Some West Virginia Republican officeholders are already campaigning for governor in 2024. But first they need to figure out what happened in 2020.

Years after Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner of the White House, Secretary of State Mac Warner and Atty arrived. General Patrick Morrisey says they remain concerned his victory was illegitimate. They persist in those views despite repeated investigations, audits and lawsuits that concluded there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud or improper counting that could have swayed the results in Donald Trump’s favor.

Warner, who is leading the election in West Virginia, held out for more than two years before taking to a talk show this week to say he can now firmly say “he believes the election was stolen.”

That election was thrown, it was stolen and we shouldn’t keep quiet,” he said on Talk Radio WRNR in the state’s Eastern Panhandle.

Claiming that the 2020 presidential race has been stolen has been a staple for some Republicans. Trump himself has fueled those allegations, though he has recently shifted his complaints somewhat away from specific disputes over voting procedures in swing states. He has embraced broader claims that tech companies, the media and federal intelligence officials colluded to cover up incriminating information on Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop.

It is these allegations that Warner says he finds credible, ignoring denials by social media executives and federal law enforcement officials that they have been pressured by Democrats to suppress the story. In an interview last week, Warner called the alleged actions treacherous and said they should be investigated more thoroughly before the next election.

But even in West Virginia, where Trump has voted twice in every county, some voters view recurring concerns about 2020 as nothing more than a GOP tick-off.

It doesn’t matter which Republican will be in the field, they’ll all say 2020 was fake,” said Trevor Southerly, a 20-year-old community college student from Moorefield. “It’s a political move, and they have to make the move or they’re going to lose.

Southerly said what draws him to Morrisey is his support for school selection programs and the expansion of the energy production workforce in West Virginia.

The Republican Party, Southerly said, is too focused on national issues and talking points rather than what matters to people at the local level, especially in West Virginia, which consistently ranks among the highest in the country in poverty and overdose death rates and among the lowest for life expectancy and educational attainment.

He thinks Morrisey has better plans to address those issues.

As Attorney General since 2013, Morrisey has had the opportunity to promote his self-proclaimed role as the state’s conservative fighter. He has defended laws passed by the Republican-controlled legislature on school choice, transgender participation in sports and abortion.

Before that, he joined a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election, which was dismissed by the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court.

In an interview last week, Morrisey repeated previous claims of significant irregularities in the 2020 election. He declined to say for sure whether he believes Biden’s victory was fraudulent.

He serves as the President of the United States. We know what’s going on right now, Morrisey said.

After West Virginia became the last in the nation to declare a presidential winner in 2020, Army veteran Warner said he supported the state’s involvement in the legal effort to challenge the results.

Warner also appeared at a March for Trump rally in Charleston after the election, where he appeared to be holding up a Stop the Steal sign.

Warner was one of the first GOP election officials to choose to retire from the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonpartisan group with a reputation for fighting voter fraud. Trump has characterized it as a “terrible” system that “pumps the reels for the Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.

But Warner never said publicly before this week that he believes the election was stolen, saying that opinion has crystallized in his mind as new information has come out.

But even voters who agree say other issues are more important.

Ken Drum, who runs the GOP in Harrison County, said he doesn’t believe Biden legitimately won the race, but his main concern is finding a candidate who will keep nearly all abortions in the state illegal and protect gun rights. For him, that’s Morrisey.

Dee Truman, a Roane County welder’s helper, said she trusts Warner because his family has lived in West Virginia for six generations and he understands why preserving coal and getting the state’s gas pipelines back up and running are important to workers like them.

She said she’s concerned about post-2020 post-2020 election security, but she’s impressed with Warner’s work to remove from the ballot lists people he said were ineligible to vote. His office says it has identified 300,000 people since 2017, in a state of 1.8 million, who can no longer vote because they have moved, died or have been convicted of a crime. During Warner’s tenure, 260,000 new voters registered.

Truman said those efforts make her feel like West Virginia is probably one of the safest states when it comes to election security.

Lori and Tim Smith are both registered independents and run a company in Marshall County that helps people make homes and businesses accessible to people with disabilities. Lori Smith, 54, said changes Warner made as Secretary of State saved them hours of paperwork.

Warner also started a pilot project that allowed military and foreign citizens to use a mobile voting application. That mattered to Tim Smith, an Army veteran, who had experienced trouble voting when he was deployed.

He wants people to vote legitimately, and to ban any form of cheating, frankly, said Lori Smith. “I don’t feel there’s anything wrong with wanting to make a system that’s more efficient and fairer.”

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