Weirich

ELKINS — Mandy Weirich, the Democratic nominee for West Virginia State Senate District 11, spoke during the Randolph County Democratic Party’s Democracy Dinner held recently at the Elks Lodge.  

Weirich is a Barbour County native with family roots in Randolph and Upshur counties. She currently works as a licensed social worker and coordinator of the Master of Social Work online program at West Virginia University. 

“I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and what I wanted to say tonight,” Weirich said during the event. “I thought, do I talk about growing up and my parents taking me to the Gettysburg Battlefield, or my mom stopping to read every single historical road sign between here and Ocean City, Maryland on our way to the beach?

“Do I talk about the trips to Mount Vernon and Monticello that really embedded in me this deep patriotic sense and sense of civic duty? I can talk about marrying my marine, who became a marine at 17…

“All of those things are really important and have a lot to do with why I’m here and why I’m running for Senate. But really what I want to do is remind you and what each and every one of you are fighting for.”

Weirich said she and her husband Ryan, who she has been married to for 29 years, were walking through town the other day and were talking about her upcoming speech.

“He told me something that was really chilling and it has stuck with me ever since,” she said. “He said ‘Democracy will not die on the battlefield, it will die to the sound of thunderous applause.’ I can see the through line in my head, as I’m sure each and every one of you can. I can see it when I think of disengaged voters, when I think about the apathy of the people, when I think of the suppressed votes, book bannings, and our rights being systematically stripped away from us here in America and here in West Virginia. 

“Literally the rights to our own bodies were stripped away at our state Legislature in a rushed interim Legislative session where I watched politicians arbitrarily throwing out the number of weeks that they would put on bans to an abortion,” she said. “Just six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks, without any input from medical professionals, without any debate, without any input from our citizens. In fact, they threw the citizens out of the gallery and laughed about it. That is chilling.”  

Weirich then talked about the Republican party and what Democrats need to do in order for change to happen.

“When I see a major political party raise up a man that bragged about sexually assaulting women, who lies whenever his mouth is open, who is a convicted felon, a man who tried to overthrow our democracy and has routinely encouraged political violence, as their presidential candidate, yeah, I can see that through line that my husband was talking about,” she said.

“They think freedom is only won on the battlefield in some kind of blaze of glory? But that is not true, democracy is fought for in every generation. And it is by sharing ideas, it’s by the written word, it is by voting, it’s by people like you who show up, it is about the news — our independent news that comes out and reports stories in our community. That’s who fights for democracy and we need you to show up and speak it.

“We need you to counter every lie and speak about our democracy. To get people out to vote and not give up. We need you to fight for our democracy and reclaim the Patriotism that was always ours. We need you to loudly and proudly support every Democratic candidate from the top of the ticket to the bottom, so that we can make change and pass on the story to the next generation of how we showed up and saved this country.”

Steve Williams, Democratic nominee for governor, also spoke at the event, alongside Teresa Toriseva, Glenn Elliot, Steve Wendelin, and Cody Thompson. Toriseva is running for state Attorney General, while Elliot is a candidate for Senator and Wendelin for Congress. Thompson is running for the Delegate District 67 seat.