IPR Interview: West Virginia Libertarian Gubernatorial Nominee Erika Kolenich Talks Key Issues and Campaign Goals

Libertarian Party of West Virginia gubernatorial nominee Erika Kolenich recently joined Independent Political Report to discuss her 2024 gubernatorial campaign, her thoughts on Donald Trump attending the recent Libertarian National Convention, and the potential to displace the West Virginia Democratic Party. Her official campaign website can be accessed here.

The interview took place over the phone on June 24, 2024. It has been transcribed and edited in accordance with the guidelines outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style. Independent Political Report conducts candidate interviews with the aim of providing insight into those running for office for the benefit of the public.

Evans: My name is Jordan Willow Evans. I am the managing editor for Independent Political Report, and I am talking with Erika Kolenich today who is running for governor of West Virginia. Hello, Erika!

Kolenich: Hello, how are you?

Evans: Good! So, I want to ask you some questions about being on the campaign trail and also being on the campaign trail as a Libertarian, as well as some thoughts about navigating a campaign like yours as a third party candidate. Jumping into my first question here, which is kind of a softball one—could you share a little about yourself and really what motivated you to run for governor of West Virginia?

Kolenich: Sure. I am a lawyer and a business owner here in West Virginia. I consider myself more of an entrepreneur than a lawyer because I do have a growing law firm. We have around 40 employees and four locations throughout the state, but I am a lawyer at heart. Even though my business is growing, I probably spend more time running the business than I do practicing law.

I love to help people. That’s my calling. One of the reasons that I love growing my business so much is because it allows me the opportunity to employ West Virginians, train them, and help them grow and develop their careers while I get to watch them help and represent West Virginia people, which, to me, is great. It combines two things that I love, so that is what I do throughout my life.

I was not born in West Virginia. I always tell people that, and people say, “Well, you don’t have to qualify that,” because I only didn’t live in West Virginia for the first 18 months of my life. But I think it’s important to say I was born in Columbus, and then my family moved back to West Virginia, where they’re originally from. My mom was born in Kingwood, West Virginia. She was raised by a coal mining family, and we came back to West Virginia when I was very, very young. I was raised in West Virginia, like almost everybody that I know, everybody around me.

When I graduated college, I thought, you know, I want something bigger and better than West Virginia. It’s what all my friends thought. It’s what I think most of the youth of today think. You have to leave the state to find something bigger. You have to leave the state to find something better. So I decided to go to law school back where I was born. I decided to go to Ohio. I went to the University of Akron School of Law, and I began my legal career in the Ohio Valley area. I practiced for a little bit in Cleveland as well, and then it didn’t take me long to realize I wanted to come back to West Virginia.

I met my husband, Carl, in Cleveland, and we came back to West Virginia to raise our daughter, Iris, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’m really involved in our local community. I love theater. I’m a theater nerd, so when I’m not running for office, I spend a lot of time being involved in the community theater, involved in a lot of different local organizations. I was on the board of directors for the local Head Start organization for over 15 years. So I love getting involved, getting my hands dirty, and helping the local community.

So that’s who I am. And, you know, I decided to run for office because I love West Virginia people, and I think they’re the nicest people. I’ve traveled a lot. My career gives me the opportunity to travel a lot, to meet a lot of different people. And West Virginians, there’s just something about them, you know? They’re the nicest folks. You wouldn’t be broke down long before somebody would stop and offer to help you. It just has that feel to it. It has the most beautiful landscapes. It has so much potential.

The experience that I had, thinking that you had to leave for opportunity, that you had to leave for a better job, just made me feel really sad. I just got so frustrated at West Virginia being at the top of all those terrible lists and at the bottom of all the good ones. And I thought, I really want to change something about that, so that’s what inspired me to get involved in politics.

Evans: Wow. I mean, just listening to you talk, I can tell that you really care deeply about your state. And I think that’s great. It makes sense as to why you were drawn to something like politics.

So going off of that, I understand you were also a gubernatorial candidate during the 2020 cycle, and it sounds like you pay close attention to what’s happening in West Virginia. I’m curious if you could speak to how the struggles and needs of West Virginians have changed over these past four years. Or, if not, how have they remained the same?

Kolenich: Our motto here in West Virginia is “Mountaineers are always free,” and it’s just a little bit ironic being a Libertarian because I think what we saw in West Virginia is that mountaineers are not necessarily free.

Historically, West Virginia has been a very blue state, which is surprising to a lot of people. You know, when my husband moved to West Virginia, he said, “This doesn’t make sense to me. West Virginians are supposed to like guns, they’re supposed to be very open, they’re supposed to like coal. I don’t understand this blueness.” But ever since JFK came to West Virginia and won West Virginia over, it has historically been very blue. It had been a Democratic state, and that shifted right around the time Obama took office, give or take a few years. Now, West Virginia is very, very deeply red. There’s a Republican supermajority in charge, and it’s been that way for several years.

The interesting thing that happened in 2020 is not necessarily that our problems changed after that election, but they just became more magnified. I think what people realized after COVID is a big, bright magnifying glass suddenly was placed on our public education system, which everyone has always known was bad, but now it has come into every parent’s home, and they saw it.

Everyone has always known that the government in Charleston, which is our state capital, suffered from overreach, but now you saw it. The governor operated under a state of emergency that he had no real authority to do for a very long time. He was arbitrarily shutting down businesses with no real rhyme or reason. You couldn’t really figure out how they were determining who was essential and who was not essential. It was very interesting. So, I think what happened is that West Virginia is a state that politically has been built on corruption and you just started to see that.

Also, a problem that West Virginia has always had—and this is actually a good thing that came out of COVID, so I’m going to talk about something positive—but one of the things that West Virginia suffers from is a declining population. We have an older population. Folks in West Virginia, much like nationally, aren’t having babies. But the youth of West Virginia is also leaving, as I mentioned, which is creating a very, very difficult situation—a difficult tax base situation and an economic growth situation. I don’t thank COVID so much, but one of the lovely things that came out of COVID was that we realized most people can work from home.

Some people in West Virginia did wake up and say, “Wait a second, we have things that people want in West Virginia. We have privacy, we have peace and quiet, and we have a beautiful landscape.” One of the things that West Virginia did benefit from is we saw people who had maybe previously left West Virginia start to come back. We had people who had moved to places like Los Angeles or New York who had West Virginia roots say, “You know what? I’m coming back home.” We also saw people who maybe owned vacation properties in West Virginia or who didn’t but were looking to relocate now come into West Virginia.

So, for the first time in a very, very long time, we saw the population of people coming into West Virginia start to grow. It’s not enough to offset the death rate, but it is starting to grow, which is a good thing and which now changes the nature of our focus. So we need to start looking at how we can bring more people in, which starts to focus the attention on things we need to do, like eliminating the personal income tax and making some real changes to attract more of those types of people to West Virginia.

Evans: You just mentioned the income tax, and earlier in your answer, you mentioned the economy in general and government overreach. I’m curious what kind of campaign priorities you have for this year. Are there any specific key issues that you’re focusing on most and solutions that you think will really work for West Virginia?

Kolenich: Sure. There are really three major things that we think West Virginia needs to focus on. The first one was what I just mentioned, which is the elimination of the personal income tax. West Virginia has—relative to a state its size and its needs—a very high income tax rate, especially when you compare it with what people in West Virginia make. Relatively speaking, wages in West Virginia aren’t that high, and the average West Virginia family is paying $5,000 in personal income tax, which is insane when you consider what the average household income is in West Virginia.

So when you talk to people—and we’re very close to D.C.—but when you talk to people from the DC area and you say, “What stops you from moving into West Virginia?,” they will flat out tell you it’s the tax rate and that they don’t want to pay West Virginia income taxes. When you have an average West Virginia income of $53,000 a year and you have a household personal income tax rate of $5,000, that’s a lot of money. One of the priorities of my campaign, and if I’m elected governor, is eliminating that personal income tax.

Secondarily, we have very high regulation in West Virginia that stops economic growth. West Virginia is very, very big about picking winners and losers, and not only in things like the energy industry. You’ll have politicians that get up and they will say that they are pro-coal because that’s what folks in southern West Virginia and in the coal mine communities that have been decimated need to hear. But then what those politicians really do is they tax small businesses like the mom-and-pop little shops that are on Main Street. They tax them to death, take those tax dollars, and then give those tax dollars—recently—to companies like Form Energy and Nucor and try to get those companies to come locate in West Virginia. When you dig deep, those are green energy companies. So you have politicians that are saying one thing, “We support coal,” and then they’re taxing West Virginia mom-and-pop companies to bring in green energy.

So my plan would involve just eliminating regulations that make it difficult for coal companies to operate so that economic growth can be sustained naturally. And I’m not talking about the types of regulations that protect people or the types of regulations that make them safe. I’m talking about the types of unnecessary regulations that are designed just to get companies to jump through hoops because you have a special interest group that has donated to a politician’s campaign and then comes back later and says, “Hey, friend, we donated to your campaign. We’re having problems, and we need something stopped so we need you to pass this.”

There are also crazy, crazy regulations on just things in West Virginia, like a barbershop. If you want to be a barber in West Virginia, it’s really heavily regulated, which means if you’re a young fella and you graduate high school and you think, “I’m not the college type, but I really enjoy people and I’d like to open up a barbershop on Main Street,” you have to be pretty sophisticated to figure out how to navigate the regulatory framework to be able to do that. So eliminating those types of things is my priority.

And then there is education. We’ve gone a long way in West Virginia in terms of educational choice, but we still have a ways to go. For example, we have a voucher program in West Virginia called the Hope Scholarship. But right now, you can only qualify for the Hope Scholarship in West Virginia if you’ve sent your child to public school, meaning if you make the decision before your child ever goes to school, “Hey, there’s this really great private school or there’s this really great charter school and I’d like to send my child there from the beginning,” you’re a contributor to the tax base. Your tax dollars are going into the school system the same as anybody else’s. You would have to make a decision to send your child to public school for a certain amount of time and then pull them out, which is really inefficient. So there are tons of things that we could do to streamline the system and actually make the tax dollars far more effective and help with school choice.

And then lastly, we have a pretty significant criminal justice crisis in West Virginia. The National Guard was brought in to staff our jails in West Virginia because there was such a staffing shortage, and that’s really because we have an overcrowding issue. We’re putting people in jail who shouldn’t be in jail and costing the state an astronomical amount of money. I don’t think some people realize how scary it is. I love the National Guard—my daughter is in the National Guard, my best friend is a first sergeant in the National Guard—but to have the military staffing our jails. That state of emergency just actually ended a couple of months and it had been an 18-month-long endeavor.

There have been several lawsuits because the conditions in the jails are horrible, there were people losing their lives as inmates in jail—nonviolent offenders in jail losing their lives—there were cover-ups from the highest places that the cover-ups could come from, and the state of West Virginia was being sanctioned by the federal court for covering up evidence. The criminal justice system in West Virginia needs to be literally burnt down—there’s no other way to describe it but burnt down and rebuilt. That’s one of my main priorities.

Evans: Wow—that’s understandable. I’m talking with you live from New Hampshire, where we don’t have a state income tax, so it’s always such a stark contrast to hear how some other states are treating their citizens. Prior to coming here, I was from Massachusetts, and while we certainly had an income tax there, we also had a number of business licenses for things that you would be really surprised to find out required a license, so I can understand—

Kolenich: You have to have a license in West Virginia to be an apprentice for a chimney sweep.

Evans: Do you really?

Kolenich: Yeah.

Evans: I have to ask because, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but I have to imagine a lot of these policies are either implemented by or are currently existing under a Republican governorship and a Republican state legislature. Correct?

Kolenich: Absolutely.

Evans: Is that what draws you to the Libertarian Party then? As you know, we are a third party-focused publication and tend to take an interest in things like that, so I’m curious if that’s what also led you to become a Libertarian or if there was something else there that you want to share.

Kolenich: Yeah, that is definitely what led me to become a Libertarian. My draw to the Libertarian Party actually came from a different place. I think that if you talk to a lot of people who are Libertarians and they came from the right, they were Republicans. I was a Democrat when I was young, only because I didn’t know what else to be. When I went to my mom, who was the most non-political person in the world, and I said, “What do I register as?” she said, “Well, I think we’re poor people and poor people register Democrat.” So I took that advice and that’s what I did.

When I realized that I thought my mom was a little misguided and I didn’t think that was true, I registered as an independent. My husband has been a Libertarian straight out of the womb. I think he’s been a Libertarian for as long as I knew him, and there were some issues that it took me a very long time to get my head around. I didn’t really understand them.

The more that I became a lawyer, I just started going crazy. I spent more time in my career at the capital on civil justice issues, trial by jury issues, and seeing certain industries come into the capital and lobby to get certain things passed, certain favors, and I saw the sausage getting made. That’s what really did it for me—being in that building and just getting fire in my stomach.

When you see the handshakes and—there’s no other word to describe it—the evil laughs and the exchange of, “I’ll vote for this, if you vote for this,” and they’re not even reading the things. You realize what’s really happening and think, “Oh Hell no, Hell no, I have to do something.” And then you’re absolutely right. You listen to the Republicans talk about how they’re doing this to protect you, and they’re stewards of your money, and they’re talking about having a flat budget. They literally talk about having a flat budget while they’re increasing spending!

This year at the State of the State address, our current governor, who’s not running this year—he’s actually running for Senate—but he is a Republican. He’s standing up there talking and bragging about what a good steward of our money he is and how he’s cutting taxes, how he’s going to have a flat budget, and then he starts talking about all this new spending and programs, and he’s getting a standing ovation from this Republican supermajority who talks about how conservative they are.

Every quarter when the spending reports come out and they’re talking about a surplus, I get so livid. That’s not a surplus, sir. That is the money that you have stolen from people who make, on average, $50,000 a year—you’re insane! It just drives me crazy.

Evans: Oh my goodness! So, it’s understandable that you’ve reached some of the conclusions that you have because you have this insight, this knowledge, and this firsthand experience that shows you, as you said, “how the sausage is being made.” But you’re on the campaign trail and you’re trying to pitch your message to the average West Virginian voter. How do you communicate these differences to someone who’s more traditionally aligned with a party like this and who doesn’t have those kinds of experiences? What do you say?

Kolenich: Well, I think you have to meet them where they are. You generally have to take one issue that’s important to them—and I find that with West Virginians, COVID is normally one where we can make some headway. I remind them that the Republicans weren’t standing up and screaming when the Republican governor was ordering that they all wear masks and stay in their house and determine if they were nonessential—and you can normally find an in.

And I have found that that’s normally all I need—is an in. If they are complaining about a state inspection sticker, I can say, “Well, you know, that’s actually the Republicans,” and I find that if I get an in on one issue, then I can get them to start listening to me. It just requires longer conversations. You can’t do it in sound bites. You can’t do it on social media. You can’t do it in a commercial. You have to get out there, walk the streets, and be willing to have conversations with people. It’s been 90, 95 degrees in West Virginia, but that’s what we have to do. You have to get out there at the fairs and festivals and have long-form conversations with people. So that’s what I do.

Evans: While you’re having these conversations—and I do want to keep the main focus on your campaign in West Virginia—but I have to ask, as you know, in May, the Libertarian National Committee created some press for itself when it had former President Donald Trump as a speaker. I’m curious, for you as a candidate who’s running down-ballot, do you have any problems with that? What kind of responses do you get? Have you received *any* kind of response to that while you’re talking to voters? Is this something that you think has been good for your campaign, or do you feel otherwise?

Kolenich: I have not yet been in a situation to have voters ask me about it. I will tell you that it did do something quite momentous for me in West Virginia, though. And I say this quite candidly, telling you that I was one of those people who raised an eyebrow about it and thought, “Oh boy, I don’t want to go to D.C. and hang out with Donald Trump. This is not my jam. I don’t like the optics of this.” And, you know, I really had to eat my words on that.

The most widely listened-to talk show in West Virginia is a thing called West Virginia Talkline. The host’s name is Hoppy Kercheval. Hoppy also moderates the gubernatorial debate, which probably doesn’t shock you that I’ve never been invited to. The gentleman who ran for governor before me twice in a row on the Libertarian ticket, David Moran, has never been invited to those debates. When I ran in 2020, this gentleman, Hoppy Kercheval, would not give me the time of day. He refused to interview me and he never mentioned me on his show once.

All of the polls that Talkline—that West Virginia MetroNews, which is the entity that owns Talkline and hosts these debates—they never included me in any of their polls. They basically pretended like I did not exist. The Sunday night of the convention, the state party chair and I got an email from Mr. Kercheval, who wanted to have us on the radio that week. Granted, he only gave us seven minutes, and during that seven minutes, he mostly wanted to talk about our reaction to Donald Trump, but it did end with a promise to have me on the show later in the summer to talk about my campaign.

Evans: Oh, wow!

Kolenich: Yeah, it did get us some attention. I mean, maybe not in the way that I would want, but it did get us some attention from him that I would have never gotten before. And then he writes an op-ed commentary daily, and he specifically wrote an op-ed commentary on myself and my campaign later that week. So it got eyes and ears on me and earned media attention for me in West Virginia that I would not have gotten but for Donald Trump being at that convention.

Evans: I’ve asked this question to a few different Libertarian candidates now, and the answers I get are so varied. It’s interesting to hear that you’re someone who went into it with some skepticism but ended up actually getting something good out of it. So, I certainly agree that it’s a more nuanced topic for the Libertarian Party than I feel some people initially thought it would be.

But I’m listening to you answer these questions, and one thing I’m noticing here is that a lot of the officeholders and a lot of the party discussion that we’re having relates to the Republican Party. When we were talking over email last week to set this up, your campaign manager mentioned that your campaign has a real opportunity to relegate the West Virginia Democratic Party to a third party status. I found that really interesting. And it sounds like the Republicans are the primary one-state authority. So, if you could, could you elaborate on what that means and why your campaign feels that way? Because I’m very curious to hear.

Kolenich: Sure. I can absolutely tell you that. So, you know, as the Republican supermajority has taken over, the Democrats continue to decline in West Virginia. And the Libertarian Party is growing at a faster per capita rate in West Virginia than the Republican Party is. The Democratic Party is just continuing to get decimated. In 2020, the Republican gubernatorial candidate got 63.5% of the vote, and the Democratic candidate got 30.2% of the vote, to put that in perspective.

This year there was a poll—and there’s talk that Joe Manchin, who is the former Democratic senator from West Virginia, switched parties the day you would have to switch to be able to run as whatever you want this term. Joe Manchin disavowed the Democratic Party and switched to an independent, which was almost the final nail in the coffin that the Democrats needed in West Virginia.

So there was a poll that came out later that week in the Hampshire Review, which is a newspaper, and it basically said, “If Joe Manchin’s in the race, who are you voting for? Are you voting Republican, are you voting Democrat, or are you voting Joe Manchin?” The Republican was polling at 36.5%. The Democrat, Steve Williams, was polling at 8%. Joe Manchin was polling at 20 or 19%, and I was polling at 35.8%.

Evans: I saw that poll! Yeah, I was sent that.

Kolenich: Mr. Williams, who was the mayor of Huntington, is only getting 8%. And as we’ve been out there on the campaign trail, he’s just not there and not campaigning. In May, he’d only raised $30,000. I mean, the Republicans were spending millions and millions of dollars in the primary, and he’d only raised $30,000. He has no presence in West Virginia. People are upset about that. The Democrats that are left are upset about that, and they’re coming out to my campaign events to let us know they are upset about that.

The city of Charleston is pretty close to this gentleman—it’s pretty close to his hometown, which is Huntington—and Charleston has the biggest Pride event in the state. You would have thought that this Democratic candidate would have been at the Pride event. He was not. I was there. I was the only gubernatorial candidate that was there, and people were coming out in droves to let us know that they were going to be voting Libertarian because the Democrats did not care. They did not care about them, they had not campaigned for their votes, didn’t bother to talk to them, and he’s just not campaigning.

It’s almost as if the Democrats have rolled over dead. So if we presume that there are going to be 63% of people who vote Republican because they did last year, that leaves what? 37%.

Evans: Yeah.

Kolenich: And we just think that the Libertarian Party is well positioned to do far better than the Democratic Party in this election, given where voter registrations are going. The fact that we continue to climb as the Libertarian Party, the Democrats continue to decline, and the Republicans aren’t climbing as fast as we are. And given the fact that we are showing up to events where the Democratic nominee should be and he’s not there.

There was only one Democrat in the primary for governor. He ran unopposed. He’s not able to raise money. There’s talk about Joe Manchin challenging him as an independent. So when you have somebody who used to be a Democrat talking about challenging you as an independent, it just means that the Democratic Party in West Virginia is dead. We think that the Libertarians are going to take over as the second-largest party in the state of West Virginia by November.

Evans: Yeah, I was sent that poll, and at first, I didn’t know what kind of poll it was. I have seen polls similar to it where third party and independent candidates will typically perform very strongly, which is usually indicative of a passionate grassroots base. But it seems like your campaign, and by extension, the Libertarian Party of West Virginia, is in a pretty unique position to rise above what sounds like a floundering Democratic Party. That’s really interesting.

Kolenich: Yeah, we’re very excited.

Evans: I had a few more questions, but you really touched on a lot of what I would have been asking. So, in the interest of time, I want to wrap things up because we’re already approaching 40 minutes. It has been wonderful speaking with you today, and I want to close by giving the floor to you. If there’s anything else that you would like to share or explain further about your campaign or West Virginia or anything, please, by all means.

Kolenich: You know, I think one of the things I love most about running for office is that—and I’m always running to win, always—but if I don’t win, it just makes me feel so good to give folks the option to go to the ballot box in November and place a vote for somebody they actually believe in. So often, we’re going in, and I know we talk a lot about voting for the lesser of two evils, but not only are we voting for the lesser of two evils, but we’re also really voting out of fear. We’re just voting out of fear that we don’t want the other person to win. And it just makes me feel so good.

After the election, if I were not to win, if there are two people who could walk up to me and say, “You know what, I felt great that I could walk in and vote for somebody I truly believed in, that I believed was the best hope for West Virginia and that I believe really set West Virginia on a path that would change its course forever,” then that means I did something worthwhile. With that being said, I don’t think that’s where we are this year. I ran in 2020, and I have never felt the energy and momentum for change and excitement that I feel from voters when I’m out there this year. So I’m really, really hopeful that we’re going to change West Virginia this year.

Evans: That sounds great. Hey, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me about your campaign. I’ll continue to watch and see how things go, so, if anything comes up again that you would want to share or discuss further, I’d love to have you back on.

Kolenich: Thank you, it was great to talk to you.