By Bradley Devlin, The Daily Signal | December 05, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election marked the first time in 20 years that a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote in addition to the electoral vote.
The commanding fashion of Trump’s historic comeback was further proof that the political realignment Trump started nearly a decade ago—transforming the Republican Party into the party of the working class—is being further cemented.
And it’s no surprise, then, that victors of down-ballot elections are increasingly representing the coalition that now makes up the Republican base. Rep.-elect Riley Moore, R-W.Va., is a perfect example, and he joined me on this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.”
Now that the GOP has rebranded itself as a multiracial, working-class party, our conversation particularly focuses on how Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C., can deliver for their supporters.
“People don’t want to monkey around,” Moore said of the incoming Congress. “They don’t want to horse around on any of this stuff. They just want to go. President Trump has got the mandate, and President Trump has got the vision, and that’s what we’re going to work on.”
This vision is not only important to the president, but to the American people who, for the first time since President Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, have sent a former president back to the White House.
Though Moore will be a freshman member of Congress, he has experience delivering policy victories for a constituency made of working-class voters as the state treasurer of West Virginia.
The Mountain State, which voted 70% for Trump in the 2024 election, is a good encapsulation of the ethos that propelled Trump to the forefront of American politics. His Make America Great Again movement has always felt more like West Virginia than Texas, and for good reason, as West Virginians have shouldered much of the burden for Washington’s globalist immigration, trade, and foreign policies.
“We’re tired of being lied to, and we’re tired of being taken advantage of,” Moore said of West Virginians. “I mean, we mine the coal that forged the steel that built the buildings, that built the airplanes and the warships and the rails and everything else that built the United States.”
“And what do we get?” Moore added. “An opioid crisis and destroying our coal industry.”
For too long, Washington, D.C., has had a “total disregard for the feelings of the people of West Virginia,” Moore told me.
“It dates back to [the North American Free Trade Agreement], particularly in my district—northern panhandle specifically would be a great example—where we do a lot of steel manufacturing,” Moore explained. “We had tens of thousands of people working in that industry, obviously. That’s not the case now due to globalization and offshoring and dumping of cheap steel, which, for some reason, people of this town have allowed to happen for successive decades. Letting China into the World Trade Organization, most favored nation status, and all these other things piled on top of it that has really crushed a state like West Virginia.”
Fast-forward to President Barack Obama’s tenure, and the destruction accelerated. Due to what Moore calls “environmental extremism,” West Virginia “lost 30,000 coal mining jobs in just a few years due to the Obama administration.”
The continued leftward lurch of economic policies from both public and private institutions has only compounded some of West Virginia’s woes.
“We had coal operators coming to me saying, ‘I’m losing access to capital. We can’t finance our stuff. No one will bank with us. We’re getting debanked all over the place,’” said Moore, adding: “This [environmental, social, and governance] movement that was destroying West Virginia.”
West Virginia responded by chasing out as many ESG-promoting financial institutions from the state as possible, particularly by divesting West Virginia taxpayer dollars from companies like BlackRock.
“The working class in West Virginia was like, ‘Yes! Thank you for doing this: fighting for our jobs, fighting for our economy, fighting for our way of life,’” Moore said.
Moore said he’s bringing the same mindset with him to Washington. “They did not elect me to get on television and tell them that they’re getting screwed. They already know that. They know that. They elected me to do something about it.”
Bradley Devlin is politics editor for The Daily Signal.
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