Photo by Jeff Baughan U.S. Senate candidate Tom Willis said Thursday the Republican nomination for Sen. Joe Manchin’s seat is down “to a four person race.”

PARKERSBURG — U.S. Senate candidate Tom Willis said the May 8 primary election “is a four person race” among the Republican candidates.

“There has been a big shift and our polling data shows we can win this race,” Willis said Thursday.

Those four people are Willis, U.S. House of Representatives District 3 member Evan Jenkins, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and Don Blankenship, Willis said.

Willis said he has four priorities. “I want to keep taxes low, keep the government size and costs low, cut through red tape because it strangles the small business owner and we need regulatory stability.

“The regulatory stability is needed so potential businesses can calculate their risk to calculate their return,” he said. “The Obama regulations were so swiftly changing, they changed almost overnight and it cost. Companies will adapt to regulations; they just need them to stay stable and not be constantly changing.”

Willis is originally from Martinsville, Va., moved to West Virginia in 2000 and joined the West Virginia National Guard. He is a major in the Guard and a Special Forces Green Beret. He is second in command of the U.S. Army Special Forces Battalion. The family lives in Hedgesville.

“Economic prosperity should be the number one job of government,” he said. “It drives the economic funding for military and why we have the military edge. We should have a strong national defense and be able to defend West Virginia values, like the Second Amendment.”

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is a member of Senate committees. “Anyone who wins against Manchin is going to go in as a junior senator,” Willis said. “But I think with 18 years of Army operations and the owner of a historical hotel, along with a more elite legal background than the others, I think I would have a lot of credibility going in and credibility translates into influence.”

Following Tuesday’s debate in Martinsburg, Willis stated he had received a high number of phone calls and has two appearances today on Fox News.

Being a member of the Guard, Willis pointed to his service as assisting in his preparation for the Senate bid. “We don’t have a single veteran in West Virginia’s U.S. Congressional delegation,” he said. “But yet, West Virginia has one of the highest percentages of veterans per capita in the nation.

“The military service helps because veterans know how to work with each other to get things done,” he said. “We put duty before self. Veterans know how to do that.”

While the Second Amendment is important to many West Virginians, Willis said the 10th Amendment is important to him as well. The Tenth Amendment states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” according to constitutioncenter.org. “What we need to is be very careful about the feds coming in and dictating regulations. The states have to be able to maintain some of its own sovereignty.”

Willis said he supports President Donald Trump in many areas, but he doesn’t offer “a blank check for support. You don’t know from one day to the other about decisions he has to make. Some I may support, some I may not. What I do support on are things like economics, immigration and his national security agenda.

“I worked at the embassy in Peru for three years,” he said. “I heard numerous leaders talk about how they were watching the United States power slowly slip away and the second the United States shows weakness, the world takes advantage. When the world senses weakness in the United States, the world becomes a more dangerous place.”