Last week, I noted how shocked I was by the sheer amount of spending by political action committees and independent expenditure committees in statehouse races for this primary period.

As I reported last week, just five groups had spent more than $1.6 million in a 30-day period between March and April 22. Well, a mere one week later and those same five groups have spent more than $2.6 million.

So, in the span of a week, these groups increased their spending by $953,709 – nearly $1 million in just seven days. The five groups in this total include Americans for Prosperity, Sugar Maple PAC, School Freedom Fund, Mountaineer Conservative Action and Make Liberty Win.

As I’ve reported and others (Brad McElhinny with WV MetroNews, Henry Culvyhouse with Mountain State Spotlight, Amelia Knisely with West Virginia Watch, Maddy Sperling with WOWK-TV), three of those groups – Americans for Prosperity, Sugar Maple PAC and School Freedom Fund (Club for Growth) – have connections one way or another to Gov. Patrick Morrisey.

Two of those groups – Mountaineer Conservative Action and Make Liberty Win – appear to have similar goals and some overlap but are otherwise not connected to the others as far as I can tell. Make Liberty Win, a national conservative group that has involved itself in other West Virginia legislative contests over the years, seems mostly interested in opposing GOP incumbents and certain new candidates.

What I can’t seem to tell is if Mountaineer Conservative Action is connected to Mountaineer Conservative Coalition, the 501(c)(4) connected to Senate President Randy Smith, R-Preston, and created by Smith’s son. It is primarily spending its money to support GOP incumbents in the state Senate, such as Senate President Pro Tempore Jay Taylor, R-Taylor; and Sens. Mike Azinger, R-Wood; Mark Maynard, R-Wayne; and Darren Thorne, R-Hampshire.

Mountaineer Conservative Action is also spending money to oppose these senators’ primary opponents as well as state Sen. Tom Takubo, R-Kanawha, the former Senate majority leader and opponent of Smith for the Senate president gavel at the end of 2024 who played a large role in recruiting many of the Senate GOP candidates challenging Smith’s faction within the Republican caucus.

Mountaineer Conservative Action and Make Liberty Win have not spent as much to date on the primary races as have Americans for Prosperity, Sugar Maple PAC and School Freedom Fund. But the two groups combined have spent $680,008.

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As I reported over the weekend, U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., has dropped $250,000 into Mountaineer Freedom Alliance’s political action committee. The group was founded by businessman David H. McKinley, son of the late former U.S. Rep. David B. McKinley, to support conservative statehouse candidates focused on economic development and job creation.

I won’t rehash what I’ve already written. But it is interesting to see this fight over the soul of the West Virginia Republican Party. On one side, you have those who helped build the modern WVGOP from the ground up.

Capito, the daughter of the late three-term Republican Gov. Arch Moore, broke glass ceilings in 2001 with her election to the U.S. House of Representatives, then did so again in 2014 in the U.S. Senate. McKinley, carrying on the legacy of his father who served in the House of Delegates, ran for governor, chaired the state GOP, then served multiple terms in Congress.

On the other side you have Morrisey, the New Jersey native, former congressional attorney and Capitol Hill lobbyist who later made West Virginia his adopted home and served three four-year terms as attorney general after defeating an entrenched Democrat. Morrisey has always been seen as an outsider, but so were Jay Rockefeller and the late Ken Hechler.

I’ve been talking about the divides within the state Republican Party for some time. Those divisions first became apparent to me during COVID-19 and have only grown worse since. I’ve yet to cover a meeting of the West Virginia Republican Executive Committee that hasn’t been raucous. And the fights within the GOP legislative caucuses have only become more pronounced with every session.

Capito and Morrisey are both conservatives, but their tactics are vastly different. And in many ways, this Republican primary has become a referendum on which kind of conservatism will be dominant in the state party going forward.

I cannot and will not predict which side will win when the polls close on May 12. But in Capito’s 2020 primary, she received 173,331 votes and carried 83.34% of the vote in a three-way primary. In the 2024 primary for governor (where Capito’s son, former state lawmaker and current U.S. Attorney Moore Capito placed second), Morrisey received 75,148 votes and only carried 33.27% of the vote in a six-person contest.