West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin has a new ad against his Republican opponent John Raese.
All the claims are true.
Roll Call confirmed Friday that Elizabeth Raese is registered to vote in both states but has not voted in West Virginia since 1998. But in an interview this week with Time magazine, she indicated that she would be — and has been — voting in West Virginia.
“We are West Virginians,” Elizabeth Raese said, according to Time reporter Jay Newton-Small. “We live here, we vote here, people know that. We also have a home in Colorado, but we’re not residents there either.”
Raese campaign spokesman Kevin McLaughlin said Elizabeth Raese does not remember the conversation with the Time reporter, but he added that, “If she did say this, she obviously misspoke.”
Though John Raese’s campaign has repeatedly confirmed that he lives and pays taxes in West Virginia, an investigation by the nonpartisan PolitiFact.com showed that his wife has been registered to vote in Palm Beach County, Fla., since 2001 and voted there in 2008.
Roll Call independently confirmed with Monongalia County (W.Va.) Clerk Carye Blaney that Elizabeth Raese is also registered to vote in Morgantown, W.Va., where she and her husband own a home, but she hasn’t voted there in 12 years.
Blaney said she requested and received certification from Palm Beach County on Friday that Elizabeth Raese has been living and voting there, so she will remove the candidate’s wife from the county voter rolls. Elizabeth Raese will not be able to vote in West Virginia in this year’s elections.
Coupled with Raese’s campaign putting out a casting call for his commercial that needed actors to be “hicky” so they would closely resemble the stereotype West Virginia residents, I would guess this is pretty effective attack. I know in Pennsylvania, revelations that Rick Santorum’s family was living in Virginia and yet was attending an internet charter school on PA taxpayer’s dime helped to sway Republican friendly voters into Bob Casey’s column. Voters don’t like it when a candidate wants to represent their state and yet is too good to live in their state.