President Donald Trump will step back onto the campaign trail on Thursday evening in West Virginia after promising at an earlier event that he would use the campaign rally to make a “very big announcement.”
The announcement, two sources familiar with the plan, is that Democratic West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice plans to switch parties and become a Republican, a move that will bring the governor more in line with his state’s Republican tilt.
Trump has routinely used the campaign trail as a way to shore up his base, visiting states that helped deliver him the White House to hold raucous rallies that regularly see the President return to the rhetorical flare that defined him during his 2016 campaign. And Thursday night’s event at the 9,000-person Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington will likely be no different.
“We’re going to West Virginia tonight, by the way. We’re going to have a very big announcement, which will be very exciting, I think, for the media and everyone else, but we have a very big announcement tonight,” Trump said Thursday at a Veterans Affairs event in the White House.
Trump has already declared his intent to run again in 2020, and his reelection campaign is already up and running, including raising money and hosting events across the country. To date, the President has headlined campaign rallies in Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Ohio.
Thursday’s event will be the Trump’s seventh campaign rally in roughly six months.
West Virginia delivered Trump one of his strongest victories during the 2016 election, with nearly 70% of the state’s electorate backing the businessman-turned-politician. And while Trump’s national approval rating has steadily gone down since he stepped into the Oval Office in January, his approval rating has remained strong in West Virginia.
According to a July Gallup poll, 60% of residents in West Virginia approve of Trump’s presidency, higher than other state.
One reason for that optimism: Trump’s repeated promises to bring back coal jobs.
“A lot of people are going to be put back to work, a lot of coal miners are going back to work,” Trump told a crowd in Kentucky in March. “The miners are coming back.”
Trump has also singled out West Virginia as a state that will benefit from policy changes like his plan to end regulations that protect waterways from coal mining waste.