Make WV Blue Again: How Out-of-State Billionaires Are Buying Our Elections

Look at the political mailers piling up in your mailbox right now. Read the small print on the back. Then read it again — because the names you're seeing aren't from your neighbors.

Sugar Maple PAC. School Freedom Fund. Americans for Prosperity. They aren't run by West Virginians. They're funded by hedge fund billionaires in Connecticut, a TikTok investor in Pennsylvania, and a dark-money network headquartered out of Arlington, Virginia. And right now, they're spending more money trying to pick our state senator than our state senator's actual constituents have given to either candidate.

West Virginia's elections — even our State Senate primary in the Northern Panhandle — are no longer ours. It's time to take them back.

The Money Flood: Where It's Coming From

In a single election cycle, five outside-money groups have spent more than $1.6 million in West Virginia's Republican primaries, much of it concentrated in races right here in the Northern Panhandle. Here's how it breaks down.

Right-leaning PACs active in WV state races (2026 cycle)

Sugar Maple PAC alone raised $565,000 from just 22 sources — and only about $45,000 of that came from West Virginia donors. Less than 8% of Sugar Maple's money came from inside the state it's trying to influence. The rest came from Long Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.

Left-leaning PACs active in WV state races

There is no comparable progressive infrastructure operating at this scale in West Virginia's 2026 state legislative primaries. Labor-affiliated organizations like Education West Virginia, the WV AFL-CIO, and local trade unions advocate, lobby, and contribute modestly to candidates — but their political spending is dwarfed many times over by the out-of-state conservative megadonor money described above.

There is no progressive billionaire writing $100,000 checks to flood your mailbox.

The disparity in one number

In WV State Senate District 1 — Hancock, Brooke, Ohio, and parts of Marshall — the two Republican candidates raised about $32,750 combined from actual West Virginians in their most recent reporting period. Sugar Maple PAC and School Freedom Fund alone have spent more than $120,000 in that one race.

That's nearly four times what the candidates themselves raised, all from groups whose donors don't live here, can't vote here, and won't have to live with the consequences of the policies they're buying.

That's not democracy. That's an auction.

What That Money Is Buying

Out-of-state billionaires aren't spending six figures on a Northern Panhandle State Senate primary because they love West Virginia. They're spending it to lock in a policy agenda that pays them back many times over — at our expense. Here's what's on the menu.

1. School Choice (The "Hope Scholarship")

The Hope Scholarship was sold as helping families afford educational options. In practice, it's draining our public schools dry to subsidize private schools and homeschooling — much of it for families who were never in the public system to begin with.

The numbers:

• The voucher program cost more than $40 million last year. Lawmakers just appropriated roughly $300 million for next year — a sevenfold increase in 12 months.
• In the same budget, state aid for public schools, which serve roughly 90% of West Virginia children, was cut by $8 million.
• About 15,000 students have exited public schools to use the voucher for private school tuition, homeschooling, or other expenses.
• A RAND Corporation study commissioned by the WV House explicitly warned against expanding the program, finding the expansion would inefficiently subsidize tuition for families who would have chosen private school regardless. Lawmakers expanded it anyway.

Real example, right here in Hancock County

Hancock County Schools faced a $7 million deficit this fiscal year and was on the verge of being unable to make payroll. The Legislature had to send $8 million in emergency funding in March to keep our schools afloat.

Meanwhile, Hancock County already spends roughly $250 less per student than the national average. Closing that gap district-wide would cost about $784,500 — enough, the WV Center on Budget & Policy notes, to fund 10 new classroom teachers, or nine school nurses and counselors, or 17 service workers.

That money exists. It's being sent to private vouchers instead.

Where Hope Scholarship money has actually gone

According to State Superintendent and education leaders' testimony to the Legislature, Hope Scholarship dollars have paid for:

• Dance studios, jujitsu lessons, and guitar lessons.
• A cheerleading and gymnastics facility in the Eastern Panhandle, which received roughly $58,000 from voucher funds, while public school cheerleaders pay for gymnastics out of pocket.
• Tuition at out-of-state schools, including Steubenville, Ohio's public schools — meaning West Virginia taxpayers are now subsidizing kids to cross the state line for school.
• More than $1.7 million total spent at out-of-state schools and microschools, according to House Finance Chair Vernon Criss.

The Republican-controlled House actually tried to add modest guardrails — banning out-of-state spending, capping the award, and restricting tutoring services. The bill was killed under intense pressure from out-of-state PACs that then turned around and started funding primary challengers against the Republicans who voted for guardrails.

2. Repealing Certificate of Need

"Certificate of Need" (CON) is a state law on the books since 1977. It requires health care providers to show community need before opening new facilities or expanding profitable services like surgery centers and imaging clinics. Governor Morrisey — backed by Americans for Prosperity, the Cardinal Institute, and the Institute for Justice — has made repealing it a top priority.

Here's the problem: every major hospital system in West Virginia opposes repeal, including WVU Medicine, Mon Health, and the West Virginia Hospital Association.

Why? Because repeal isn't really about freedom. It's about letting out-of-state private equity strip-mine our health care system.

The CEO of WVU Medicine Jackson General Hospital, who came to West Virginia from a large Ohio system, told the Dominion Post that her first reaction to CON was that it seemed like unnecessary red tape — until she realized that without it, her rural critical-access hospital would be at risk of closing.

Here's why: 75% of West Virginians rely on government insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, PEIA), which pays less than the cost of care. The national average is 40.5%. Rural hospitals survive by using profitable service lines — surgery, imaging — to cross-subsidize the unprofitable ones — ER, obstetrics, primary care. Without CON, an out-of-state company can open a stand-alone surgery center down the road, scoop up the profitable patients, and leave the rural hospital with only the money-losing services. The hospital then closes.

Real example: Buckhannon, WV

When the CON repeal was being debated in 2025, the Buckhannon-Upshur Chamber of Commerce warned in writing that repeal would likely force WVU Medicine St. Joseph's Hospital — a 100-year-old hospital — to close. That's the medical anchor for an entire region of the state. Gone, so a private equity firm in Pennsylvania can open a stand-alone imaging center.

That's what AFP and the Cardinal Institute are spending your dollars to push.

3. "Regulatory Reform."

"Regulatory reform" sounds boring and technical. In West Virginia, where the history of our state was written in the blood of coal miners and the chemicals in our drinking water, it's anything but.

This is the state of:

• Hawks Nest Tunnel (1930s) — hundreds of workers, mostly Black migrant laborers, killed by silica dust in one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history. There were no enforceable workplace silica standards.
• Buffalo Creek (1972) — 125 dead, 4,000 homeless when a coal slurry impoundment that operators' own engineers had warned was unstable burst above a mining community.
• Upper Big Branch (2010) — 29 miners killed in an explosion that federal investigators tied directly to a culture of safety violations at Massey Energy.
• Elk River chemical spill (2014) — Freedom Industries leaked the chemical MCHM into the Kanawha River, leaving 300,000 West Virginians unable to drink, cook with, or bathe in their tap water for days.

Every one of those tragedies traces back to companies cutting corners and regulators being too weak, too underfunded, or too captured to stop them. "Regulatory reform," when pushed by groups funded by petrochemical and fossil fuel fortunes, means returning to those conditions.

The Koch network — which is the largest funder of AFP and a contributor to Make Liberty Win — owns Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the U.S., with major holdings in petrochemicals, pipelines, refining, and natural gas. They are not abstract about wanting fewer environmental rules in West Virginia. It's their business.

4. Tax Cuts (and Who Actually Benefits)

We've been told for years now that cutting income taxes will pay for itself through economic growth. West Virginia is on its third consecutive round of cuts. Here's what's actually happening.

• Two-thirds of the benefit of the 2023 tax cut went to the top 20% of earners. The bottom 20% of households received about $21 per year. The top 1% received roughly $10,000 a year.
• By 2026, West Virginia's wealthiest 5% of households will receive a combined $1.2 billion from state and federal tax cuts enacted over the last decade — money no longer available for schools, PEIA, roads, foster care, or rural hospitals.
• The cuts will reduce West Virginia's general revenue budget by an estimated 10.5% by FY 2028 — almost the exact same percentage of revenue that the Brownback tax cuts cost Kansas in the 2010s.
• The FY 2026 budget started with a $400 million gap, closed only through one-time money and approximately $110 million in cuts to existing services.

Real example: Kansas

In 2012, Republican Governor Sam Brownback called his tax cuts a "real-life experiment." The result: state revenues collapsed, schools were gutted, infrastructure deferred, two bond rating agencies downgraded the state's credit, and Kansas's own Republican-controlled Legislature voted in 2017 to repeal most of the cuts. They overrode their own governor's veto to do it.

West Virginia lawmakers told voters this would not be Kansas. The math says otherwise.

Where the money goes when there isn't enough

When tax cuts shrink the pie, somebody loses. In West Virginia, it's been:

• Public school employees (more than 70 schools have closed since 2019; counties have cut hundreds of teaching, custodial, and service positions in the past year alone).
• Special education students (West Virginia ranks near the bottom nationally in special-ed funding despite having the fifth-highest rate of special-ed students in the country).
• Foster care, child protective services, jails, prisons — all chronically understaffed.
• PEIA — public employee health insurance — repeatedly raising premiums and cutting benefits.

Meanwhile, the top 1% gets a $10,000 check.

So What Do We Do?

"Make WV Blue Again" isn't a slogan about partisanship for partisanship's sake. It's about taking our elections back from billionaire donors who think they can decide our future from a hedge fund office in Connecticut or a P.O. box in Alexandria, Virginia.

Three things you can do this week:

1. Vote in the May 12 primary. This year's Republican primary is closed, but the Democratic primary is open to unaffiliated voters. If you're a Democrat or independent, that ballot is yours.
2. Look up your candidates' actual fundraising at cfrs.wvsos.gov. See who's funded by their neighbors and who's effectively funded by mailers paid for by out-of-state PACs.
3. Don't let the mailers decide for you. When a glossy mailer arrives calling someone a "RINO" or a "liberal," check the small print on the back. If it says Sugar Maple PAC, School Freedom Fund, or any address out of state, you know exactly whose interests it's protecting — and they aren't yours.

West Virginia is not for sale. Let's prove it on May 12.

Sources

• WV Secretary of State Campaign Finance Reporting System — cfrs.wvsos.gov
• West Virginia Watch — coverage of Hope Scholarship costs, school funding, CON debate, primary spending
• WV MetroNews — "Outside Money Dominates Sugar Maple PAC"; "Morrisey's political machine is laying down big bucks"
• The Intelligencer / Intermountain — "Money Bomb: Morrisey-linked groups pour millions into legislative races"
• Mountain State Spotlight — "Out-of-state money floods West Virginia GOP primaries amid Hope Scholarship fight"
• WOWK / WBOY — Sugar Maple PAC and School Freedom Fund reporting
• Dominion Post — "Local health systems oppose repeal of Certificate of Need"
• WV Center on Budget & Policy — Hope Scholarship and tax cut analysis
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — comparative state tax cut analysis
• RAND Corporation report on WV school funding (commissioned by WV House)