‘Bo the Miner’ Would Run for Office ‘If It’s God’s Plan’

Bo Copley, known as “Bo the Miner” for challenging Hillary Clinton at a round table event in Williamson, West Virginia, during the campaign season, has a lot of things on his mind these days. Among them is the possibility of running for elected office — but only if it’s God’s plan and not his own, he told LifeZette Wednesday afternoon.

“It’s come up a lot lately. It came up while we were in New York last week,” Copley said, referencing his trip to the Big Apple last week to film a spot for a Yahoo web series.

Copley is waiting for the sign — and isn’t sure it is his destiny to start from the ground up. “People have said, ‘You should run for school board,’ but I don’t want to put God in a box.”

“A lot of people have asked me, and I’ve always been afraid to think about it because it’s my thought, and not God’s,” said Copley. “If it’s what He wants, then I’m all for it — but if it’s for me or my agenda, I know that it will fail.”

There will be no stopping Copley, a man of deep faith, if he does get a clear sign from God that he should run for office. “If that’s where God pointed me, that’s what I would do,” he said. “This morning I walked into my kids’ school to talk to a teacher and they were playing music, like they do in the morning. They were playing a song called ‘God Is on the Move’ and I got choked up on the line, ‘Send me, here I go,'” said Copley. “If He wants to send me somewhere, I want to go. It’s His will. If I am best suited to do His will through that platform [politics], I’ll do it. I just don’t want to go in that direction if it’s about me and not Him.”

Copley, a father of three, has other things on his mind as well. He has just gotten two of his kids out of the hospital. His four-year-old, Charlotte, was struggling with pneumonia, and his daughter Merritt — just two years old — was admitted with a high fever. He also has a son, Elliott, who is seven.

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Copley, 39, is still unemployed. He worked in the mines for 11 years before being laid off last September. Today he is volunteering, driving the shuttle van for his kids’ private church school, and running things at home while his wife, Lauren, works as a photographer with her own business.

Copley said relatives have gotten the clear sign he should run for elected office. “My aunt texted me at the Franklin Graham event [the West Virginia Decision America tour stop] after Graham said Christians need to run for office. She said to me, ‘You need to run,'” said Copley.

Copley is waiting for the sign — and isn’t sure it is his destiny to start from the ground up. “People have said, ‘You should run for school board,’ but I don’t want to put God in a box.”

He also noted that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, “voted for Hillary Clinton against the voice of his own people.”

Copley has gotten his feet wet in the political sphere ever since meeting with Clinton in front of TV cameras in May 2016, when she campaigned in his state. At that event, he slid a photo of his three kids across the table to Hillary and said he couldn’t explain his situation — or her comments about putting coal miners out of work — to his children. He asked her how she could make those comments and then “come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend.” He was representative, he said, of the angry crowd that had gathered outside. The Democratic candidate, staring at him, was mostly at a loss for words.

“I spoke on behalf of the coal industry at a Senate hearing on Oct. 5,” Copley said. “Congressman Evan Jenkins is in our district, and I’ve met him a couple times as well, and he asked me to speak at a small press conference. I also attended a GOP dinner last month in West Virginia when Congressman Jenkins couldn’t make it — he asked me to sit at his table. It was the stuffiest room I’ve ever been in in my life, and I walked next door to get the vehicle and bring it around to pick Lauren up, and I said, ‘Okay, God, was that your way of telling me that this would be my dream and not yours, or is this your way of telling me you have to lean on me to do this?'”

“I’m hopeful about the future,” said Copley. “I think a lot of our leaders now are looking for positions of stature and power — but they are supposed to be elected servants. A lot of our leaders have lost sight of that — that they are there to serve.”

After much prayer and consideration, Copley voted for Donald Trump. “I’ve said it a lot this election season: God uses the unjust to do His will every day, and neither candidate was perfect. You have to pick the one that most closely aligns with God’s word, and when you have someone who says, ‘I support Israel,’ which was one of my first priorities, when you have someone who says, ‘I want to protect the values of Christians,’ and when you have someone who says, ‘I am going to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices’ vs. someone who celebrates abortion, well — the choice was simple, once God laid it out for me that way.”

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“I still have concerns about him,” added Copley of Trump, “but I know in my heart I did what God wanted me to do in voting for him. I think it shows that there are forgotten people like me and other West Virginians — and others all around the country  — that felt the same way. They showed up in a huge way.”

For now, Copley is prayerful, and concentrating on his children. “They are a 24/7 job,” he said. “We are so blessed.”