Babydog: West Virginia Governor Jim Justice’s pooch steals show at Republican National Convention

Governor Jim Justice hit the stage of the Republican National Convention to frenzied chanting at the increasingly surreal GOP gathering in Milwaukee.

However, the chanting wasn’t for him. It was reserved for his 27kg bulldog, Babydog, who already currently adorns a mural in West Virginia.

“Babydog!” the crowd yelled.

And it was Babydog they got.

Mr Justice - proudly using his increasingly politicised pooch in part of his run for his state’s Senate - told the excited crowd: “I know that a lot of you want to meet my little buddy.”

The hefty bulldog then strolled across the stage where an aide placed her in a cushy armchair, situated appropriately, to Mr Justice’s right.

The pooch then sat contently as Mr Justice addressed the crowd on standard Republican topics (praise for Trump, the threat of a Biden win) in front of a graphic revealing Babydog’s main interests (her owner, chicken nuggets and napping).

Mr Justice still bowed down to the headliner as he reached his conclusion.

“Babydog’s got a prediction for everybody here,” he told the crowd. Unsurprisingly, it was of a Republican landslide come November.

It’s far from the four-year-old pure breed’s first high-profile political appearance however.

Babydog has already joined the ranks of Abraham Lincoln, Civil War soldiers and odes to Appalachian folk music in new murals under the golden dome of the state Capitol last week, alongside other state cultural symbols.

Tucked into a mural about artistic traditions, the dog sits placidly between a banjo player and an artist painting the Seneca Rocks, one of the state’s best-known natural landmarks, in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest.

Babydog made another memorable appearance at the Capitol in 2022, when the governor hoisted her up during his State of the State address and pointed her rear end at the camera.

Days earlier, singer and actress Bette Midler, on what was then Twitter, had called West Virginians “poor, illiterate and strung out” after US Senator Joe Manchin, the state’s sitting Democrat senator, refused to support a bill promoted by President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress.

“Babydog tells Bette Midler and all those out there: Kiss her heinie,” Mr Justice said to a standing ovation from the crowd, which included state Supreme Court justices and members of the Legislature.

The governor has also used the dog, a gift from his children in 2019, in his “Do it for Babydog” COVID-19 vaccination campaign

His Democratic opponent in November, Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott, does not find Babydog all that funny. Mayor Elliott said he saw Justice later on the day the mural was unveiled, at another arts event to celebrate a new statue of the state’s first governor, Arthur Boreman, in Wheeling.

“In his remarks, he spoke at length about his own dog and said nothing about Governor Boreman,” Mayor Elliott wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “This total lack of respect for anything beyond himself is why he is wholly unfit to represent West Virginia in the United States Senate.”

Asked about Elliott’s criticism, Justice had this to say: “Tell Glenn to get a life.”