In a West Virginia district that's been Republican for 20 years and Trump carried with 68% of the vote, environmental activist Cathy Kunkel is running on a progressive platform including Medicare for All. She might even win. She joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don't forget there's a donate button at the top of the webpage.

Across the country, in numbers not seen before, progressive candidates are running for office in this election. Many have never run for office before and many are women. And one of them is Cathy Kunkel. She's the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 2nd district of West Virginia. That's a district that's been a Republican bastion for 20 years. As an energy policy expert, Cathy has testified before the West Virginia Public Service Commission and lobbied the legislature to defeat corporate bailouts for electric utilities, defend the state's rooftop solar laws and strengthen energy efficiency programs.

She's also co-founded Advocates for a Safer Water System, a community organization that fought for three years to win improvements to the safety of the drinking water after a chemical spill contaminated the water supply for the Charleston area in 2014. 

Cathy is running for Congress as part of West Virginia Can't Wait, a coalition of dozens of West Virginia candidates who have pledged not to take corporate money in their campaigns. And she moved to West Virginia around ten years ago, if I have it correctly, to do just this: to organize on environmental issues.

And here she is now running for Congress. And not only that, here she is on our podcast. Thanks for joining us, Cathy.

Cathy Kunkel

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here, Paul.

Paul Jay

So, let me ask you the obvious question to start with, and then we can get into some of the issues: why the heck are you running in a district that has been a Republican stronghold for at least 20 years? In fact, if I understand it correctly, no Democrat even wanted to run in this district. Like, you just said, OK, I'll do it. And it was an uncontested primary, and I assume uncontested because no other Democrat thought they could win. And, lo and behold, here comes the pandemic -- and you actually could win this thing.

Cathy Kunkel

It's a pretty crazy story. You know, like you said, I moved to West Virginia a decade ago. Certainly, when I moved here I had no intention of ever running for Congress here in the 2nd congressional district or anywhere else, quite frankly. 

But I have been very involved in community and environmental issues here over the last decade. And I've just been frustrated more and more by the lack of political leadership on energy and economic transition issues here in West Virginia. You know, we're a state that's been dominated by extractive industry, by the coal and gas industries, for decades. And we've perpetually been one of the poorest states in the country. 

Now that the coal industry has been collapsing here for the last decade and going from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, our political leaders from both parties, frankly, just keep making empty political promises about...