David H. McKinley: We’re Losing the Backyard Brawl to Our Neighbors. It’s Past Time West Virginia Businesses Fought Back
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Last month, CNBC released its 2026 rankings of America’s Top States for Business. Ohio finished first, the culmination of a two-decade climb from 30th place when the study began.
West Virginia finished 46th. Last year we were 40th. In 12 months, while our neighbor across the Ohio River was becoming the best state in the country to build a company, we fell six spots in the other direction.
Read the fine print and it gets more specific. West Virginia ranks 48th in the country for Economy and 49th for Access to Capital. We are, quite literally, one of the hardest places in America to grow a business or raise the money to try.
The one bright spot is Cost of Living, where we rank first. That’s not nothing, but it’s not a strategy either. A state can’t build a future on being cheap to live in if it’s this hard to make a living.
Ohio didn’t get to number one by accident, and neither did we get to 46th by accident. Rankings like this are the accumulated result of a thousand policy choices, regulatory postures, and political priorities, made year after year by the people West Virginians elect. When we send leaders to Charleston who don’t understand or don’t prioritize what it actually takes to compete for jobs and capital, this is the scoreboard.
It isn’t just Ohio pulling away. Look at every state that touches our border. Pennsylvania climbed to 13th this year, up from 17th, its best showing in 15 years, after Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration made permitting reform and tax changes a stated priority. Virginia held at third, up from fourth, still drawing on years of investment in infrastructure and education.
Even Kentucky, which slipped two spots to 27th, and Maryland, which fell four spots to 36th amid its own well-documented struggles with business costs, are still comfortably ahead of us. West Virginia isn’t just losing ground to Ohio. We’re behind every state that borders us.
Here’s what should trouble every business owner in this state: the people working hardest to shape West Virginia’s political future are, increasingly, not from West Virginia. Out-of-state money and interest groups have poured into our elections in recent cycles, often backing candidates with no real stake in whether a manufacturer in Wheeling can get a loan, a small business in Morgantown can find workers, or an engineering firm in Charleston can compete for talent against companies from Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Richmond.
We can complain about that influence, or we can outcompete it. The most direct way to do that is for the people who actually build things here, who actually employ people here, to get engaged in who represents us and what they stand for. Not as an afterthought during election season, but as a sustained, serious commitment.
That doesn’t mean writing a check and calling it done. It means small business owners talking to their employees, honestly and without pressure, about what’s at stake in state elections. It means trade associations and chambers of commerce treating candidate education as core to their mission, not a side project. It means businesses that have never been engaged politically asking why not, when the state’s competitiveness, and their own ability to hire and grow, is directly on the line.
It also means supporting the organizations already doing this work, ones built by West Virginians, for West Virginians, without out-of-state money calling the shots. There is a real difference between influence that answers to Columbus, Washington, or Wall Street, and influence that answers to the people who live here and have to make payroll here.
I don’t think most West Virginia business owners are indifferent to any of this. I think most are simply busy, running companies and managing payroll in an economy that keeps getting harder to compete in. But busy is how a state loses ground for 20 years running.
Ohio didn’t wait for the perfect moment. It made a decades-long decision to get serious about competitiveness. Pennsylvania is making that same decision right now, and it’s already showing up in the numbers.
West Virginia can do the same thing. We have real advantages: low cost of living, a strong work ethic, a central location, energy resources every other state wishes it had. What we don’t have is the political leadership, cycle after cycle, focused hard enough on turning those advantages into results. That won’t change because we hope it changes. It will change when the people with the most to gain, and the most to lose, decide to get in the fight.
We are in a backyard brawl, and right now we are losing it badly. The businesses of this state have more say in the outcome than they’ve been acting like. It’s time to use it.
David H. McKinley of Wheeling is the founder of Mountaineer Freedom Alliance and an eighth-generation West Virginian. He is the principal owner of McKinley Carter Wealth Services, McKinley Architecture and Engineering, Omni Strategic Technologies, Beyond Marketing, Willow Glen Capital, and McKinley Properties. He serves as chair of the board of governors at West Liberty University, on the Wheeling Park Commission overseeing Oglebay Park and Wheeling Park, and the executive committee of Regional Economic Development Partnership board of directors.