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ELKINS -- Republican Senatorial candidate Don Blankenship made campaign appearances in Elkins and Buckhannon Wednesday as he criss-crosses the state in preparation for the May 8 primary election.
"The state is not in good shape and the country's not in good shape. We're looking at $22 trillion in debt. One of these days if we don't get serious about it the jig's going to be up," Blankenship, the controversial ex-Massey Energy boss, said in The Inter-Mountain offices Wednesday afternoon.
"I feel that with the experience that I have and the background I have in business and working in West Virginia, and the diversity of my background, that I'm a good candidate to turn it around."
Blankenship, 68, a former coal company CEO who went to prison for charges stemming from the deadliest U.S. mine disaster in decades, will face U.S. Rep. Evan Jenkins and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in the GOP primary. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is seeking re-election.
Blankenship said his candidacy is receiving increasing national attention.
"People are curious. Can somebody on probation win a federal election? I don't know if there's ever been one," he said Wednesday.
Blankenship was released from a federal prison in California last year after serving a one-year term. He was sentenced in 2016 for a misdemeanor conviction of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards at Massey's Upper Big Branch Mine in southern West Virginia, where 29 were killed in the 2010 mine explosion. He is currently serving one year of supervised release scheduled to end on May 9 -- one day after West Virginia's Senate primary.
Blankenship said Wednesday he believes he will win the primary, and that he will actually have an easier time defeating Manchin in the general election in November.
"I think Manchin will be easier to beat than beating both Jenkins and Morrisey in the primary," he said. " I think Manchin, with the tax vote, and the Planned Parenthood vote, and the not standing up with Chuck Shumer thing, his fundraising will necessarily come from plaintiff attorneys in the state and environmental groups outside the state."
The candidate stressed Wednesday that he has helped strengthen the Mountain State's Rebublican party through the years.
"I don't know if I've done anything where people thought I would win because that would be too easy. We beat McGraw 87-13. We beat the bond when people told us you couldn't beat the bond. Manchin himself told me, 'You can't beat the bond because I'm going to get the airplane out and go to every town and advocate for it.' And I said, 'That television's a lot faster than that airplane.' We beat the bond, we beat the food tax," he said.
"We started the revolution for the Republican party when we put a candidate for every house seat on the ballot in 2006. I feel greatly responsible, good or bad, for the Republican majority (in West Virginia) and I feel greatly responsible for about probably a billion and a half dollars of taxes that people haven't had to pay for food and probably over a billion dollars in insurance costs because of McGraw being gone."
Blankenship was asked Wednesday how he thinks the national Republican establishment views his campaign.
"They don't want me to win, but I think they're afraid to work against me," he replied. "They know that, unlike (Chuck) Shumer with Manchin, I don't care whether Mitch McConnell wants me to stand up or not. When it comes to something I think is important to the country or West Virginia I'll stand up. It doesn't matter if Trump is standing there."
Blankenship is a fan of the president, however.
"I think Trump is wrong to sign this ($1.5 trillion spending) bill, but most of the time I agree with him."
What he called the media's "one-sided" coverage of his campaign has frustrated Blankenship.
"We need to have a balanced media … it's self-defeating," he said. "The business community has a story to tell. They have problems -- like the water contamination or the Upper Big Branch explosion -- but if you don't have business, you don't have quality of life. If Daytona reported they had the most shark attacks in the world or if Idaho was against potatoes, they'd be in trouble too. We've got to find balance in the media."
Blankenship pointed out that before the explosion Massey had won "three Sentinels of Safety awards from MSHA, the first company ever in history to do that … I invented two dozen things that are used around the world in the coal mining industry."
The candidate says he has been surprised that none of the voters he's met personally during his campaign have expressed anger about the explosion.
"It's funny, you don't meet people that are angry about it. They don't see it as a problem in their voting. But they express concern about if I can overcome it," he said. "I haven't met the person yet who said, 'I'm not going to vote for you because of the explosion.' But I've met a lot of people who say they're concerned."
He has encountered several protests along the campaign trail, however.
"This morning we had some guys set up chairs, over in Buckhannon, 29 chairs with the names of the victims," he said. "We had people, when we first started campaigning in Logan, show up with a sign, but the only real rowdy bunch that we had was at WVU. And there we had the Sierra Club, Black Lives Matter, some other socialist group … we had all those groups. We appreciated them being there because I think they got us a lot of votes."
Blankenship also stressed that he feels he was treated unfairly during his trial.
"I was tried in front of a West Virginia jury, with, quite frankly, a biased judge appointed by Obama, and Obama-appointed prosecutors," he said. "I did not even put on a defense and was found not guilty on three felonies … with the family members sitting in the courtroom and the media doing everything it could to impact the jury."
"I got charged for a crime that nobody's ever been charged for, (facing) 25 years in prison for 13 words in a letter I didn't write. And both of our senators, one of them says I don't deserve a fair trial. The other one says there's blood on my hands before I ever get to the courtroom."
Blankenship was asked Wednesday if his perceived treatment by West Virginia's senators prompted his decision to run against Manchin.
"You know, it's hard to say," he responded. "It's like dying from a thousand cuts. I've been cut so bad by the government and by the media."
Manchin, who was West Virginia's governor during the time of the mine explosion, has said he hoped Blankenship would "disappear from the public eye" after his prison release.
Blankenship received approval last August to have his supervised release transferred to federal officials in Nevada, where he has a home in Las Vegas.
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Blankenship's bid to appeal. He has insisted he's innocent, and that natural gas and not methane gas and excess coal dust caused the explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine.