CANARY IN A COALMINE — If West Virginia had a Mount Rushmore, the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, the longest-serving senator in American history, would be on it. Even before he died in 2010 , his name was everywhere in the state — on bridges, roads, federal buildings, libraries, hospitals and even a space telescope — leading to much chortling during his lifetime about all the things in West Virginia paid for by taxpayers but named after the pork-loving Byrd. For much of his career, West Virginia was a Democratic state. Now it’s one of the reddest states on the map. In a measure of how far to the right West Virginia has veered over the past two decades, Republican lawmakers now want to remove a statue of Byrd from a prominent spot in the statehouse. The experience is a cautionary tale for national Democrats, who are reeling in the aftermath of the 2024 elections and desperate to reconnect with the party’s blue collar heritage. West Virginia is a model of working class voter alienation from the national Democratic Party — and an extreme example of the consequences. It’s easy to forget that when Democratic lawmakers unveiled the Byrd statue in 1997 , West Virginia was solidly blue. Bill Clinton had just carried the state in the presidential election. But soon after that the Democratic hold on the state began to loosen, and since Byrd’s death in 2010 , the state Democratic Party has cratered. Today, the governor, every other statewide elected official and the two-member congressional delegation are Republican. Donald Trump won all 55 counties last fall. There are only 11 Democrats left in the 134-member legislature. Now the 10-foot bronze Byrd statue is literally one of the last Democrats standing in the state. In recent years, Byrd’s name has come off a few buildings, including a manufacturing institute at Marshall University and a student health center at a private college in the state’s Northern Panhandle. State Senate Republicans have made several attempts to remove or replace the Byrd statue, with the newest push coming from Republican state Sen. Michael Azinger, who introduced a bill this month to replace it with one of George Washington and fill other prominent corners of the Capitol with statues of Abraham Lincoln, James Madison and Arthur Boreman, the state’s first governor. Azinger has a history of throwing shade at Byrd. In 2017, he was the sole senator to vote against a resolution honoring Byrd’s 100th birthday. Azinger did not respond to a request for comment. A separate bill last year would have set aside $300,000 for a similar replacement plan, but now the state has a $400 million budget hole , so commissioning and installing such figures could be hard to justify at the moment. Plus, the Capitol has already been mired in controversy over another recent remodel that included a mural with an English bulldog that bears an uncanny resemblance to Babydog, the favored political prop of GOP Sen. Jim Justice, the former governor who was recently elected to the seat once held by Byrd. Close to 30 years after its unveiling, it’s hard to imagine the statehouse without Byrd’s likeness. The statue, by a sculptor from central West Virginia , stands out. There he is, Byrd, looming over the events of the day. When Byrd died at age 92, his body was brought into the rotunda to lay in state. The statue was already there, making Byrd probably one of the few people in history whose body was carried past their own metal likeness. But his past as a Ku Klux Klan member in the early 1940s and his 14-hour filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — both of which he would disavow in his later years — has certainly haunted his legacy. “We have a statue in the rotunda of someone who fought the civil rights movement,” state Sen. Jason Barrett, a Republican, said during a recent committee hearing. Yet Byrd’s story is far more complicated. A one-time Democratic Senate majority leader, he reshaped his legacy into one liberals could love by forcefully opposing the 2003 war in Iraq and becoming an early backer of Barack Obama’s first campaign for president. He rooted his opposition of the war in Iraq to the mistake he made voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. When he died, the NAACP mourned his passing and Obama praised his capacity to change , learn, listen and “be made more perfect.” Sam Petsonk, a former Byrd staffer and DNC committee member from the state, said the fight over the statue is the product of reactionary politicians trying to ignore Byrd’s hard-won lessons. “The movement to erase all of the lessons that Sen. Byrd stands for about the Constitution, the separation of powers and the importance of learning from our own hard history — that movement is very real,” he said. Former Rep. Nick Rahall, who started his career as a Byrd aide, said he would stand guard by the bronze Byrd if he had too. “There’s no way I’m going to sit still and let the Robert C. Byrd statue be moved out of our state Capitol,” he said. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at rrivard@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ryrivard .
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