(1) if you don't live here you have no idea how hard it is for a Republican to win in WV. I had very little confidence that Mollohan could be beaten in the general.
(2) Mollohan was such an utterly corrupt, bottom feeding douche that I'm delighted to see him kicked out, even if replaced by another Dem.
True, and I'll take a conservative Dem over a liberal Dem any day of the week. Hopefully, the GOP will win big enough in November that the occasional conservative Democrat making a pro forma vote for their own Party's leader for the Speakership won't make a difference.
WV strikes me as being about where a lot of the Deep South states like Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina were thirty years ago - willing to vote for a Republican at the Presidential level, but still locked in with the Dems at the local and district level. This makes sense as WV started to make the break a couple of decades after the Deep South did. Shoot, WV went for Carter in 1980, Dukakis in 1988, and Clinton both times. One could make the argument that WV has been voting reliably Republican at the Presidential level only since 2000.