West Virginia is a state that embodies the tensions and possibilities inherent in the recent antiestablishment turn in American politics: it is a state that voted 68 percent for Donald Trump in 2016, and it is the state that kicked off a national wave of rank-and-file labor militancy in 2018.

And now West Virginia has a candidate for governor in 2020 running an ambitious antiestablishment campaign. Stephen Smith, who has been described by the Intercept as a “genuine populist,” is a thirty-nine-year-old community organizer who is seeking to realign West Virginia politics, not just for one election but for the long haul.

Until very recently, West Virginia’s political establishment was solidly Democratic. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of the state legislature in an unbroken rule from 1932 to 2014. The perceived recent “red” turn in West Virginia politics has been not so much pro-Republican, but rather antiestablishment. In 1998, West Virginia’s registered voters were 63 percent Democrat and 29 percent Republican. By 2019, the fraction of voters registered as Democrats had dropped to 41 percent, but the defectors had largely switched to “no party” (22 percent), with the Republican party at 33 percent.