After nearly three decades around the West Virginia statehouse, Mike Caputo prepares to move on
After nearly three decades around the West Virginia statehouse, Mike Caputo prepares to move on
The West Virginia Weakly Wednesday Extra
The West Virginia Weakly will return Saturday for our regularly scheduled Weakly Reader email update. Trust us, we know a special session just wrapped up in Charleston and we’ll get you a recap of things in due time. Saturday, in fact. But this interview has been in the hopper for a minute — and we wanted to get it out and into your inboxes.
Also, this warning — we’re turning on paid subscriptions tomorrow evening at 6pm. If you’ve made a pledge of support, you may notice an odd debit to your bank account.
Our WV Weakly Reader will always be free to anyone willing to hand over their email address. But the following interview with outgoing Sen. Mike Caputo (D-Marion) is the sort of thing that will only be made available to paid subscribers.
For nearly 30 years, Mike Caputo has been on the ballot for a seat in the West Virginia Legislature in every election cycle possible. Up until last week’s primary election, that is.
“There were a couple of elections that I wasn’t on the ballot. When we had the special election for U.S. Senate when Senator Byrd died [in 2010] — and then we had to have a special election for governor [in 2011] and I didn’t have to be in that election, either,” Caputo recalled. “But other than that, I’ve been on the ballot in every primary and general election throughout the last 28 years."
Announcing last year he would not seek reelection to the state Senate,1 the 66-year-old Marion County Democrat, labor leader and longtime resident of Rivesville is now approaching his third professional retirement of sorts.
Caputo worked in coal mines for twenty years before spending 22 years in various roles organizing for the United Mine Workers of America. Hanging it up in 2018, he retired with the title of Vice President of International District 31.
It was the same year Caputo took a full-time job as a grievance representative with the UMWA that he found himself running for a seat in the West Virginia House of Delegates.
‘How in the hell did that just happen?’
While Caputo’s long tenure in politics seems fitting — and, arguably, even expected — given the UMWA’s heavy involvement and lobbying in Charleston and Washington, D.C., he maintains elected office was an accidental, almost unwitting, endeavor.
“I never had any desire at all [to run for office],” Caputo said during a recent interview.
But in 1995, the Legislature had passed workers compensation reform and soon after, organized labor — including the UMWA — was looking to figure out how to get that legislation off the books.
“So, the movement was on to try to recruit within our own ranks to run for legislative offices,” Caputo said.
Caputo says the UMWA’s political recruiting effort brought him to a meeting — with him thinking he was showing up to nominate his then-local union president for a seat in the House of Delegates.
“When we left that meeting, Larry wasn’t running for anything and I was running for the House in Marion County. And I said, ‘How in the hell did that just happen?’” Caputo remembered.
He said the whole deal caught him off guard, but he agreed to pursue the seat. UMWA members collectively slapped something like $7,000 in campaign donations down on the table and he was off to the races.
“I wouldn’t even leave the house these days if that’s all I had [for a campaign],” Caputo joked.
He wound up winning that 1996 primary election by a mere ten votes. Caputo’s opponent called for a recount, but the result held.
“If I was betting on that election, I would have never bet on me. I was the long shot of long shots of winning it,” Caputo said. “I credit it not to me, but the people I surrounded myself with. My local union brothers and sisters from all over this area, they just really wanted that election and they would not take no for an answer.”
Since then, Caputo has gone on to win every election he’s been a part of — landing him 24 years in the House of Delegates and the past four in the West Virginia Senate.
Learning the legislative ropes
Caputo describes himself as a “back bencher” when he arrived for duty in Charleston in 1997. The legislative process and parliamentary procedure were foreign to him, bills were printed out in thick reams of paper and leadership whizzed through the process. He quickly realized being a legislator would be complicated work.
“I was scared to death. The Speaker would be moving through this stuff very rapidly and you didn’t even know what the heck you were voting on,” Caputo admits. “ I just held my breath to read The Gazette the next morning to see what we passed at the final hour of the final night of the session. Because, as a freshman, there is no way you can keep up with that.”
He recalls one moment on his first final night that fellow lawmaker at the time, Bill Stemple (D-Calhoun), had him going while Caputo was feeling dizzied by the speed of things.
“Things started moving and I said ‘What the hell did I just vote on?’ And he looked at me and he said ‘Right to Work,’” Caputo remembered. “And I said ‘What?!?’ I just couldn’t deal with that.”
Of course, lawmakers weren’t voting on a Right to Work bill. But the point stands: the speed of the process was overwhelming for Caputo in the beginning.
While some might think his proudest legislative accomplishment would be laws protecting the safety and health of fellow coal miners (something he’s indeed proud of), Caputo points to a bill early on in his tenure that had nothing to do with coal as a shining memory from his nearly three decades under the gold dome.
“It was my first year in the Legislature and a convenience store clerk was working the midnight shift and she got robbed and was brutally beaten and raped,” Caputo remembered. “The community was just in an uproar.”
Come the second year of his first term, Caputo introduced a bill that mandated cameras in convenience stores or for two people to be working the overnight shift.
While Caputo thought the bill would be a “no brainer,” that legislation didn’t come without a fight. Lobbyist groups came out against the measure, but it wound up passing on the final night.
From the majority to slim numbers as part of the minority party
Much has changed in West Virginia politics since Caputo first walked — or stumbled, he might argue — onto the scene.
Following the 1996 election, Democrats held 78 of 100 seats in the House of Delegates and 25 of 34 seats in the Senate.2
Now, those numbers are flipped — and even more dismal for Democrats. With a Republican supermajority in place on both sides of the rotunda, Democrats hold just 11 seats in the House of Delegates.3 In the Senate, Caputo now stands as one of only three Democrats in the upper chamber.4
“When I first got to the Senate [in 2021], we had eleven and we were able to do a little bit,” Caputo said of the balance of power, which has slipped even further out of the hands of Democrats since 2022.
Caputo says not only have the numbers changed, but he says the modus operandi around the Capitol — and other aspects of state politics — has as well.
“Being in the minority sucks, I’ll just be honest about that. But, you know, the tactics of campaigning has changed, the bullying has changed,” Caputo said. “It’s mostly red meat issues that appeal to a certain very right-wing, conservative base that seems to be at top of the agenda every year. We do more worrying about the next election than we do worrying about good policy for West Virginia.”
With partisan divides deepening in state and national politics, Caputo is quick to acknowledge what he describes as genuine friendships with some lawmakers on the opposite side of the aisle — those, he says, who approach the job with a sense of decency and policy rooted in reality.
He points to labor-friendly Sen. Bill Hamilton (R-Upshur) and Senate Majority Leader Tom Takubo, a physician from Kanawha County.
“He looks at it from a healthcare aspect — but he’s just so outnumbered and he’s got to roll with his caucus and that’s kind of how it works,” Caputo said of Takubo. “I think he tries to bring sense into the game and he doesn’t act on emotion.”
Caputo also views Senate Judiciary Chair and soon-to-be state Supreme Court Justice Charles Trump (an attorney from Morgan County) as an example of someone who’s made reasonable concessions to Democrats.
“Charlie and I have been friends for 28 years,” Caputo said. “He is the conscience of the Senate — and I’m going to tell you, they’re going to miss Senator Trump when he’s gone.”
But Captuo says it’s gone beyond friendship between himself and Trump. The two have also had a productive working relationship on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I went to him with several issues in the last four years. If he could help me he always did.” Caputo said of Sen. Trump. “You know, like putting something in a bill for me that was important to me. He gave me a fair shake in committee, always — when he didn’t have to. He didn't have to be nice to me, because the numbers didn’t dictate that he had to be nice to me.”
Caputo said Trump, who was uncontested on the ballot as a non-partisan candidate in the Supreme Court’s May 14 election, may be the first and only Republican he’ll ever vote for.
Despite respect for others on the other side of the aisle, Caputo says he remains deeply bothered by legislation floated and championed by other Republicans that take aim at some of West Virginia’s most vulnerable.
“I’m watching TV and it’s really making me sick to see them talking about transgender West Virginians and folks like that — to use them as political pawns to appeal to a certain base of voters,” Caputo said. “It’s demoralizing for folks.”
A low point turns into a reason for keeping on
Known for impassioned floor speeches and his staunch defense of people who’ve been marginalized in some way, Caputo moved up in the ranks of the Democratic caucus over the years — winding up, at one point, as House Majority Whip. After Republicans seized control in 2014, he filled the post as House Minority Whip.
But his passion for wanting to do what he feels is right has come at a cost at moments, though — particularly, one moment in 2019.
I was reporting for West Virginia Public Broadcasting at the time and, as that particular session dragged on, it felt like everyone was trapped inside of a pressure cooker.
That year marked the second of two consecutive statewide teacher strikes. The House had also been reeling from anti-LGBTQ remarks of then-Del. Eric Porterfield (R-Mercer) and criticism from Democrats that Republican leadership had failed to hand down any punishment.
There was no love lost between the two parties and seemingly every issue and every floor speech was a powder keg waiting to blow. I remember realizing that the Capitol Press Corps was tired, anxious for it all to be over and just hoping that any drama could be kept to a minimum — which is really saying something when it’s coming from a group of people who write and tell stories for a living.
But as the 60-day regular legislative session was winding down, an anti-Muslim display outside the House chamber sent Caputo into a frenzy of sorts. In an attempt to get back into the chamber and bring the display to the attention of House Speaker Roger Hanshaw (R-Clay), Caputo kicked in the main doors, injuring a doorkeeper.
I vividly remember meeting Caputo in Bluegrass Kitchen (a restaurant just a few blocks from the Capitol) later that night to try to get additional comment about the incident.
Caputo was surrounded by Democrats who, understandably, wanted to filter contact with the media. But he was visibly shaken — hours after the incident at that point — and walked up to me with tears in his eyes.
“All I know is: if I hurt that kid, I didn’t mean to,” Caputo said to me that night.
Reporting is a heavy job at times and the weight of the whole situation was pressing down on seemingly everyone. There was a lot of quick back and forth about what was on-or-off the record. But I do remember feeling like there was no questioning Caputo’s sincerity that he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Moments like that just get etched into a person’s brain.
Over the course of the next few days, Republicans threatened to censure Caputo or have him expelled from office. In the end, he wound up being removed from committee assignments for the remainder of the session — a punishment that would last only a few days.
Criminal battery charges were also brought against Caputo related to the incident, though they were ultimately dropped in late January 2020.5
Regardless of the outcome, it was a low point for Caputo.
“It was the dark spot of my 28 year career,” Caputo says now. “I hate it that it happened.”
While he says he’s embarrassed by his actions on that day, Caputo still feels as though he was doing the right thing by calling out inflammatory rhetoric.
“I’m not mad at myself for being angry about the anti-Muslim display, I’m mad at myself for the way I conducted myself,” Caputo said. “But, I owned up to it. It was a huge mistake.”
Caputo says he felt so embarrassed at the time he considered resigning from the House and retiring from the Legislature. But friends and family told him that wouldn’t be the right move. In a conversation following the incident, Caputo says his wife told him he wasn’t allowed to hang it up quite yet.
“My wife had been wanting me to get out for a few terms at that point,” Caputo said. “But she said, ‘You’re going to show them that they didn’t run you off.’”
The following election in 2020, Caputo won a four-year term in the West Virginia Senate. With 2024 marking the end of that term, this past legislative session, the freshly wrapped special session and the remainder of the year mark his final lap in the West Virginia Legislature.
Life after lawmaking
Despite the steep and steady slide of the West Virginia Democratic Party over the past decade, Caputo maintains he wasn’t concerned about being defeated this election cycle. He said it was just time to walk away from office.
“Look, I don’t have the energy I had 28 years ago,” Caputo told me. “It’s time for some new ideas and some new energy to go to Charleston.”
Now that he’s not locked into months of campaigning, Caputo says he is looking forward to focusing on his final stretch as a lawmaker. More than that, he says he’s looking forward to spending time with family.
“There were a couple years that I spent over two hundred nights in hotel rooms,” Caputo said. “It wasn’t only the 60 days I was in Charleston, I was traveling for the union doing whatever for the other ten months a year and spending night after night in hotel rooms away from the family.”
Caputo says he’s also planning more frequent trips to his family’s modest vacation home in Florida, more time on his motorcycle — and he’s hoping to squeeze in a bit more time trout fishing.
Still, Caputo says he will remain active in politics in some way for the West Virginia Democratic Party.
“I’m not ready to give up on the Democratic Party by any means,” Caputo said of the work ahead. “Sometimes things have to bend — or maybe break a little bit — to recover. And I think people are going to see that the grass isn’t greener on the other side like this majority party has promised them over the years.”
This story is a part of The West Virginia Weakly’s Wednesday Extra. A quick reminder to readers that we’re turning on paid subscriptions tomorrow evening at 6pm. The Saturday edition of the ‘Weakly Reader’ will remain free. But moving forward, the Wednesday Extra and other content will only be available to paid subscribers.
Longtime state lawmaker Caputo won’t seek reelection in 2024 ~ Jeff Jenkins, WVMetroNews
Charges against Minority Whip Caputo dropped ~ Steven Allen Adams, The Parkersburg News & Sentinel