I don't know about any of you, but I'm already exhausted and overwhelmed by the 2024 election, and none of the candidates are even official yet.
We already know next year's campaigns will receive major focus. There's a presidential election coming up, even though it seems as if we just finished up the last one. There are U.S. Senate and U.S. House seats up for grabs. West Virginia will have a new governor, a new attorney general and new (yet old) people sitting in various other elected seats. We've been covering candidacy announcements for the last 10 months, and official candidate filings won't even begin until January in most cases.
It's going to be a heavy ballot locally, too, with a county commission seat coming due in both Hancock and Brooke counties, a couple of school board seats up for grabs in each county, Weirton's municipal election set to go before the city's voters with officials working on what they hope will be a more cooperative approach with the counties in operating the election. We've also had a couple of our current legislators already make their intentions clear for next year, and rumors continue to persist about others who are considering throwing their hats in the ring.
Those things I can handle fairly well. The way election cycles have lenghthened for today's society, it's pretty much expected candidates are going to be declaring months (and in some cases years) prior to the actual filing period. Remember we even had a couple who made their intentions known shortly after the last election ended.
The worst part of it is the almost daily inundation of "attack ad" emails and endorsement messages filling my inbox. There are even a handful of pieces arriving in the mailbox.
I've lost track of the number of endorsement emails I've received in recent weeks, mostly announcing a state legislator is putting their name behind this candidate for governor or this individual running for U.S. Senate.
There are emails at least four times each week attacking Gov. Jim Justice for one thing or another. The interesting thing there is they are coming from both Democrats and Republicans.
I'm not certain how much the regular citizen pays attention to all of this even as elections are a couple of months away, let alone a year down the road. I'm sure most of them probably toss the mailers into the recycling or garbage right along with the rest of their junk mail, but there may be a few here and there who take the time to read the claims made by the campaigns.
As for the endorsements, most of us are going to forget that Legislator X or Organization Y endorsed Candidate Z if the announcements are made in August or September of 2023 for an election taking place in May 2024. One would think they would want to hold off on issuing their backing until at least the filing period is complete.
We've already seen a couple of instances where a candidate has declared for one office and then quietly changed to a different office. They may not even be running by the time we get to January.
I get that, in most cases anyway, "the early bird gets the worm." Candidates want to get out ahead of any potential field which might be forming for a particular office. But there's another phrase which also should be kept in mind in times like these: "Slow and steady wins the race."
(Howell, a resident of Colliers, is managing editor of The Weirton Daily Times, and can be contacted at chowell@weirtondailytimes.com or followed on Twitter @CHowellWDT)