavioral issues are concentrated in underfunded public schools while resources flow to unaccountable private entities.

Insight: The “Education Innovation” pillar is not about improving education for all; it is about dismantling the state’s obligation to provide a uniform system of free schools, replacing it with a fragmented market that serves the few at the expense of the many.

Part IV: The Dismantling of the Administrative State – The New Spoils System

4.1 “Cutting Needless Red Tape”: The Elimination of Civil Service

Under the banner of efficiency, the AFP-WV agenda proposes to “Eliminate the antiquated State Division of Personnel (DOP)” and “Exempt all agencies from DOP”. This dovetails with Governor Morrisey’s legislative push (HB 2008) to remove civil service protections for new hires in major departments like Commerce and Economic Development, converting them into “at-will” employees.

This is a strategic regression to the pre-1930s “spoils system,” where public employment was a reward for political loyalty rather than professional merit. By removing grievance procedures and job protections, the administration gains the power to purge institutional knowledge and replace subject matter experts with partisan loyalists. This mirrors the federal “Schedule F” plan proposed during the Trump administration, which sought to strip protections from policy-making civil servants to bring the bureaucracy to heel.

4.2 Regulatory Capture and the Threat to Public Safety

In a state like West Virginia, where the government plays a critical role in regulating powerful extractive industries (coal, gas, timber, chemical), the independence of civil servants is a matter of life and death. An environmental inspector who fears that citing a politically connected coal operator will result in their “at-will” termination is an inspector who looks the other way. A public health official who knows that releasing data contradicting the Governor’s narrative means losing their livelihood is a silenced official.

By eliminating the DOP, the AFP agenda effectively privatizes the regulatory power of the state. It removes the firewall between the regulators and the regulated. This is the ultimate goal of the donor class: a regulatory environment where the rules exist on paper but the enforcement mechanism has been captured by political patronage. The “efficiency” gained is the efficiency of corruption. The recent “quiet gutting” of the Office of Equal Opportunity, which investigated discrimination claims within state government, serves as a canary in the coal mine for this broader dismantling.

Part V: Weaponizing the Safety Net – The “One Door” Trap

5.1 The “One Door” Policy: Surveillance Disguised as Service

AFP-WV proposes to “Energize workforce participation by enacting a One Door policy to modernize and integrate the state’s welfare system”. On the surface, this sounds benign—a streamlining of bureaucracy to help citizens access services. However, the “One Door” policy is a specific product of the ALEC and Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) legislative factory, modeled on Utah’s system.

5.2 The Mechanism of Exclusion

The “One Door” model integrates all welfare eligibility (SNAP, Medicaid, TANF) and workforce training into a single portal. While marketed as “integration,” its primary function in the conservative policy ecosystem is to erect administrative barriers to access.

1. Tighten Verification: The system implements rigorous, often redundant, eligibility checks (”integrity measures”) designed to find technical reasons to purge rolls.

2. Enforce Work Requirements: It links all benefits to strict work or training requirements. If a recipient fails to meet a metric in one program (e.g., misses a job training appointment due to lack of childcare), they can be locked out of all support through the “One Door”.

3. Deter Access: By centralizing the process and linking it explicitly to “workforce development” rather than “human services,” it creates a psychological and administrative barrier for the most vulnerable—the disabled, the elderly, those with unstable housing—who may not be immediately “work ready” but desperately need food or healthcare.

5.3 The Failure of the Utah Model

Proponents cite Utah as a success story, but a closer look reveals that while Utah’s caseloads dropped, its poverty reduction success is questionable. Critics note that the “One Door” system often functions as a bottleneck, reducing state expenditures on the poor not by lifting them out of poverty, but by making the process of getting help so onerous that people give up. In West Virginia, a state with high rates of disability and an opioid crisis, increasing bureaucratic friction does not magically create a healthy workforce; it increases hunger and uninsurance.

Insight: The “One Door” policy is a tool for “load shedding.” It is designed to reduce the number of people the state supports, thereby freeing up budget space to fund the tax cuts for the wealthy discussed in Part II. It creates a closed loop of austerity.

Part VI: The Energy War – Sabotaging the Future to Protect the Past

6.1 Sunsetting “Green” Tax Credits: Protectionism for Incumbents

The agenda explicitly calls to “Sunset all state tax credits... beginning with ‘green’ energy” to create a “systematic review of actual versus expected return on investment”. This proposal is a direct assault on the burgeoning renewable energy sector in West Virginia—a sector that is finally bringing manufacturing jobs back to the state.

6.2 Economic Malpractice

West Virginia has recently seen significant wins in the new energy economy, such as the Form Energy iron-air battery plant in Weirton and the expansion of Solar Holler. These projects rely on a predictable tax environment that includes both federal (IRA) and state incentives. Repealing these credits puts thousands of announced jobs and billions in investment at risk. An analysis by Energy Innovation suggests that repealing green credits could cost West Virginia nearly 10,500 jobs by 2030 and reduce GDP by over $2 billion.

6.3 Protecting the Donors

This policy cannot be understood through an economic lens—West Virginia desperately needs any job growth. It can only be understood as regulatory capture by incumbent fossil fuel interests (Koch Industries, coal barons) who view renewable energy not as an economic opportunity for the state, but as a market threat to their assets. The proposed “review” is a pretext for market foreclosure. It is a protectionist measure designed to shield the donor class from competition, even if it means stranding West Virginia in a declining industry while the rest of the region pivots to the future.

Part VII: Conclusion – The Colony of Donors

The AFP-WV 2026 Legislative Agenda is a coherent, synchronized assault on the public institutions of West Virginia. It is a strategy of liquidation:

Liquidating fiscal capacity via income tax elimination.

Liquidating public education via universal vouchers.

Liquidating state expertise via civil service elimination.

Liquidating the safety net via the “One Door” bottleneck.

Liquidating future economic growth via the repeal of green energy incentives.

This agenda was not written for the coal miner in Boone County, the teacher in Gilmer County, or the small business owner in Huntington. It was written for the donors in the “Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce”—the billionaires who, protected by the Buckley trajectory and AFP v. Bonta, view West Virginia not as a home for 1.7 million people, but as a resource extraction colony and an ideological laboratory.

The “Buckley Trajectory” has stripped the citizens of West Virginia of their right to know who is buying their government. But the policy outcomes—closed schools, crumbling roads, politicized agencies, and a hollowed-out economy—will be visible to everyone. The “Pathway to Prosperity” is, upon closer inspection, a cul-de-sac of austerity.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

Season 1

* Article 1 - Welcome To Permanent Campaign Mode

* Article 2 - THE PLAYBOOK: A Torrent of Propaganda

* Article 3 - The PAC Problem: How Ideological Kingmakers Took Over Primaries

* Article 4 - How West Virginia Policy Actually Gets Made and Why Understanding this Machinery Matters

* Article 5 - Cleta Mitchell and Mac Warner: A Case Study in Conservative Partnership Institute‘s State Election Takeover Strategy

* Article 6 - The Ranked Choice Voting Gambit - Why Extremists Fear Ranked Ballots

* Article 7 - Buckley v. Valeo: The 1976 Decision That Built America’s Dark Money Architecture

* Article 8 - We Want Your Vote, Just Not Your Voice

* Article 9 - When Silicon Valley Meets Appalachia: The Systematic Failure of Campaign Technology in Rural America

The Supreme Court’s 1976 per curiam opinion in Buckley v. Valeo established the constitutional framework that makes dark money and unlimited campaign spending legally possible—not Citizens United. While Citizens United (2010) became the public lightning rod for criticism, legal scholars increasingly recognize it as merely an extension of doctrines Buckley cemented 34 years earlier. As Columbia Law Professor Richard Briffault argues, Buckley “produced a campaign finance law that Congress never enacted, and set the stage for many of the pathologies that have marked the campaign finance system ever since.”

The case struck down post-Watergate spending limits while creating three foundational doctrines:

* Money spent on politics equals protected speech;

* Independent expenditures cannot be limited because they don’t corrupt; and

* Contributions and expenditures deserve different constitutional treatment.

These holdings constructed the legal architecture that dark money now flows through.

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The Watergate Scandal Drove Comprehensive Reform That The Court Dismantled

When Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, the Watergate investigations had exposed campaign finance as central to political corruption. Twenty-two individuals and seventeen corporations pleaded guilty to illegal contributions to Nixon’s Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP). Prior to 1974, Corporate executives flew to Washington with “brown leather suitcases” full of cash. After the dairy industry pledged $2 million to Nixon’s reelection, he approved milk price increases. Secret slush funds financed dirty tricks and break-ins.

Congress responded with the most comprehensive campaign finance legislation in American history: the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) Amendments.

* The law imposed contribution limits ($1,000 per individual per election),

* Expenditure limits ($1,000 for independent expenditures, $20 million presidential spending cap)

* Comprehensive disclosure requirements, and created the Federal Election Commission to enforce these rules.

* Public financing of presidential elections was established through an income tax checkoff.

Just one day after the law took effect, Senator James Buckley—joined by a bizarre coalition spanning Eugene McCarthy, the ACLU, the Libertarian Party, and the American Conservative Union—filed suit arguing the law violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court heard arguments on November 10, 1975, and issued its ruling on January 30, 1976.

The Court’s “Money Equals Speech” Doctrine Transformed Campaign Finance Into Protected Expression

The government argued that campaign finance restrictions merely regulate conduct—monetary transactions—not speech. The Court emphatically rejected this position, holding that political spending is constitutionally indistinguishable from political speech itself:

“A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.”

The Court distinguished campaign spending from cases like O’Brien (draft card burning), stating that “the expenditure of money simply cannot be equated with such conduct as destruction of a draft card.” Because money enables political communication, restricting campaign spending directly restricts the “quantity of political speech.” The First Amendment affords “the broadest protection to such political expression” to ensure the “unfettered interchange of ideas.”

This doctrinal move transformed any spending limit into a speech restriction requiring the highest constitutional justification—a framework that would prove nearly impossible for reformers to satisfy.

The Contribution-Expenditure Distinction Created Constitutional Asymmetry

Buckley’s most consequential and controversial holding treated contributions to candidates fundamentally differently from expenditures on political speech. This bifurcated analysis shaped all subsequent campaign finance law.

Contributions received weaker protection because they involve only “marginal restriction upon the contributor’s ability to engage in free communication.” A contribution serves as “a general expression of support” but “does not communicate the underlying basis for the support.” The Court found contributions were essentially “speech by proxy”—the actual communication comes from the candidate who spends the money, not the contributor. Given this attenuated speech interest, the government’s interest in preventing corruption and its appearance provided “constitutionally sufficient justification” for contribution limits.

Expenditures received strict scrutiny because they “represent substantial... restraints on the quantity and diversity of political speech.” When individuals or groups spend their own money on political communication, they are directly exercising First Amendment rights that the government cannot constrain based on vague anti-corruption concerns.

This distinction meant that while Congress could limit how much someone gives to a candidate ($1,000 survived), it could not limit how much that same person spends independently advocating for that candidate—creating an immediate asymmetry that wealthy individuals could exploit.

Independent Expenditure Protection Became The Dark Money Foundation

The Court’s most consequential holding for modern dark money was its ruling that independent expenditures receive full First Amendment protection and cannot constitutionally be limited. The $1,000 independent expenditure ceiling in FECA was struck down because it “heavily burdens core First Amendment expression” while failing to serve “any substantial governmental interest.”

The reasoning was straightforward but momentous: independent expenditures pose no corruption risk because there is no direct exchange between spender and candidate. As the Court wrote:

“The absence of prearrangement and coordination of an expenditure with the candidate or his agent not only undermines the value of the expenditure to the candidate, but also alleviates the danger that expenditures will be given as a quid pro quo for improper commitments from the candidate.”

This holding established that as long as spending is “totally independent of the candidate and his campaign”—made without “prearrangement and coordination”—it cannot create corruption and therefore cannot be restricted. The government’s only legitimate interest in campaign finance regulation, the Court held, was preventing quid pro quo corruption: explicit exchanges of money for political favors.

The Court also created the infamous “magic words” test in footnote 52, ruling that regulable express advocacy required explicit terms like “vote for,” “elect,” “support,” “cast your ballot for,” “vote against,” “defeat,” or “reject.” This created the issue advocacy loophole: groups could influence elections without disclosure or limits simply by avoiding these specific phrases.

What Buckley Struck Down Versus What It Preserved

Struck down as unconstitutional:

* Independent expenditure limits ($1,000 ceiling)

* Candidate personal expenditure limits ($50,000 for President, less for Congress)

* Overall campaign spending limits ($20 million for presidential general elections)

Upheld as constitutional:

* Individual contribution limits ($1,000 per candidate per election)

* PAC contribution limits ($5,000 per candidate)

* Disclosure and recordkeeping requirements

* Public financing of presidential elections (with voluntary spending limits as a condition)

The Court also struck down the FEC’s original appointment structure as violating the Appointments Clause, requiring Congress to reconstitute the Commission with presidential appointees.

The Line From Buckley To Citizens United Shows Doctrinal Continuity, Not Disruption

Citizens United extended Buckley’s independent expenditure protection to corporations—it did not create something new. The doctrinal progression demonstrates how each major case built directly on Buckley’s framework.

McConnell v. FEC (2003) upheld the McCain-Feingold law’s soft money ban and restrictions on “electioneering communications” by corporations. The 5-4 decision relied partly on Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990), which had created an “antidistortion” rationale allowing restrictions on corporate spending to prevent wealthy corporations from dominating political discourse. This was the one significant departure from Buckley’s framework.

FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life (2007) began eroding McConnell by ruling that BCRA’s restrictions on corporate electioneering communications were unconstitutional as applied to ads that were not “the functional equivalent of express advocacy.” Chief Justice Roberts’ plurality opinion explicitly invoked Buckley: “Buckley itself compelled the conclusion that such tests fall short when it narrowed the statutory language there at issue to cover only advertising that used the magic words of express advocacy.” Justice Scalia’s concurrence noted the decision had effectively overruled McConnell.

Citizens United v. FEC (2010) explicitly built on Buckley’s framework. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion quoted Buckley directly:

“Section 441b’s prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is thus a ban on speech. As a ‘restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign,’ that statute ‘necessarily reduces the quantity of expression.’ Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 19 (1976).”

The Court overruled Austin as an aberration from Buckley’s framework, characterizing the “antidistortion” rationale as incompatible with Buckley’s First Amendment analysis. Under Buckley’s actual framework, the identity of the speaker—individual or corporation—cannot justify restricting political speech. Citizens United was a return to Buckley, not a departure.

SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010) completed the logical chain just two months after Citizens United. The D.C. Circuit unanimously struck down contribution limits to groups making only independent expenditures, creating Super PACs. The reasoning combined Buckley and Citizens United in a syllogism: if unlimited independent expenditures cannot corrupt (Buckley), and this applies regardless of speaker identity (Citizens United), then unlimited contributions to groups making only independent expenditures also cannot corrupt. As the court put it: “In light of the Court’s holding as a matter of law that independent expenditures do not corrupt or create the appearance of corruption, contributions to groups that make only independent expenditures also cannot corrupt.”

Scholars Identify Buckley, Not Citizens United, As The Structural Problem

Legal scholars increasingly argue that Citizens United was doctrinally inevitable given Buckley’s framework—and that meaningful reform requires addressing the 1976 decision.

Burt Neuborne (NYU Law School, Brennan Center Legal Director) argues that Buckley erected “four walls” trapping democracy: the money-equals-speech equation, rejection of political equality as justifying regulation, differential treatment of “direct” versus “indirect” spending, and the assumption that independent spending poses no corruption risk. Together, these created “perfect conditions for a black market in soft money” and made Buckley the “principal architect” of public “uniform abhorrence of the campaign finance system.”

Richard Hasen (UCLA Law School) documented in “The Nine Lives of Buckley v. Valeo” that only three of eight participating Justices agreed with Buckley’s core holdings—it was a “compromise opinion written by a committee.” The contribution/expenditure distinction has been “sharply criticized since its inception,” and both Citizens United and earlier cases “relied upon Buckley”—making it the doctrinal foundation that must be addressed.

Richard Briffault (Columbia Law School) writes that Buckley “produced a campaign finance law that Congress never enacted.” The combination of unlimited spending funded by limited contributions “led directly to our world of endless fundraising, PACs and other fundraising intermediaries, the explosion of independent spending, and the invention of a host of devices—soft money, issue advocacy, Super PACs, dark money.”

Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law School) developed the concept of “dependence corruption”—candidates become dependent on wealthy donors in ways that distort democratic representation even without explicit quid pro quo exchanges. Buckley’s narrow corruption definition excludes this structural distortion from constitutional consideration.

The University of Akron Law Review documented that over 200 constitutional scholars signed a statement calling for reversal of Buckley’s prohibition on spending limits. Attorneys general for 26 states and secretaries of state for 21 states went on record seeking to overturn the ruling.

The Coordination Fiction Enables De Facto Coordination Through Nominally Independent Groups

Buckley’s framework depends on a critical assumption: that “independent” expenditures are actually independent. Coordinated spending can be treated as contributions, but spending made without “prearrangement and coordination” receives full First Amendment protection.

In practice, this coordination requirement has become, as the Campaign Legal Center documents, “frequently an illusion.” Super PACs are “run by individuals who are personally close to a candidate or formerly associated with a campaign.” Candidates appear as “featured guests” at super PAC fundraisers. In 2024, Turning Point Action representatives stated they are “officially a arm of the Trump campaign.”

The FEC has failed to enforce its coordination rules. The Campaign Legal Center reports the agency “has never even fined a super PAC for working hand in glove with a candidate.” In 2024, the FEC issued an opinion allowing campaigns to participate in joint fundraising committees with super PACs and share data for canvassing operations—further eroding any meaningful distinction between campaign and “independent” activity.

This coordination loophole transforms Buckley’s theoretical framework (independent spending cannot corrupt because it lacks strategic value to candidates) into a legal fiction that enables exactly what Buckley claimed to prohibit.

Buckley Constructed The Architecture That Citizens United Furnished

The dark money system flows through constitutional channels that Buckley v. Valeo excavated in 1976. The equation of money with speech, the protection of independent expenditures from any limit, the narrow definition of corruption as explicit quid pro quo, the magic words test creating issue advocacy loopholes, and the coordination concept that separates nominally “independent” spending from candidates—each of these doctrines predates Citizens United by decades.

Citizens United expanded Buckley’s independent expenditure protection to corporations and unions. SpeechNow created Super PACs by applying Buckley’s corruption logic to contributions for independent expenditure groups. But the foundational architecture was built in 1976. As Representative Adam Schiff acknowledged when introducing a constitutional amendment: “Citizens United was one of the most egregious enablers of special interest money, but it was only the latest in a long line of Supreme Court cases that opened the floodgates.”

Meaningful campaign finance reform must grapple with Buckley’s doctrinal foundations. The Democracy for All Amendment, supported by over 40 Democratic senators, would “address the fundamental flaws underlying the Court’s reasoning in that and an entire line of cases dating back to the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision.” Until those foundations are addressed—whether through constitutional amendment, Supreme Court reconsideration, or creative legislative approaches that work within Buckley’s constraints—the architecture of unlimited political spending that the 1976 Court constructed will continue to channel dark money into American elections.

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Sources

Briffault, Richard. “Buckley v. Valeo’s Dubious yet Durable Contribution-Expenditure Distinction.” SSRN, 2024, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5018463

“Buckley v. Valeo.” Federal Election Commission, www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/buckley-v-valeo/

“Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).” FindLaw, http://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court424/

“Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).” Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center, http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/424/1/

“Buckley v. Valeo at 40.” Demos, 2016, www.demos.org/research/buckley-v-valeo-40

“Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010).” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/citizens_united_v.federal_election_commission

“Challenging Buckley v. Valeo: A Legal Strategy.” Akron Law Review, vol. 33, no. 1, 1999, www.uakron.edu/law/lawreview/volumes/v33/docs/wright331.pdf

“Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (1971).” The First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University, http://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/federal-election-campaign-act-of-1971/

“Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. (2007).” The First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University, http://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/federal-election-commission-v-wisconsin-right-to-life-inc/

“FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., 551 U.S. 449 (2007).” Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center, http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/551/449/

“How Watergate and Citizens United Shaped Campaign Finance Law.” Retro Report, http://retroreport.org/transcript/transcript-how-watergate-and-citizens-united-shaped-campaign-finance-law/

“James L. Buckley et al., Appellants, v. Francis R. Valeo, Secretary of the United States Senate, et al.” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/424/1

“SpeechNow.org v. FEC.” Campaign Legal Center, http://campaignlegal.org/cases-actions/speechnoworg-v-fec

“The Anniversary of U.S. v. Nixon Shows Why We Should Restructure the FEC.” Campaign Legal Center, http://campaignlegal.org/update/anniversary-us-v-nixon-shows-why-we-should-restructure-fec

“The Other Watergate Scandal, That Changed Campaign Finance in America.” NPR Planet Money, 2022, www.npr.org/transcripts/1109345948

“Why Limits on Contributions to Super PACs Should Survive Citizens United.” Fordham Law Review, vol. 86, no. 5, 2018, http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol86/iss5/2/

Wright, J. Skelly. “Beyond Citizens United.” Fordham Law Review, 2016, http://fordhamlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/AlmendaresHafer_May.pdf

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

The Math That Terrifies Ideological PACs

Let me show you the one reform that makes professional political operatives lose sleep: ranked-choice voting in open primaries. Not because it’s some democracy-saving miracle cure—it’s not. But because it fundamentally breaks the mathematical model that ideological PACs have perfected.

Here’s the dirty secret: In closed primaries with low turnout, you need about 6-8% of eligible voters to win. That’s it. Six percent. That’s not democracy; that’s a rounding error with legislative power.

Ideological PACs have weaponized this math. They know exactly how many extremist voters they need to mobilize. They know exactly how much it costs per vote. $823 in the Craig Blair case. They know exactly which attacks will suppress turnout among moderates while energizing their base. It’s surgical. It’s effective. And it’s destroying governance.

But here’s what happens when you combine open primaries with ranked-choice voting: their entire playbook catches fire.

The Alaska Experiment Nobody Wants You to Understand

Alaska implemented top-four open primaries with RCV in 2022. The political establishment immediately started lying about what happened. Let me give you the actual data:

Primary turnout jumped to 37%—third highest in the nation. Not 12%. Not 15%. Thirty-seven percent. When you let all voters participate regardless of party registration, people actually show up.

The share of uncontested legislative seats got cut in half. When extremists can’t lock up nominations with 6% of voters, actual competition emerges.

Here’s the part that really matters: Conservative Republican Mike Dunleavy won the governorship. Moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski won the Senate seat. Moderate Democrat Mary Peltola won the House seat. Different candidates, different coalitions, same electorate. The system didn’t favor Democrats or Republicans—it favored candidates who could appeal beyond their base.

You know what it didn’t favor? Ideological purity tests backed by outside money.

Why The Opposition Is So Desperate

Since 2024, eleven states have banned RCV. Not studied it. Not piloted it. Banned it outright. West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma—notice a pattern? These are states where primaries are completely captured by ideological PACs.

The Foundation for Government Accountability—one of those think tanks that exists solely to launder billionaire ideology into policy papers—claims RCV creates “fake majorities” by throwing out ballots. This is weapons-grade gaslighting.

Here’s what actually happens: In traditional primaries, if you get 30% in a five-way race, you win with 30%. Period. The other 70% of voters? Their preferences don’t matter. In RCV, those 70% get to say “if not my first choice, then this person.” That’s not throwing out ballots—that’s actually counting what voters want.

But here’s the real tell: The hysteria isn’t about voter confusion or election integrity. Look at who’s funding the anti-RCV campaigns. It’s the same ideological PACs that have captured closed primaries. Make Liberty Win, Stand For Us PAC, Heritage Action—they’re spending millions to ban RCV because they’ve run the numbers.

The 75% Solution

Unite America Institute found something that should be on every reform billboard in America: In open primaries, ideological PAC money is 75% less effective.

Read that again. Three-quarters of their advantage evaporates when all voters can participate.

In closed primaries, backing from 20 ideological PACs boosts vote share by 9.4 percentage points. In open primaries? 2.4 points. That’s the difference between kingmaking and background noise.

Now add RCV to that equation. Suddenly, you can’t win by just mobilizing extremists. You need second-choice votes from your opponent’s supporters. You can’t run scorched-earth negative campaigns because you might need those voters’ second preferences. The entire strategy of division and demonization that PACs have perfected becomes counterproductive.

The West Virginia Warning

West Virginia banned RCV in 2025. You know who pushed hardest for that ban? The same groups that took out Craig Blair and installed their hand-picked replacements. They saw what happened in Alaska. They did the math. They panicked.

The state that desperately needs electoral reform to break the stranglehold of extremist PACs just made that reform illegal. That’s not coincidence. That’s strategy.

Meanwhile, they’re still running those “voter security” campaigns, but what they’re really securing is their mathematical advantage in low-turnout primaries.

The Independent Problem That’s Actually An Opportunity

Twenty-seven million Americans can’t vote in the primaries that actually decide their representation. These aren’t fringe voters—they’re 33% of the electorate, increasingly young, disproportionately veterans. They’re paying $287 million in taxes to fund elections they’re locked out of.

In 85% of districts with closed primaries, the general election is meaningless. The seat is safe. So when ideological PACs capture the primary with 6% of voters, they’ve captured the seat.

Open primaries with RCV don’t just let independents vote—they fundamentally change what kind of candidate can win. When turnout goes from 12% to 30%, when you need broad appeal instead of base mobilization, when you can’t win with just the extremes, different people run. Different people win. Different policies emerge.

What The Data Actually Shows

Let’s cut through both the reformer propaganda and the establishment fear-mongering:

RCV doesn’t create moderate utopias. Alaska still elected conservatives and progressives. But it elected conservatives and progressives who could build broader coalitions, who couldn’t rely solely on ideological purity.

It doesn’t eliminate negative campaigning. But it changes the calculus. You can attack your opponent, but not so viciously that their supporters won’t rank you second.

It doesn’t end polarization. But Unite America data shows a 20% reduction in legislative polarization scores in Alaska post-2022. That’s not transformation—that’s incremental improvement that actually matters for governance.

Voter confusion? MIT’s studies show error rates comparable to traditional elections after the first use. The “confusion” narrative is manufactured panic from people who benefit from the current system.

The Backlash Machine

Watching the establishment respond to RCV is like watching a parasite realize its host is taking medicine. The panic is immediate, overwhelming, and completely detached from actual voter experience.

In 2022, there were 33 bills supporting RCV nationwide. In 2023? Seventy-four. The response? Seventeen bills to ban it, with 16 coming from Republicans. Not because Republican voters hate it—62% of Alaskans approved after using it—but because the PAC infrastructure that controls Republican primaries knows it’s an existential threat.

The Democratic establishment isn’t exactly thrilled either. Yes, Democrats have introduced more RCV bills, but watch what happens when it threatens incumbent power structures. The resistance crosses party lines because the threat crosses party lines.

The Implementation Problem Nobody Discusses

Here’s where reformers consistently screw up: They pitch RCV as a revolution when it’s actually a technical adjustment that needs careful implementation.

You need voter education that doesn’t sound like condescending civics lessons. You need ballots designed by actual humans, not policy wonks. You need counting systems that don’t take three weeks to determine winners. You need to acknowledge that asking voters to rank candidates is more complex than checking a single box, and complexity has costs.

The reformers pretend these are minor details. The opponents pretend they’re insurmountable obstacles. Both are lying.

The Actual Bottom Line

RCV in open primaries isn’t going to save democracy. It’s not going to end polarization. It’s not going to eliminate money in politics. Anyone selling you those promises is as full of s**t as the people claiming it will destroy elections.

What it will do is break the mathematical model that allows 6% of voters, mobilized by unlimited outside money, to capture entire legislatures. It forces candidates to appeal beyond their base. It makes ideological PAC money less efficient. It lets the fastest-growing segment of voters—independents—actually participate in the elections that matter.

That’s not revolution. That’s reform. Incremental, technical, achievable reform that threatens billions in ideological infrastructure.

Which is exactly why they’re trying to ban it everywhere before voters figure out it works.

The West Virginia Model, Revisited

Remember those PACs that took out Craig Blair? Make Liberty Win, Stand For Us, West Virginia Family Foundation? They’re not just playing defense against RCV—they’re actively spreading their model to states that still allow it.

Their nightmare scenario: A state adopts open primaries with RCV, their hand-picked extremists lose to candidates who can build broader coalitions, and voters realize the sky didn’t fall. Once one red state shows it works, the containment strategy collapses.

That’s why the bans are happening now, before more states can run the experiment. It’s not about voter confusion or election integrity. It’s about preserving a system where $2 million in PAC money can buy a congressional seat through a primary that 94% of eligible voters don’t participate in.

What Happens Next

The smart money is betting against RCV expansion. The forces arrayed against it—both parties’ establishment wings, the ideological PAC infrastructure, the confusion-industrial complex—have more resources and better message discipline than reformers.

But here’s what they can’t control: The mathematical reality that their model depends on voter apathy and restricted participation. Every election cycle, the gap between what voters want and what the 6% deliver gets wider. Every primary season, more incumbent lawmakers get primaried by extremists nobody outside the base actually wants.

Eventually, that tension breaks. The question is whether it breaks toward reform like RCV, toward something more radical, or toward complete democratic collapse where primaries become purely theatrical and all power flows to whoever controls the PAC money.

If you’re betting on the status quo holding, you’re betting that voters will permanently accept being ruled by the preferences of ideological billionaires laundered through low-turnout primaries.

That’s not a bet I’d take. Even with the deck stacked against reform.

One Final Data Point

West Virginia’s ban on RCV passed along party lines. You know who didn’t support it? When actually polled, 58% of West Virginia voters wanted to keep RCV as an option.

But those voters don’t write $2 million checks to primary challengers. So their preferences don’t matter.

That’s the system. RCV threatens it. Which is exactly why—despite all its flaws and complications and overpromises—it might be worth fighting for.

Not because it’s perfect. Because it breaks the part of the machine that’s killing us.

The next article will post after Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving!

Data sources: Unite America Institute, “Not Invited to the Party Primary” (2024); Foundation for Government Accountability, “Myths of RCV” (2024); Bipartisan Policy Center, “Primary Turnout Analysis” (2023); Alaska Division of Elections (2022)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

Cleta Mitchell, the Trump attorney who participated in the notorious January 2, 2021 Georgia phone call, has built a nationwide election infrastructure that transforms election denialism into tangible policy changes through carefully cultivated relationships with state officials like West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner. Their partnership exemplifies how the Conservative Partnership Institute creates "parallel governing infrastructure" that coordinates national strategy with state implementation, turning fringe conspiracy theories about voter fraud into coordinated multi-state campaigns that fundamentally weaken election administration. Mitchell provides the national platform, training materials, legal expertise, and coordination network, while Warner delivers the state-level authority to implement withdrawals from voter roll maintenance systems, purge hundreds of thousands of voters, and influence other states to follow suit. This relationship reveals CPI's sophisticated model for capturing state election administration through what appears to be grassroots activism but is actually a well-funded, centrally coordinated operation that has already dismantled bipartisan election infrastructure across nine Republican-led states.

From Georgia phone call to election infrastructure architect

Cleta Mitchell's transformation from disgraced attorney to influential power broker happened with remarkable speed. On January 5, 2021—just three days after she participated in Trump's call pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" 11,780 votes—Mitchell resigned from her law firm Foley & Lardner under pressure. By March 2021, she had joined the Conservative Partnership Institute as Senior Legal Fellow, earning $231,000 annually. More significantly, she founded and now chairs the Election Integrity Network, which has become the central coordinating body for election denialism translated into state policy.

Mitchell's background uniquely positions her for this role. She began as a Democratic Oklahoma state representative in the 1970s, served as the first woman to chair a state appropriations committee, then underwent a political transformation after her husband's banking fraud conviction, which she blamed on "overreaching government regulation." She switched parties, became a prominent Republican election law attorney representing the NRA, major conservative donors, and Tea Party groups targeted by the IRS. She testified before Congress calling the IRS "corrupt and rotten to the core."

Her 2020 election activities reveal her willingness to push legal boundaries. She filed lawsuits seeking to invalidate Georgia's presidential results, sent Mark Meadows 1,800 pages of documents purporting to show fraud (later debunked), contacted John Eastman to engineer legal arguments challenging electoral certification, and made false claims during the January 2 call about voters who had "moved out of state." The Fulton County grand jury unanimously recommended her indictment for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, though she was never charged.

What distinguishes Mitchell from other election deniers is her institutional infrastructure-building capacity. She doesn't just spread conspiracy theories—she creates the organizational machinery to implement them. She serves on the Bradley Foundation board (which has spent roughly $18 million on election fraud conspiracy efforts since she joined in 2012), chairs the Public Interest Legal Foundation, belongs to the Council for National Policy's Board of Governors, and briefly served on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors until public outcry forced her resignation in November 2023.

Building the Election Integrity Network as CPI's state takeover mechanism

Mitchell founded the Election Integrity Network in January 2021, weeks after the January 6 insurrection. As Marshall Yates, EIN's executive director, explicitly stated at an October 2022 summit: "We're all here because of what happened in 2020... the election objection did not go as we wanted on January 6." The organization was originally housed within CPI before splitting into an independent 501(c)(4) in 2022, allowing greater flexibility for political activity while CPI maintained its 501(c)(3) status.

The funding flows reveal tight integration with the broader CPI ecosystem. In 2022, EIN received exactly two contributions totaling $753,255: $525,000 from CPI and $228,200 from Citizens for Renewing America (another CPI-affiliated organization). Trump's Save America PAC donated $1 million to CPI in July 2021, weeks after the House established the January 6 committee. Major donor Mike Rydin gave CPI $25 million in 2021. This influx transformed CPI from a $7.3 million operation in 2020 to a $45.7 million powerhouse in 2021, with the broader CPI network raising nearly $200 million by 2022.

EIN's operational structure demonstrates sophisticated organizing capacity. In 2022 alone, Mitchell's network conducted statewide summits in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Mexico. These weren't typical conferences—they were multi-day training sessions teaching activists to interrogate local election offices, file FOIA requests, challenge voter registrations, recruit poll workers, and document alleged irregularities. Each summit launched "permanent election integrity coalitions" in partnership with Tea Party Patriots, Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, and Turning Point USA.

The training materials reveal the strategic sophistication. EIN's 19-page "Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure," distributed at a December 2021 ALEC meeting, instructs activists to research local election officials and classify them as "friend or foe." The guide details how to create state and local task forces, work with local GOP organizations, and build permanent workforces of election challengers. EIN's website offers a 21-lesson masterclass covering everything from becoming an election worker to "get knee deep in voting by mail" to understanding the role of USPS in elections.

Mitchell coordinates this infrastructure through multiple channels. Her weekly "Who's Counting?" podcast provides a platform for state officials, activists, and conspiracy theorists—NPR called it "a central hub for stolen election narratives." She runs weekly Friday coordination calls with "election integrity leaders from across the country." She organizes private conference calls on voter roll challenges attended by 100+ activists from at least 15 states. She leads National Working Groups via Zoom on topics like "Citizens Only in American Politics and Voting," "Banning Third-Party Election Interference," and "Voter Roll Maintenance."

The RNC coordination is explicit. Josh Findlay, RNC National Director for Election Integrity, stated at a leaked March 2022 Pennsylvania summit: "Cleta Mitchell, she's like the best election and election law expert out here. We're not going to tell her what to do. But hopefully we can provide some infrastructure and some muscle." Andrea Raffle, RNC director for Pennsylvania, discussed connecting election workers to the RNC "war room." This represents clear coordination between a supposedly nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization and the Republican Party—activity that tax law experts say could jeopardize CPI's tax-exempt status.

The Mitchell-Warner collaboration: Timeline and documentation

The relationship between Cleta Mitchell and Mac Warner demonstrates how national coordination translates into state policy changes. The partnership began in 2021 when Mitchell met Warner after he testified before the US Senate Rules Committee against HR 1/S 1 (the For the People Act). Mitchell praised his "powerful testimony" as "sobering" and called Warner "indeed, honorable," "a true American patriot and hero," and "a leader among his peers serving in the highest level of election administration circles in the country."

January 2022: First major platform. Warner appeared on Mitchell's "Who's Counting?" podcast for an extended interview discussing federal election legislation and his opposition to what he characterized as federal takeover of elections. This early podcast appearance established Warner as an "election integrity" leader within Mitchell's national network and gave him credibility with conservative activists nationwide.

June 17, 2022: The critical coordination meeting. Mitchell convened a secret four-hour summit at CPI headquarters bringing together Republican Secretaries of State or their representatives from Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Heather Honey—a Pennsylvania-based "open-source investigator" who had worked on the Arizona audit and is closely associated with Mitchell—presented a 29-page report calling ERIC "a threat to election integrity." On the same day as this summit, Honey spoke with Donald Kersey, Warner's general counsel, regarding concerns about ERIC data sharing. The coordination was explicit: Mitchell's organization paid for at least some officials' travel and lodging to attend.

This meeting proved pivotal. As NPR's investigation concluded, Mitchell and her network were "central in the effort to discredit and dismantle ERIC." The first five states to withdraw from ERIC all had representatives at this June 2022 meeting. Jim Womack, head of North Carolina's Election Integrity Team and a regular Mitchell collaborator, also attended.

March 2023: The coordinated withdrawal. In early March 2023, Warner appeared on Mitchell's podcast again for an episode titled "Mac Warner: Turning Over The Rocks of Election Integrity's Critical Infrastructure." They discussed federal agency bias, "disinformation about election security," and Warner's work removing 365,000 names from West Virginia's voter rolls. CPI's press release noted the episode was recorded "just a few days" before Warner's announcement.

On March 6, 2023, West Virginia withdrew from ERIC in a coordinated announcement with Florida and Missouri—all three states announced the same day, citing each other's decisions. Warner's public statement echoed the talking points developed at Mitchell's June 2022 summit, calling ERIC an organization with "opportunity for partisanship" and questioning third-party influences. Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft's press release was titled "Ashcroft Leads Missouri, Florida and West Virginia Out of ERIC," emphasizing the coordination. Gateway Pundit, which had published the initial false claims about ERIC in January 2022, was pre-notified of the announcements.

Days after the March 6 withdrawals, Warner participated in an "Election Integrity Leaders" call with Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd and Virginia Commissioner of Elections Susan Beals, further coordinating the multi-state campaign.

May 2023: Active coordination on ERIC alternatives. Warner spoke at a convening of the Voter Rolls National Working Group hosted by Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP), where Mitchell's EIN was being partially folded. Warner shared West Virginia's steps for maintaining voter roll accuracy post-ERIC. The same week, Warner and his general counsel presented at a webinar hosted by EIN and the Virginia Fair Elections coalition, moderated by Hayden Ludwig of Restoration of America, discussing "what WV is doing to clean their voter rolls in their post-ERIC world."

On May 19, 2023—approximately one week after Warner's working group presentation—Mitchell directly emailed Warner's general counsel Donald Kersey and Chief of Staff Chuck Flannery with a specific request: "You made reference last week to some databases that your office and clerks used in your efforts to clean voter rolls. Do you mind sending me those databases and any information about them, so I can forward them to the National Working Group on Voter Rolls?" This email, obtained through public records requests by American Oversight, reveals Mitchell directly seeking access to West Virginia's voter databases to share with her national network, demonstrating that Warner's methods were being packaged and distributed to other states considering ERIC withdrawal.

Also in May 2023, Virginia withdrew from ERIC. Days later, Warner emailed Virginia Commissioner Susan Beals: "Susan, first congratulations on your departure from Eric. I've got another situation I'd like to run by you when you have a moment." This shows Warner actively congratulating and coordinating with other officials who left ERIC, serving as an encourager and validator for the coordinated withdrawal campaign.

June 2023: Continued coordination on alternatives. Julia Hecht from EIN emailed Donald Kersey mentioning that Kersey had requested a handout shared with VIPP's voter rolls working group by Rick Richards, founder of EagleAI. Hecht sent Kersey a copy of the handout and a recording of a meeting between VIPP, EIN representatives, and EagleAI. This coordination is particularly significant because EagleAI—a software tool for identifying alleged "voter fraud" that Georgia's Elections Director called inaccurate due to high false positive rates—is being promoted as an ERIC alternative. The nonprofit Valid Vote, which supports EagleAI, was formed by Compass Legal Group, a firm associated with Mitchell.

May 11, 2023: Third podcast appearance. Warner appeared on Mitchell's podcast for a 41-minute episode titled "MAC WARNER CALLS ON SECRETARY OF STATE TONY BLINKEN TO RESIGN," further cementing his role as a voice for election conspiracy theories within Mitchell's network.

Throughout this documented collaboration, Mitchell publicly praised Warner effusively. She told The Federalist in 2024: "He speaks the truth — he is a true patriot and I only wish we had 50 state election officials just like him." She called Warner "a national hero and a treasure."

How the Mitchell-Warner partnership influenced the multi-state ERIC exodus

The ERIC withdrawal campaign represents Mitchell's most significant policy achievement and reveals how the Warner partnership fit into a broader coordinated strategy. Before the campaign began, ERIC included 32 member states plus DC—a bipartisan partnership formed in 2012 by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (a conservative) and supported by Pew Charitable Trusts. ERIC helped states identify outdated voter registrations by cross-referencing motor vehicle and Social Security death records across state lines, detect double voting, and identify eligible but unregistered citizens.

The campaign followed a clear pattern. Phase 1 began in January 2022 when Gateway Pundit published false articles claiming ERIC was funded by George Soros and represented a "left-wing conspiracy." NPR's analysis found ERIC mentions on far-right social media exploded only after Gateway Pundit's coverage. Seven days later, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced suspension of ERIC membership—the first withdrawal.

Phase 2 involved Mitchell's infrastructure building. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen campaigned on withdrawing from ERIC in 2022. Mitchell organized her June 17, 2022 secret summit bringing together officials from the states that would withdraw. Heather Honey's anti-ERIC report circulated through conservative networks. Local EIN chapters in Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, and other states began organizing pressure campaigns on state legislators, with materials like Michigan EIN's "How to Discuss ERIC with Your State Legislator" guide and Florida's "top 10 reasons to get out of ERIC" fact sheet.

Phase 3 saw the coordinated March 6, 2023 mass withdrawal. Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia announced simultaneously, with statements cross-referencing each other's decisions. Alabama had already withdrawn in January 2023 when Allen took office. Within 11 days, Ohio and Iowa followed despite their Secretaries of State having previously called ERIC "one of the best fraud-fighting tools" (Ohio's Frank LaRose) and "a godsend" (Iowa's Paul Pate).

Phase 4 completed the cascade with Virginia's withdrawal in May 2023 (with Warner congratulating them) and Texas in July 2023. By the end, nine Republican-led states had withdrawn from what had been a 32-state bipartisan partnership.

Warner's role was that of enthusiastic collaborator and validator rather than independent originator. His value to Mitchell's campaign was threefold. First, as a West Point graduate and military veteran with an image of integrity, Warner provided credibility for conspiracy theories about ERIC. Second, his willingness to testify before the US Senate and appear repeatedly on Mitchell's podcast gave him a national platform to influence other officials. Third, his coordination of 54 of 55 West Virginia county clerks to oppose federal election legislation (HR 1/S 1) demonstrated his ability to mobilize local officials—a model Mitchell wanted to replicate nationwide.

The common talking points across all withdrawing states reveal coordination. Every state cited "partisanship," "data privacy concerns," and "Soros connections"—all false or misleading claims developed in Honey's report and amplified through Mitchell's network. Missouri staff had privately called Gateway Pundit articles "horrible and misleading" and said they were "glad to be part of ERIC," yet the state withdrew anyway. Ohio's deputy director told colleagues "I really worked as hard as I possibly could to avoid this," suggesting external pressure overcame internal assessments. American Oversight's analysis concluded: "Documents show how election officials defended ERIC behind the scenes while publicly caving to a pressure campaign led by some of the same people who sought to keep Trump in power in 2020."

The consequences have been significant. According to a December 2023 Votebeat report, "Nine Republican states that have left ERIC are struggling to find a suitable replacement." States lost their primary tool for detecting cross-state double voting, have less accurate voter rolls, face higher costs for maintaining data, and have rushed into inadequate bilateral agreements. Georgia's Elections Director called EagleAI—one Mitchell-promoted alternative—inaccurate due to high false positive rates. Former Utah county clerk Josh Daniels mockingly summarized the absurdity: "These states have decided that instead of using a wheel, they're going to invent a spherical device that will allow them to easily transport and roll items from A to B."

Mitchell's broader influence within the CPI ecosystem beyond EIN

Mitchell's role extends far beyond the Election Integrity Network. She serves as CPI Board Secretary, one of the key officers alongside Jim DeMint (Chairman, $545,000 salary), Ed Corrigan (President/CEO, $382,000), and Mark Meadows (Senior Partner, $559,000). This positioning gives her influence over CPI's broader strategic direction.

CPI has grown explosively under Meadows' leadership, from $7.3 million in revenue in 2020 to $45.7 million in 2021, with the broader CPI network raising nearly $200 million by 2022. The organization has purchased $41 million in properties near the Capitol to create "Patriot's Row"—a conservative campus where the House Freedom Caucus and Senate Republican Steering Committee meet weekly. CPI also acquired a 2,200-acre compound in Cambridge, Maryland for training events, "researcher bootcamps," and "legislative director retreats."

Mitchell trains congressional staffers through CPI, which hosted at least four trainings in 2022 exclusively for House Freedom Caucus members and staff on topics including "election integrity," "effective research into Presidential appointees," and "proper oversight." She coordinates with CPI's network of approximately 24 affiliated organizations sharing CPI's Capitol Hill address or close financial ties, including America First Legal (Stephen Miller), Center for Renewing America (Russ Vought), American Accountability Foundation (opposition research on federal employees), State Freedom Caucus Network (replicating the House Freedom Caucus in state legislatures), and American Moment (cultivating conservative staffers).

The media infrastructure reveals CPI's sophistication. CPI maintains a production studio that films content for Newsmax and PragerU, and hosts podcasts for The Federalist, Representatives Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs, and of course Mitchell's "Who's Counting?" This allows the network to create and amplify its own narratives without relying on mainstream media.

Mitchell's board memberships multiply her influence. As a Bradley Foundation board member since 2012, she has overseen approximately $18 million in spending on election fraud conspiracy groups, including major funding to Heritage Foundation, ALEC, Federalist Society, Honest Elections Project, FreedomWorks, True the Vote, and Turning Point USA. Bradley gave CPI $200,000-$300,000 over multiple years and funded VIPP's Virginia Fair Elections project that served as Mitchell's original model. As Council for National Policy Board of Governors member, Mitchell participates in secretive meetings where conservative strategies are incubated before being promoted publicly. As chairman and co-founder of Public Interest Legal Foundation, she directs an organization focused on purging voter rolls, with John Eastman serving on the board.

Mitchell's strategic coordination across this ecosystem is evident in her ALEC work. In 2019, she told an ALEC session they should "treat redistricting as 'political adult blood sport'" and advised legislators on "how to gerrymander." In December 2024, Mitchell led an ALEC panel urging state lawmakers to fight legislation protecting election workers from threats, with EIN's Sharon Bemis claiming the threat environment was "overblown by the media"—this despite documented harassment that drove the Fairfax County registrar to resign.

Warner's strategic value to Mitchell's national election integrity strategy

Warner provides Mitchell with multiple strategic assets. First, military credibility: As a West Point graduate, Army JAG Corps veteran with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and recipient of the Bronze Star, Warner offers biographical credentials that make election conspiracy theories more palatable to mainstream audiences. Mitchell leveraged this repeatedly, introducing Warner as "a true American patriot and hero" and holding him up as proof that "good governance is possible."

Second, state-level implementation authority: Unlike activists or commentators, Warner has actual power to change election administration. He withdrew West Virginia from ERIC, removed 365,000+ names from voter rolls (in a state with only 1.8 million residents), coordinated 54 of 55 county clerks to oppose federal legislation, and created a "See Something, Text Something" program making "every citizen an extension of our investigative unit." These concrete actions provide proof-of-concept for Mitchell's theories about how states can resist federal election standards.

Third, influence with other election officials: Warner testified before the US Senate Rules Committee, participated in coordination calls with Florida and Virginia election officials, congratulated Virginia's commissioner on leaving ERIC, and shared West Virginia's post-ERIC methods at Mitchell's working groups. His willingness to collaborate publicly with Mitchell's network gave cover to other officials considering similar actions. When a sitting Secretary of State endorses leaving ERIC, it legitimizes the decision in ways that activists alone cannot achieve.

Fourth, amplification of federal conspiracy theories: Warner distinguishes himself as "the only current sitting secretary of state to publicly embrace Trump's false claims that the election was stolen," according to Route Fifty. At the February 2024 National Association of Secretaries of State meeting, Warner alleged the CIA and FBI "covered up" stories that would have prevented Trump from winning—an extraordinary claim from a sitting election official. These statements, amplified through Mitchell's podcast and CPI's media infrastructure, mainstreamed conspiracy theories that would otherwise remain fringe.

Fifth, electoral political integration: Warner ran for Governor in the 2024 Republican primary (he lost), receiving an endorsement from Lt. General Michael Flynn citing "Secretary Warner's work on election integrity and security has set the example for what is needed right now across this entire country." Flynn—a key figure in post-2020 election denial—explicitly connected Warner's election administration work to broader MAGA movement goals. Warner did not recuse himself from administering the election in which he was a candidate, demonstrating the partisan nature of his office.

Mitchell described Warner to The Federalist as someone who "speaks the truth" and "a national hero and a treasure," stating "I only wish we had 50 state election officials just like him." This reveals Mitchell's strategic vision: replicating the Warner model across all states would mean 50 Secretaries of State willing to withdraw from bipartisan election infrastructure, purge voter rolls aggressively, coordinate with conservative activists, testify against federal election standards, and embrace election conspiracy theories while maintaining an image of military-backed integrity.

Documentation of specific joint appearances and coordinated activities

Beyond the podcast appearances and coordination meetings already detailed, Mitchell and Warner's collaboration involved multiple formats and venues demonstrating sustained partnership.

The June 2022 anti-ERIC briefing was the most consequential coordination meeting. Held at CPI's headquarters in Washington, DC, the four-hour event brought together election officials from states that would collectively dismantle ERIC over the following year. Heather Honey's presentation provided the intellectual justification, but Mitchell's convening power—bringing together secretaries of state, paying for travel and lodging, and creating a private forum where officials could coordinate—was the critical infrastructure. American Oversight obtained emails and agendas documenting the meeting through public records litigation.

The February 14-15, 2023 Heritage Foundation Secretaries of State Conference demonstrated how Mitchell's network extends beyond CPI into the broader conservative ecosystem. Warner attended the two-day conference in Washington, DC, co-hosted by Heritage Foundation, Honest Elections Project, and Public Interest Legal Foundation (which Mitchell chairs). The agenda included sessions on "Realistic ERIC fixes and reforms" and "mapping the opposition." Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd—who had appeared on Mitchell's podcast and participated in the March 6, 2023 coordinated ERIC withdrawal—also attended. The Guardian criticized the conference as a secretive gathering to push election denialism.

The Voter Rolls National Working Group meeting in mid-May 2023, hosted by VIPP, represents how Mitchell created permanent infrastructure for coordination. Warner's presentation on West Virginia's post-ERIC voter roll maintenance methods became a blueprint distributed to other states. The webinar that same week—with Warner, his general counsel, and EIN representatives presenting on post-ERIC strategies—formalized the knowledge transfer from state implementation to national network.

Mitchell's subsequent email requesting West Virginia's voter databases "to forward them to the National Working Group on Voter Rolls" shows the coordination loop: Warner implements a strategy, shares it at Mitchell's events, and Mitchell then packages it for distribution to election officials and activists in other states. This creates a self-reinforcing system where successful state-level actions become templates for national replication.

The "Election Integrity Leaders" call in late March 2023, bringing together Warner, Florida's Byrd, and Virginia's Beals, demonstrates peer-to-peer coordination among state officials facilitated by Mitchell's network. These weren't formal government coordination—they were organized through Mitchell's private infrastructure, allowing officials to align strategies without public accountability or transparency.

Warner's third podcast appearance in May 2023 calling for Secretary of State Tony Blinken's resignation further demonstrated his willingness to make increasingly extreme public statements amplified through Mitchell's platform. Each podcast appearance built Warner's profile within the conservative movement while reinforcing Mitchell's positioning as the central coordinator of election integrity efforts.

The coordination extended to materials and alternatives. When Warner's office received EagleAI materials from EIN in June 2023, it revealed how Mitchell's network promotes specific alternatives to the infrastructure they dismantle. EagleAI, despite concerns about accuracy, becomes the recommended replacement for ERIC—another Mitchell-connected tool that her network can influence and that creates opportunities for voter challenges based on unreliable data.

The Mitchell-Warner partnership as exemplar of CPI's broader strategy

The Conservative Partnership Institute has pioneered what The New Yorker called "an alternative, fully self-sufficient ecosystem" for the right. Jonathan Blitzer's July 2024 investigation concluded CPI is "maybe the most influential group in Washington that you've never heard of" and represents "the next Trump Administration 'in waiting.'" Unlike traditional think tanks like Heritage Foundation or American Enterprise Institute, CPI is "an incubator and an activist hub that funds other organizations," creating permanent infrastructure rather than just producing policy papers.

The Mitchell-Warner model exemplifies CPI's three-tier strategy for capturing state election administration. Tier 1 is national coordination, with Mitchell providing training materials (the 19-page "Citizens Guide"), hosting statewide summits in battleground states, offering strategic and legal expertise, creating communication channels (podcast, working groups, coordination calls), and developing unified messaging. Tier 2 is state-level coalitions built in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico, integrating Tea Party Patriots, Heritage Action, Turning Point USA, state-specific groups, and coordination with GOP officials and RNC state directors. Tier 3 is local activist mobilization, recruiting poll watchers and election workers, monitoring election offices with FOIA requests, challenging voter registrations, and classifying officials as "friend or foe."

This structure creates what appears to be grassroots activism but is actually centrally coordinated. As Documented's investigation noted: "Rarely, if ever, do these activists disclose that they are mobilizing as part of a national effort." Local activists demanding their state leave ERIC don't mention they received talking points from Mitchell's network, attended training sessions organized by CPI-funded groups, or are implementing a strategy coordinated across multiple states. The appearance of spontaneous local concern provides political cover for officials like Warner to claim they're responding to constituent pressure when they're actually implementing a national strategy.

The "Virginia Model" pioneered this approach. Mitchell's network claimed to train 4,500 poll watchers and election workers, organize 18 local task forces, and cover 85% of polling locations on Election Day 2021 plus 45 days of early voting in Virginia. The Bradley Foundation provided $125,000 to VIPP to support the "Virginia Fair Elections project" that served as the template. The result was aggressive: Fairfax County registrar Scott Konopasek resigned, citing EIN coalition disruption. Konopasek described the activists: "Everything they saw that they didn't understand was fraud in their minds... It was always accusatory." Marshall Yates boasted at an October 2022 summit: "Fairfax County ran their registrar out" and "we've had numbers of [election officials] fired across the country"—celebrating harassment as a strategic success.

CPI's State Freedom Caucus Network provides legislative muscle in parallel to EIN's administrative pressure. Founded in December 2021, the network now operates in 12-13 states with 175+ state legislators as members. These caucuses introduce legislation aligned with EIN priorities: restricting mail-in voting, removing ballot drop boxes, enabling voter roll challenges, withdrawing from ERIC. In Missouri, the Freedom Caucus created legislative gridlock resulting in the fewest bills passed in 30 years. The combination of activist pressure from below (EIN), legislative pressure from above (State Freedom Caucuses), and administrative coordination through officials like Warner creates overwhelming momentum for policy changes that weaken election administration.

The financial architecture enables sustainability. CPI raised $45.7 million in 2021 and distributed funds throughout its network: $525,000 to EIN, $228,200 from affiliated Citizens for Renewing America to EIN, grants to state-level organizations like VIPP, funding for legal defense through Personnel Policy Operations ($1.15 million in 2022), and support for 24 affiliated organizations sharing CPI's address or close financial ties. Major foundations like Bradley ($850 million endowment, Mitchell on board) provide ongoing funding to multiple network organizations simultaneously, creating redundancy and resilience. Dark money flows through Donors Trust, which Mother Jones called "the dark-money ATM of the right," allowing wealthy donors to fund politically controversial activities while remaining anonymous.

The legal structure provides protection. CPI maintains 501(c)(3) status for tax-deductible donations and "educational" activities like training and summits. EIN split into a separate 501(c)(4) allowing explicit political advocacy and coordination with candidates. Other affiliated organizations handle opposition research, legal defense, and direct candidate support. This distributed structure makes it difficult to challenge any single organization while allowing the network to function as an integrated whole. When NPR investigated CPI's apparent coordination with the Republican Party—activity that could jeopardize 501(c)(3) status—CPI simply deleted all its tweets before March 2022.

The personnel infrastructure extends beyond election administration. CPI maintains a database of vetted "America First" staffers for placement in congressional offices and future administrations. As Axios reported in July 2022, CPI expected to "wield substantial influence on makeup of a potential second-term Trump administration," with Ed Corrigan noting: "In 2024 if Trump is the nominee, it gives you a huge advantage in that you know the kind of people that Trump's going to want to pick." Multiple CPI figures were appointed to Project 2025 roles (Russell Vought, Ed Corrigan, Stephen Miller), demonstrating how CPI functions as a personnel pipeline for authoritarian policy implementation.

The physical infrastructure creates permanence. CPI purchased $41 million in properties near the Capitol through shell companies (LLCs) to create "Patriot's Row"—a conservative campus where House Freedom Caucus and Senate Republican Steering Committee hold weekly meetings. The 2,200-acre Maryland compound hosts multi-day training events away from public scrutiny. The media production studio creates content for Newsmax, PragerU, The Federalist, and Member of Congress podcasts, building an alternative media ecosystem. This infrastructure survives election cycles and individual politicians, creating institutional capacity that traditional campaigns lack.

Mitchell's role in this ecosystem is that of architect and coordinator. She doesn't just lead EIN—she sits on CPI's board, chairs PILF, serves on Bradley Foundation's board, belongs to CNP's Board of Governors, trains congressional staff, coordinates with ALEC, works with Heritage Foundation, and maintains relationships with dozens of state-level operatives. This positioning allows her to identify successful tactics in one arena and replicate them across others, coordinate messaging across organizations, connect funders with implementers, protect activists from consequences through legal defense funds, and scale local successes into national campaigns.

The Mitchell-Warner partnership demonstrates how this ecosystem converts national coordination into state policy. Warner provides legitimate authority as an elected official. Mitchell provides platform amplification, training resources, coordination with other states, legal and strategic guidance, and connection to funding networks. Together they accomplish what neither could alone: dismantling bipartisan election infrastructure, purging voter rolls, mainstreaming conspiracy theories, and influencing other states to follow suit—all while maintaining an appearance of independent state action responding to local concerns.

As The New Yorker's investigation concluded about CPI's strategy: "The goal is 'de-risking public service on the right' via financial and legal support." This means building infrastructure where conservative officials can implement increasingly authoritarian policies without facing professional or personal consequences. When Warner makes false claims about CIA/FBI election interference, Mitchell's network provides validation. When Warner purges hundreds of thousands of voters, EIN holds him up as a model. When Warner faces criticism for administering an election in which he was a candidate, CPI's ecosystem provides defensive messaging and alternative media amplification.

This represents a fundamental transformation in how policy change happens. Traditional models involve legislators responding to constituents, agencies implementing laws, and courts adjudicating disputes. CPI's model creates parallel infrastructure that circumvents these democratic processes through coordinated pressure campaigns that appear grassroots but are nationally orchestrated, legal organizations that challenge election administration while claiming nonpartisanship, media ecosystems that amplify conspiracy theories while dismissing factual reporting, training programs that convert activists into poll workers with authority over elections, and coordination networks that allow officials to implement changes simultaneously across multiple states while maintaining plausible deniability about coordination.

The ultimate goal, as Marshall Yates explicitly stated, is forcing election officials out: "Fairfax County ran their registrar out" and "we've had numbers of [election officials] fired across the country." Replace professional election administrators with partisans, dismantle bipartisan infrastructure like ERIC, create opportunities for challenges through unreliable tools like EagleAI, restrict voting access through legislative changes, and position compliant officials like Warner to implement these changes while claiming to protect election integrity. The irony is profound: an organization created because "the election objection did not go as we wanted on January 6" claims to protect election integrity while systematically dismantling the infrastructure that actually ensures accurate elections.

The Mitchell-Warner partnership is not an outlier—it's the template. Mitchell told The Federalist she wishes for "50 state election officials just like" Warner. CPI's infrastructure is designed to make that vision achievable through sustained investment in state-level organizing, coordination across multiple states simultaneously, legal and financial protection for compliant officials, media amplification of successful examples, and replication of proven tactics. The ERIC withdrawal campaign succeeded in nine states within 18 months. The Virginia model has been adapted in ten states. The State Freedom Caucus Network operates in twelve states with 175 members. This is how minority-supported policies become reality despite public opposition—through infrastructure, coordination, persistence, and the systematic capture of administrative authority.

The partnership reveals that election denialism is not primarily about belief—it's about power. Warner likely understands that his claims about CIA election interference are false, that ERIC was effective and nonpartisan, that his voter roll purges disproportionately affect legitimate voters. But these tactics serve strategic purposes: energizing the MAGA base, obtaining conservative movement credibility, building relationships with national figures like Mitchell and Flynn, and positioning himself for higher office or post-government opportunities within the conservative ecosystem. Mitchell knows she's not building election integrity—she's building the infrastructure to contest future elections she doesn't win. The name "Election Integrity Network" is Orwellian: it describes the opposite of the organization's actual function, which is weakening election integrity while claiming to protect it.

CPI's sophistication lies in recognizing that lasting power requires infrastructure, not just candidates. Movements need training programs, funding pipelines, legal defense, media ecosystems, coordination networks, physical spaces, personnel databases, and multi-state strategies. The Conservative Partnership Institute has built all of this, with Mitchell's Election Integrity Network as its election administration arm and Warner as a key validator and implementer. This infrastructure will outlast Trump, survive electoral defeats, and continue pushing American democracy toward authoritarianism through the patient work of capturing state-level election administration one Secretary of State, one county clerk, one election board member at a time.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

Season 1

* Article 1 - Welcome To Permanent Campaign Mode

* Article 2 - THE PLAYBOOK: A Torrent of Propaganda

* Article 3 - The PAC Problem: How Ideological Kingmakers Took Over Primaries

* Article 4 - How West Virginia Policy Actually Gets Made and Why Understanding this Machinery Matters

* Article 5 - Cleta Mitchell and Mac Warner: A Case Study in Conservative Partnership Institute‘s State Election Takeover Strategy

* Article 6 - The Ranked Choice Voting Gambit - Why Extremists Fear Ranked Ballots

* Article 7 - Buckley v. Valeo: The 1976 Decision That Built America’s Dark Money Architecture

* Article 8 - We Want Your Vote, Just Not Your Voice

* Article 9 - When Silicon Valley Meets Appalachia: The Systematic Failure of Campaign Technology in Rural America

AUDIO ONLY

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com