May 25, 2018 2 min read

You would have thought that doing prison time for his role in the deaths of 29 miners would have precluded former coal baron Don Blankenship from being a serious candidate for a high-level political seat, but there he was running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in West Virginia this year.

To the credit of the Mountain State’s GOP voters, Blankenship finished third in the race. To their discredit, he got 20 percent of the vote. But if Republicans, intent on unseating Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in November, thought they had dodged the Blankenship bullet, they might be wrong.

Blankenship now says that he will, indeed, be running in November, as the candidate of the Constitution Party, whose leaders unanimously nominated him, according to an Associated Press report earlier this week.

“Blankenship said his personal views align with those of the Constitution Party, whose goal is to restore U.S. government philosophy to its biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its constitutional boundaries,” the report said.

But can Blankenship really run in the Republican primary, lose that race and then hitch his wagon to another party for the November general election?

State law says no. It’s called the “sore loser” or “sour grapes” law, and it prohibits candidates from doing exactly what Blankenship is trying to do.

Blankenship says he’ll go to court if anyone challenges his latest candidacy, and he says he’ll win, “absent a politically motivated decision by the courts.”

That sounds like pure Blankenship. He’ll win, unless everybody’s out to get him. Sounds like an old-fashioned persecution complex.