West Virginia’s Republican Candidate For Senator Jim Justice Barely Shows Up to Work: Colleagues

West Virginia candidate Jim Justice may almost certainly snag a seat in the U.S. Senate next year. But even the Republican governor's own colleagues say that his attendance at work is less of a guarantee.

Nearly a dozen people in West Virginia’s political scene told Politico that Justice is rarely seen at the state capitol building in Charleston, which houses the governor's office.

Justice, nicknamed “Big Jim,” is perhaps best known nationally as the guy who spoke to the Republican National Convention in July with his English bulldog, “Babydog,” sitting in a chair next to his podium.

That was not a bit. Justice brings the admittedly adorable Babydog with him all over, including to official events. “It’s an extension of him,” one West Virginia Republican operative told Politico. “Babydog is not like a prop. It’s like he has made the dog an associative tool to his humanity. It’s weird.”

But while he’s nationally best known for Babydog, in Charleston, Justice is perhaps best known as the guy who nobody sees. “There’s an old saying that 80 percent of success in life is showing up, and Jim Justice rarely shows up,” Democratic state Del. Mike Pushkin told Politico. “I don’t think anybody in West Virginia honestly believes that Jim Justice is going to show up in Washington, D.C., regularly.”

It’s not just partisan Democrats who expressed alarm.

“There is concern about — and it’s frequently talked about amongst legislators and amongst everybody here — about his poor health,” one GOP state legislator, speaking anonymously, told Politico. “There was talk from time to time about whether he was going to be able to physically last and be able to carry out his term.”

Justice has long standing, and well-known, mobility issues due to his weight and height, and also had his gallbladder removed last year. The same year, multiple bill signings were delayed by his health issues.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who would be one of Justice’s Republican colleagues, worried last year that “Justice has got a lot of health issues and is not very mobile. There's a question of how he'll be able to serve given his health.”

Besides Justice’s health, critics have suggested he is otherwise focused on his embattled business empire or the high school basketball team he coaches two hours outside the capital—he’s said he’ll consider quitting the latter gig if elected to the U.S. Senate.

Even those who defended Justice admitted they don’t see him much and were left to perform rhetorical backflips to get to something resembling a compliment.

“He’s not always around,” Republican state Del. Geno Chiarelli told Politico. “He wasn’t always the most transparent. It wasn’t always easy to get a hold of him. But when it comes down to it, when the chips were down, we knew what he wanted.”

Politico noted that, when Democrats tried to get a hold of Justice’s official schedule through a public records request last year, his office claimed he doesn’t keep “a schedule or calendar solely for official business.”

But when the Associated Press got a hold of seven months of Justice’s schedules during his first term in 2019, the record showed he was mostly absent from the state capital and barely met with his own Cabinet.