There is a question worth asking before the May 12 Republican Primary, and it cuts straight to the bone: does Patrick Morrisey think West Virginians are stupid?

Because the playbook he is running this primary season only works if we are.

The governor of our state is publicly endorsing primary challengers to sitting Republicans who had the nerve to vote their conscience instead of his orders. Now, his First Lady has personally cut $2,800 maximum-dollar checks to the people running against incumbents like House Finance Chairman Vernon Criss and Sen. Deeds. That alone would be a break with every governor our state has had in living memory.

But it gets worse, because Morrisey isn’t just endorsing. He’s funding.

A constellation of political action committees — Sugar Maple PAC, the School Freedom Fund, Black Bear PAC, the West Virginia Prosperity Group — share treasurers, donors, and an obvious common interest: getting the governor’s enemies out of the Legislature. Sugar Maple’s treasurer also runs Black Bear PAC and the West Virginia Prosperity Group.

Those groups have raised millions of dollars and are spending it against Sen. Tom Takubo, Sen. Vince Deeds, Del. Scot Heckert, House finance Chairman Vernon Criss, House Finance Vice Chairman Clay Riley, Senator Ben Queen, Jeffrey Stephens, and Gary Howell to defeat the very legislators West Virginians elected to represent us. Here is the part Morrisey is hoping you don’t notice. After his inauguration, his committee had $500,000 left over. State law mandates that this money go to charity or improvements at the Governor’s Mansion. Instead, it went to the West Virginia Prosperity Group — a so-called “social welfare” nonprofit that does not have to disclose its donors. That group then turned around and shipped $125,000 to Black Bear PAC, the same super PAC that ran ads supporting Morrisey in 2024 and is now part of the same political ecosystem spending money in this primary.

This isn’t normal. It isn’t how we do things in West Virginia, and it isn’t how it’s done across most of our country either. For generations, the unwritten rule has been that a governor stays out of his party’s primaries. Ronald Reagan called it the Eleventh Commandment — thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. His predecessor, now-Sen. Jim Justice, almost never weighed in on state legislative primaries. Political scientists who study this for a living have been blunt about why: party leaders who get publicly involved in their own primaries wound the party they then must unify in November. Studies of party influence in primary nominations have found that party leadership, when it does steer races, almost always does so quietly and behind the scenes — not by torching incumbents in public.

What is happening in West Virginia right now is — by every measure available — basically unprecedented. Look across the country and try to find another state where a sitting governor is doing all of this at once: publicly endorsing primary challengers to multiple incumbent members of his own party, having his spouse fund those challengers personally, and operating a network of dark-money PACs funneling millions in out-of-state cash into legislative primaries. You will not find it. The political class openly admits this is the new playbook they want to roll out nationally, and West Virginia is the test kitchen.

Morrisey is making West Virginia the guinea pig for his own gain. Who else has done that? Oh, the companies he and his spouse lobbied for — the ones that brought the scourge of the opioid epidemic upon us.

A man who won his own primary with just 33% of the vote — meaning two out of every three Republicans in this state did not pick him — is now using the powers of the governor’s office, leftover cash from his own inauguration, and a network of dark-money PACs funded by out-of-state interests to remove every legislator who told him no. He didn’t pick up the phone and negotiate when Vernon Criss called his budget unconstitutional or sit down with Sen. Deeds to work it out. He didn’t show Del. Scot Heckert “the vision,” as Heckert himself has said publicly — “We’re just told to ‘do this’ and ‘do that.’ That ain’t good governance, that’s dictatorship.” Instead, Morrisey wrote checks. Or, more precisely, he made sure his friends did.

That is not leadership. That is a bully with a title and a Rolodex of donors.

This only works on one condition: that West Virginia voters don’t pay attention, don’t read the campaign finance reports, and don’t notice the same treasurer’s name on three different PACs. That we don’t ask why a “social welfare” nonprofit needs to launder $125,000 into a political super PAC, and that we shrug and check the box for whichever name the governor’s mailers — printed and shipped from out-of-state vendors — told us to vote for.

He is betting we are stupid. He is betting we are tired. He is betting we are too busy keeping our lights on and our kids fed to read past the headline on a flier.

He’s wrong.

So, here is what we need to do on May 12. If you believe a governor of West Virginia answers to the voters and not the other way around, vote for the incumbents he is trying to fire. If you believe a primary belongs to you and not to a politician with a grudge and a slush fund, vote against the candidates whose campaigns are being bankrolled by his out-of-state friends. If you believe in the freedom of elections, in the right of a state senator from Greenbrier or a delegate from Wood County to vote his conscience without losing his job to the governor’s wallet — vote for the candidates Patrick Morrisey does not back.

That means voting for Sen. Vince Deeds. For Sen. Tom Takubo. For House Finance Chairman Vernon Criss. For House Finance Vice Chairman Clay Riley. For Del. Scot Heckert. For Del. Erica Riley. For Del. Jeffrey Stephens. For Del. Gary Howell. And for every other Republican incumbent on this primary ballot who has been targeted not because they failed their district, but because they failed to kneel.

Here is the thing Patrick Morrisey forgets, or maybe never understood in the first place. He isn’t from here. He was born in Brooklyn, raised in New Jersey, and built his career as a Washington lobbyist. He moved to West Virginia and ran for the U.S. Senate within a few years of arriving and now, sitting in the governor’s office of a state whose people he barely knew a decade ago, has decided that we will be the laboratory for his political ambitions — that he can buy our Legislature, override our votes, bulldoze our representatives, and that we will simply nod along because we don’t know any better. He thinks we are an easy mark and that he can take advantage of us, the way out-of-state interests have tried to take advantage of this state for a hundred years, and that we’ll thank him for it.

We are not an easy mark. On May 12, we have the chance to remind a governor that West Virginia still belongs to West Virginians — and we are the ones who decide who represents us

Melody Potter is the former chairman of the West Virginia Republican Party and a former Republican National Committee member.