Apologies in advance for the length of this post—I hereby pledge that future posts will be shorter. But here goes . . .

 

While contemporary politics leaves much to be desired, from my earliest memories I have always considered public service to be an honorable and noble profession. From the Schoolhouse Rock “I’m Just a Bill” cartoon I watched as a child, to my high school civics class with Mr. Donathan, to West Virginia Mountaineer Boys State, to my first real job working as a legislative assistant to Senator Robert C. Byrd, to the past 7½ years I have spent serving as mayor of my hometown of Wheeling, I have always believed in that sacred pact formed between voters and the people they put in office.

 

But as I look at where we are today, it is hard not to conclude that in the eyes of many that sacred pact has been broken. Voters’ trust in the men and women they elect is at an all-time low, and too many politicians seem to be responding not by seeking consensus but instead by moving further towards extreme positions to protect their flanks in the next primary.

 

I am running for the United States Senate because I believe I have both the temperament and the experience to break through the partisan stalemate in Washington and elevate basic notions of sanity and decency in doing so. To be clear, this does not mean surveying the political landscape and trying to find the ideological center. There is no plausible middle ground, for example between those who support democracy and those who do not. Or between those who believe that every American should have access to quality and affordable health care, and those who do not. And on those issues splitting the difference just rewards the side with the more extreme view. What I have instead learned as mayor is how to break issues down into core values first and then to work outwards towards consensus solutions. While as a people we may be as divided as ever on political issues, there tends to be much more overlap with our core values. And I have made finding and piecing together those overlaps central to my approach to public service.

 

The obvious answers here could be found in a social media bio section: Husband. Father. 7th generation West Virginian. Mayor of my hometown. Concerned citizen. Historic preservationist. DIY carpenter. Amateur musician. Dog lover. Genealogy enthusiast. And so on.

And those would be a good start. But I am not sure they capture the essence of who I am. Fundamentally, at my core, there is a part of me that has always identified with the underdog.

It is why that for as long as I have had political thoughts I have identified with the Democratic Party and the policies that emanated from the FDR, JFK, and LBJ presidencies. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, civil rights and fair housing laws, and collective bargaining rights for unions all seemed to me to be in furtherance of a fairer outcome.

 

It is why I have always favored a tax system that taxes billionaires at a higher effective rate than it taxes those who clean those billionaires’ bathrooms—unlike the effective outcome we often see with our tax code today.

It is what has driven me as mayor to push for civil rights initiatives to protect minorities in Wheeling, despite significant political pushback.

 

It is what caused me to split with other members of Wheeling City Council and vote against a recent ordinance to ban homeless encampments before we had a compassionate and appropriate safety net in place to protect those displaced.

 

To me, this is the core of who I am. And it encapsulates the values I hope to pass on to my son. While I am no psychologist, I believe this underdog spirit comes from certain circumstances of my childhood. While I was always loved, always well fed, and always dressed to perfection by my mother, my earliest years were spent living in a singlewide trailer in a household existing paycheck to paycheck. Many of my cousins, aunts, and uncles—even my maternal grandparents—were at or below the poverty line. And I saw firsthand the challenges of living with little margin for error in a world that seemed to be designed for other people—those with money. There is nothing in my life more central to my desire for public service than making sure that there are opportunities for everyone to improve their own lives—regardless of their starting point.

 

And then there was my speech. For as long as I can remember talking, I can remember my brain and mouth being on different frequencies. I distinctly recall not being able to complete a sentence without stuttering while in elementary school. And I remember how the classroom bullies would never let me forget it. I remember my parents trying speech therapy and even hypnosis to try to “cure” me, to no avail. Over time, my speech would improve, to the point where I could hide it in limited conversation. But it would always rear its ugly head in the most inopportune times. Decades later, it nearly stopped me from running for mayor because I feared how it would be received during speeches. But today, with nearly a decade of those speeches behind me, I consider my speech impediment not the curse I thought it was as a child but instead as a gift. A door that opened in my life to help me see the plight of those with internal or visible struggles. A pathway to empathy for the bullied. It is very much a defining part of who I am.

 

The easy answer here would be to link to About Me section of the City of Wheeling website, which can be found at: https://www.wheelingwv.gov/departments/Mayor

But much of what is described therein occurs after I was first elected Mayor of Wheeling in 2016. As I think about it today, getting elected mayor in the first place is an accomplishment I will always cherish and which is relevant for the campaign ahead of me. Because I entered that campaign as a decided underdog with virtually no name recognition against a very popular incumbent member of City Council. And along the way, as I began to gain traction, I found myself the target of some rather vicious mudslinging by local elected officials trying to discredit my candidacy with false rumors. But I kept my head down and kept knocking on some 4,000 doors across every neighborhood in Wheeling. I rose above pettiness and instead spent my time listening to actual Wheeling residents and hearing their concerns about the present as well as their hopes for the future. And I won a four-person race with 53% of the vote—15% more than the second-place finisher. This experience taught me that voters are often much smarter than the political pundits who seek to explain them—particularly when it comes to sensing authenticity. And it taught me that the type of race worth entering might just be the one that everybody says you cannot win.

 

Beyond the 2016 election and the various accomplishments and accolades I have achieved as mayor (many of which are described here: https://elliottforwv.com/about/ ), I am also very proud of the way I have dealt with unexpected events during my time in office. Two in particular come to mind. The first was the closure of OVMC—one of Wheeling’s two hospitals—in 2019. Within a matter of months, a major local employer (of approximately 750 jobs) closed its doors and left roughly 4 acres near our downtown and some 800,000 square foot of commercial building space sitting empty. With no imminent interest in those properties, I pushed City Council to take ownership of the entire OVMC campus, which we were able to acquire for a fraction of its value. While this decision was very controversial at the time, five years later, we have turned the sour OVMC lemon into delicious lemonade. In one of the former OVMC buildings now sits the new headquarters of the Wheeling Police Department—its first new home since 1959. And on the balance of the campus will soon be an estimated $100 million regional cancer center operated by WVU Medicine.

 

The other unexpected twist to my time in office was of course the COVID-19 pandemic. While no mayor in the nation was spared this experience, I can say with some certainty that there were no instruction manuals on how to guide a community through a global pandemic. At the time I stayed in close communication with our public health officials and turned to Facebook Live to give regular updates to local residents. We kept the business of City Council moving by utilizing Zoom for meetings and worked closely with our state and federal partners to navigate the many ups and downs of that crisis. And we approved a variety of measures to provide direct and immediate assistance to local businesses and residents being impacted by the shutdown. While there are lessons learned to be gleaned from any such experience, I am very proud of the way we on City Council were able to navigate this once-in-a-century public health crisis.

 

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1310 Market Street, #102

Wheeling, WV 26003

info@elliottforwv.com