General Discussion

Based on what? Nothing. In 1999, Karl Rove had a plan:

"His strategy rested on the prospect of pulling the state into the nationalization of politics. The culture wars and Christian Coalition had been steadily drawing most of rural America into Republican hands, but West Virginia was an exception; the Democratic Party's historical attention to the problems of Appalachia had made the state unnaturally resistant to the national trends. 'Many Democratic voters were pro-life, pro-prayer, and pro-gun, even if they had voted Democratic for decades, and it seemed that Bush would be a better fit than the elitist Al Gore' Rove [said]. In particular, the progressive environmental policies of the Clinton administration had vexed coal miners, and nobody was more associated with efforts to raise attention on climate change than the Democratic nominee for president.

"The Bush-Cheney campaign opened eighteen offices across West Virginia. It barraged the state's tiny media market with ads, funded most importantly by a coal tycoon named James H. Harless. ... Conservatives realized that if they could turn West Virginia into a presidential contest, they could also enlist it in the larger libertarian project funded by the Kochs and Hanleys and other wealthy donors: the organized resistance to business regulation and taxes. For years, the state had greeted visitors with billboards that said, 'Wild Wonderful West Virginia.' In 2006 it adopted a new slogan: 'Open for Business.' Conservatives in West Virginia presented the regulation of heavy industry as a threat to the state's cultural and existential survival. ... Over the decades, the combined effects of pressure, incentives, and sheer corruption formed a West Virginia political culture in which virtually any attempt to protect lives or land was reduced to a false choice: jobs or health."

Evan Osnos, "Wildland"