As results rolled in on election night, most political consultants and commentators were caught off guard by the victory of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

But in West Virginia, a state where Trump trounced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, another wealthy businessman also claimed victory after capturing the attention of voters for his outsider perspective.

In the race for governor, Jim Justice, a Democrat who is West Virginia’s only billionaire, defeated Republican opponent Bill Cole by 7 percentage points.

Though they may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum—at least in party affiliation this year—the similarities between Trump and Justice are evident.

Justice, however, wasn’t the only candidate to win a governor’s race in a state where voters split the ticket.

In Montana and North Carolina, voters also elected Democrat governors, but supported Trump at the top of the ticket. By contrast, Vermont and New Hampshire voters elected Republican governors but supported Clinton.

Still, in none of those states was the support for Trump as overwhelming as it was in West Virginia.

There, the president-elect bested Clinton by 42 percentage points—a margin second only to Wyoming.

On its face, it’s difficult to see how Democrat Justice could have won the state against Republican Cole, especially given West Virginia’s support for Trump.

But to those who have watched the state move from a Democratic stronghold to one where Republicans hold majorities in the House of Delegates and the state Senate, Justice’s rise to the governor’s mansion didn’t come as much of a shock.

“Jim Justice was just an iconic candidate,” Rex Repass, CEO of Repass Research and Strategic Consulting, and director of the MetroNews West Virginia Poll, told The Daily Signal. “He’s the savior of the Greenbrier hotel. He’s well known in the state, and he’s a business person.”

“Plus, he relates to West Virginians very well,” Repass said. “He just comes across as one of them.”

And Trump’s popularity in the state actually may have helped Justice, 65.

“Jim Justice is the most Trump-like person running for office whose name isn’t Donald Trump,” Geoff Skelley, associate editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told The Daily Signal.

‘Hero’ in West Virginia

It’s difficult to ignore the parallels between the governor-elect and the president-elect.

“Trump and Justice, the two of them together winning in the same year, makes a lot of sense, especially the way things are going in West Virginia,” Skelley said. “It’s a state that’s suffered immensely in recent times, so it doesn’t shock me that voters really took to a renewal message regardless of the party label of the two candidates.”

Both Trump and Justice are wealthy businessmen with no political experience who used their positions as outsiders to woo voters.

Justice’s net worth tops $1.6 billion, according to Forbes, and he is the only billionaire in West Virginia.

His wealth made it possible for him to self-fund his campaign, as Trump did. According to campaign finance reports, Justice loaned his campaign more than $2.6 million.

Over the course of their lives, both men have pledged allegiance to both political parties, with Justice most recently changing his affiliation from Republican to Democrat in February 2015.

And they both campaigned on the promise of economic prosperity.

Now that they’ve won their respective offices, each man plans to collect a salary of just $1.

But though both Justice and Trump have been successful in business, they’re not without their troubles.

In October, one month before Election Day, NPR reported that Justice’s mining companies owed $15 million in taxes and fines.

Still, Justice’s success as a candidate, like Trump’s, can be tied to his personality.

“Personality matters immensely with these kinds of things,” Skelley said. “The idea of ‘Make America Great Again’ for Trump wasn’t dissimilar for Justice. He’s that ‘West Virginia First’ kind of guy.”

In West Virginia, Justice is considered a hero, and a hero for one reason in particular: Justice saved the Greenbrier resort.

The Greenbrier, located in White Sulphur Springs and dubbed “America’s Resort,” has been in operation since 1778. But by 2009, it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

That year, Justice made national news when he beat Marriott Corp., which thought its effort would be a slam dunk, to buying the resort.

In the 18 months following the purchase, the billionaire was able to return the Greenbrier to profitability, according to The Washington Post.

And six days after buying the Greenbrier, Justice hired back the more than 600 employees who were laid off when the resort was hemorrhaging money.

Justice then convinced the PGA to replace the Buick Open, held in Flint, Michigan, with a golf tournament at the Greenbrier—creating the Greenbrier Classic—and persuaded the New Orleans Saints football team to hold its training camp on the resort’s campus.

In June, after deadly floods hit West Virginia, the Greenbrier closed to the public. But Justice opened the resort free of charge to flood victims in need of a place to stay.

Defeating the guy who restored the Greenbrier to its former glory would be a tall task for any challenger, said Repass, who has conducted the MetroNews West Virginia Poll since 1980.

“He’s done so much, and he’s perceived as someone who can open doors and build positive economic momentum in the state,” Repass said, adding:

Bill Cole ran a strong campaign, but I think he was really behind the eight ball from the beginning. You buy the Greenbrier, and you’re a hero in West Virginia for a long time.

A ‘Coal Man’

Republicans in West Virginia for years have used the “war on coal” as an easy line of attack against Democrats competing at the state and national levels.

But it was nearly impossible for that line to stick to Justice.

Justice made his money in the coal industry, inheriting Bluestone Industries and Bluestone Coal Corp. from his father after his death in 1993.

In 2009, Justice sold Bluestone Coal Corp. to OAO Mechel, a Russian company, for $568 million.

In February 2015, the billionaire bought the coal company back for $5 million—less than 1 percent of what he sold it for—a dramatic indication of how much the price of coal had fallen.

“It’s ridiculous to think a coal man is wanting to support the war on coal,” William Gorby, a history professor at West Virginia University, told The Daily Signal.

During the campaign, Justice distanced himself from Clinton and said he couldn’t support the Democratic presidential nominee because of her energy policies.

“The reason I can’t be [a supporter] is her position on coal is diametrically, completely wrong in many, many different ways,” Justice said in an interview with the MetroNews radio network.

But the billionaire businessman’s record as a coal operator isn’t clean, detractors note.

“He’s screwed every coal operator in West Virginia at one time or another,” Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a Democratic political strategist, told Politico in September.

In 2014, NPR reported that Justice had nearly $2 million in unpaid fines to the federal government.

Justice’s mining companies still owe a total of $15 million in fines and taxes in six states, according to a second NPR investigation published in October.

But Justice’s troubles in running his coal mines didn’t motivate voters to support Cole.

After the second of two gubernatorial debates, Repass conducted a focus group with 12 voters and found that though Justice’s tax issues “raised a red flag,” they largely still trusted him.

“It was about overall trust and feeling like he would work hard for the state,” Repass said, adding:

People understood that successful business people who have multiple companies from time to time have challenges with basically dealing with tax issues and having to appeal tax issues and having to work with vendors.

Typical Democratic Candidate

Gorby, who studies West Virginia and Appalachian history, said Justice is no different than other Democrats who have run for governor in the Mountain State and won.

Since the 1970s, West Virginia’s Democratic Party has made a habit out of nominating gubernatorial candidates who are independently wealthy or political outsiders, Gorby said. Think Jay Rockefeller, governor from 1977 to 1985, and Gaston Caperton, governor from 1989 to 1997.

“[Caperton] ran on the idea that you need an independently minded figure to run and make some structural reforms, and was able to get elected,” Gorby said. “Justice used that same language and was using that same mentality.”

But this year’s governor’s race didn’t exactly pit an outsider against a political insider.

Like Justice, Republican candidate Cole is a businessman; he owns several car dealerships in West Virginia and Kentucky.

Cole served just seven months in the state House of Delegates in 2010, when he filled a vacant seat. In 2012, Cole was elected to the state Senate and became president of the chamber last year.

During Cole’s tenure, the Senate passed a litany of bills that should’ve bolstered his conservative bonafides, including a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, a right-to-work bill, and a measure allowing residents to carry concealed handguns without a permit.

But Rob Cornelius, who used to work with the state party and currently chairs the Wood County Republican Party, said Cole’s political consultants ended up burying his record and distancing him from Trump.

“[Voters] didn’t know Cole, they didn’t perceive him to be conservative, and they enjoyed Jim Justice’s ‘Mayberry’ act,” Cornelius told The Daily Signal.

Gorby, though, said Justice was able to use Cole’s record against him.

During this year’s legislative session, lawmakers were forced to reconvene in Charleston for a 17-day special session to work out budget issues, which provided Justice with fodder on the campaign trail.

“Bill Cole wasted over a half a million dollars of your money on a special session to pass a budget that solved nothing,” the Democrat candidate said in an ad in September. “What West Virginia needs is jobs—good jobs that increase state revenue and decrease unemployment. That’s how you balance the budget.”

In a radio interview, Cole attempted to shift the blame for the special session to Justice and accused the Democrat’s campaign of pushing House delegates to slow down budget negotiations because “it’ll make the Republicans look bad.”

But Justice’s ability to use the special session against Cole had the desired effect, Gorby said.

“There were a lot of issues that came up during the campaign and during the debates where Justice was able to effectively criticize some of the policies that had been pushed by Cole,” he said. “Jim Justice made a persuasive argument by blaming a lot of that on the Senate president that we had to have a special session, that we spent several hundred thousand dollars, and we didn’t really solve a lot of the long-term budget issues.”

Some say one more legislative change may have hurt Cole.

During the 2015 session—Cole’s first as Senate president—the Republican-controlled state Legislature decided to eliminate “straight-ticket” voting, which allows voters to select a party’s entire slate of candidates.

According to the secretary of state’s office, 27 percent of West Virginia voters took advantage of the straight-ticket option during the 2014 general election. Of those who voted straight ticket, 53 percent voted Republican.

“That was a curious move to make for Republicans controlling both houses of the state Legislature to decide to do that,” Skelley said of the decision to eliminate straight-ticket voting.

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, perhaps “had some foresight saying this is a good thing to do,” Skelley said.

“I wonder if that hurt Cole to some degree.”

Justice may be faced with an early test as he assumes office Jan. 16.

According to reports, Trump has considered U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., for one or more positions in his administration.

If the president-elect taps Manchin, himself a former West Virginia governor, Justice would be responsible for filling the vacancy. (For more from the author of “How a Billionaire Democrat Running for Governor Won in Trump Country” please click HERE)

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While flying home recently from an overseas trip, I watched a movie in which the CIA played a prominent role, and if the movie is anything is close to reality, the CIA knows a lot – and I mean a whole lot, from what’s on our computers to what we’re talking about on our phones.

Yet a healthy percentage of the American population seems to trust President-elect Trump more than our nation’s Central Intelligence Agency. How can this be?

I asked my Twitter followers, “When it comes to alleged Russian influence on the elections, do you believe the CIA or Trump?”

Remarkably, only 18 percent said they trusted the CIA while 44 percent said they trusted Trump and 38 percent said they were unsure – and it should be noted that while the vast majority of my Twitter followers are, to my knowledge, Christian conservatives, a good number of them did not support Trump. Why, then, are they so distrusting of the CIA?

To answer that question, we can ask this: “Do you personally trust the federal government?” As broad as that question is, I think the answer for many Americans would be, “No, I don’t.”

After all the federal government is the IRS, the Department of Justice, the FBI – and also the CIA. The federal government is the big bad “them” which is always out to get the vulnerable little “us.”

As for Trump, while he is about to become the head of that very federal government, he is perceived by many Americans to be “one of us” rather than part of the system, and the way he is conducting himself thus far as president-elect, with his Twitter account as active as ever, continues to reinforce that perception. He is the champion of “us.”

The federal government is also hardly a stranger to corruption or mismanagement, unless you believe the IRS was not guilty of unfair treatment of conservative organizations and the Department of Justice was not guilty of favored treatment of Hillary Clinton and FBI Director James Comey acted in a completely dispassionate and professional manner. And so it’s easy to think that the information linked from unnamed CIA sources is unreliable. After all, this is President Obama’s CIA, is it not?

Confidence in Institutions
We also should bear in mind that the source for the Russian hacking claims is the liberal, mainstream media, which has also taken a big credibility hit in recent months.

Consider these striking results from a June, 2016 Gallup poll focused on Americans’ “confidence in institutions.”

The pollster said to each participant, “I am going to read you a list of institutions in American society. Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in each one – a great deal, quite a lot, some, or very little?”

At the top of the list was the military, with a high mark of 73 percent positive (41 percent responding with “a great deal” of trust and 32 percent with “quite a lot”). At the bottom of the list was Congress, with only a 6 percent positive response (those responding with “a great deal” of trust were too small to number; 6 percent said they had “quite a lot” of trust in Congress). What a staggeringly poor showing for our elected officials, and what a strong showing for our military.

Numbers two and three at the top of the list were small business (68 percent total) and the police (56 percent). Rounding out the bottom of the list were big business (18 percent total), newspapers (20 percent) and television news (21 percent). And despite the constant attacks on religion in America, the church ranked number four on the list, one slot higher than the presidency, which was then followed by the Supreme Court, the public schools, banks, and organized labor.

The offshoot of all this is that the CIA is perceived by many as being part of a larger, untrustworthy system, while those pushing the Russian hacking narrative are part of the untrustworthy media. Added to this is the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign is supportive of efforts to launch an investigation into the alleged Russian hack, and it’s easy to see why many trust Trump more than the CIA right now.

Callers to my radio show also emphasized that, whoever was behind the hack, what was revealed was only damning because it was true. Because of this, there’s very little sympathy for the Democratic complaints about the hacking and more concern with the content of the hacked material than the question of who did the hacking.

I personally have no idea whether Russia hacked us or not, and obviously, it will be important for Trump and the CIA to find a place of rapprochement and trust in the days ahead. But right now, Trump continues to represent the views of a fairly significant portion of the populace which is, after all, how he got elected. (For more from the author of “Why Many Americans Trust Donald Trump More Than the CIA” please click HERE)

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Being penny-wise could pay off big over the next decade, according to budget experts looking at part of President-elect Donald Trump’s spending plan.

While campaigning in September, Trump told the New York Economic Club, “If we save just one penny of each federal dollar spent on nondefense, and non-entitlement programs, we can save almost $1 trillion over the next decade—again this is spending that does not touch defense, and that does not touch entitlements.”

Trump’s plan is narrower than similar plans previously proposed in Congress for an across-the-board 1 cent out of every $1 cut in each federal agency’s budget from the previous year, because it would exclude cuts from the military and entitlements.

But, since most federal agencies are projected to grow by 4 percent per year, this could lead to a reduction in spending by a quarter over a decade, or about $630 billion less in nondefense discretionary spending, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Trump projected “almost $1 trillion” in his economic speech in September.

For now, the Trump transition team did not have details as to how quickly the plan would be implemented. More details will come after Trump takes office, transition team spokesman Jason Miller said.

“The penny plan is something the president-elect spoke about on the campaign trail as part of a broader economic and spending plan,” Miller told The Daily Signal during a conference call with reporters. “We’ll explain of the mechanics of it after he is in office. But it is an innovative cost-cutting measure.”

What seems to be a small reduction, one penny out of every dollar or 1 percent, would accumulate over 10 years. For example, a federal agency with a $100 billion budget would decline to $99 billion the next year, then to $98.01 billion the year after that.

The Trump version of the penny plan would apply only to nondefense discretionary spending, which already faces spending caps.

Discretionary spending includes areas such as education, research, environmental and health programs, foreign aid, or any spending that Congress must set. That’s as opposed to entitlement or “mandatory” programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that occur without annual action by Congress.

“Trump’s version of the penny plan is actually more targeted and thoughtful because it isolates this to spending that is already being capped,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told The Daily Signal.

Goldwein said a one-fourth reduction in nondiscretionary spending over a decade will accumulate, even if the “penny” branding seems small.

“This will seem modest in the first years, but it will accumulate significantly,” he said. “I’m not advocating against a 25 percent reduction, but it will mean there are some nondefense discretionary programs that they’ve got to deal with.”

Goldwein also said this won’t necessarily conflict with Trump’s ambitious plans for infrastructure, since most of that will be financed through highway funds.

If Trump’s economic policies are successful in spurring job growth, then government revenues could increase enough to pay for infrastructure spending, said Justin Bogie, a senior policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation.

However, unlike other “penny plan” proposals in Congress, the Trump plan shields defense and entitlement spending.

“Entitlements are the biggest driver of the debt,” Bogie told The Daily Signal. “ [Trump’s version of the plan] limits itself on how much it can save. But, it’s better than nothing.”

Politically, Bogie thinks the penny plan could be easy to sell.

“It’s very anecdotal to say that if every agency cuts just one penny from every $1, you’ll have substantial savings,” Bogie said.

The plan already has support in Congress. In July, House Budget Committee member Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., introduced a version of the “penny plan” that “would cut a single penny from every dollar the federal government spends.”

This would be across the board, and would cap federal spending as a percentage of the economy at 18 percent by 2022.

It is quite unlikely lawmakers would have the discipline to keep a “penny plan” in place for a decade, said Damian Brady, director of research at the National Taxpayer Union Foundation. Yet, if such a plan is in place for even a few years it would at least reduce spending as a percentage of the economy and maybe lead to a budget surplus, he said.

“If it’s enacted and actually adhered to, it would definitely lead to more savings,” Brady told The Daily Signal of the penny plan. “It’s nice on paper but history tells us Congress and the executive branch don’t hold the line on spending for long. If they do this for a couple of years, they will have extra money to play around with and begin spending again.” (For more from the author of “Trump’s ‘Penny Plan’ Could Slash Federal Spending over Decade” please click HERE)

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