Could Byrd’s replacement affect West Virginia’s economy?

As a successor to Robert C. Byrd’s Senate seat is likely to be chosen by West Virginia’s voters and not the state’s Democratic Governor Joe Manchin in a special election this November, the likelihood of new federally-funded projects in the state is now uncertain.

West Virginia’s voters swayed Republican in the 2008 presidential election, with 56 percent of voters supporting John McCain.

But, West Virginia politics have historically been ruled by Democratic figures, including long-time Senator Byrd, first elected in 1958. Currently, the state’s lone Senator, Jay Rockefeller, is a Democrat, as is the state’s governor, who has indicated he will likely run for Byrd’s seat. Two out of three of West Virginia’s U.S. House Representatives are also Democrats.

A common theme among Republican candidates running for office over the past few years – whether at a local, state or national level – has been to criticize federal spending, pork barrel projects and budget waste. Byrd, who was proud to call himself the King of Pork, used federal funding and pork projects to bring dozens of developments to West Virginia to spur the poverty-stricken state’s slow economy in a number of ways (The U.S. Census Bureau lists West Virginia as 49^th in the U.S. for personal income per capita.).

An anti-pork organization once “honored” Byrd as the first legislator to pull in $1 billion in pork spending to his home state. Such honors, Byrd said in his autobiography, “rolled off me like water from a duck’s back,” the Charleston Gazette said.

Some of those pork-funded projects include federal courthouses in Charleston and Beckley, a high school, a biotechnology center at Marshall, various libraries, streets, health clinics, college departments, and freeways. All of these projects, in some form or another, help spur business and economic development across the state.

Should a Republican candidate fill Byrd’s seat, what will happen to that stream of federally-funded projects West Virginia has benefited from? Well, it will likely stop. And, in a state desperately needing economic help, this could be an issue as the U.S. economy grows out of the recession.

Another uncertainty with this election is the future of coal company regulation. In Byrd’s later years he was often more vocal about criticizing the coal industry and prodding the industry to change and embrace new technologies to help the state’s environment and miners.

“Change has been a constant throughout the history of our coal industry,” the Charleston Gazette quoted Byrd as saying. “West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it. The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think and hard about which course they want to choose.”

On a more personal note, as a West Virginia native and a coal miner’s daughter, I hope a good steward to Byrd’s seat is elected who will keep in mind the best interests of the state and its residents, above coal company lobbying and populist politics against Obama. As Byrd often said, some state will get those pork dollars, so why not West Virginia?

Local and national election results [CNN]

Census personal income rankings [US Census]

U.S. Sen Robert C. Byrd dies at 92 [West Virginia Gazette]

Manchin ‘highly likely’ to run [Politico]