But Hanna, now 19, soured on Obama’s policies. This month, he was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates as a Republican, becoming one of the party’s youngest black legislators in the country.
(The youngest Democratic state legislator is Kalan Haywood of Wisconsin, who is also 19 and black.)
Hanna grew up not only in a state that is overwhelmingly white, but in a white family. He was adopted as a child, and his father, mother, four sisters and brother, who are all white, joined him at his swearing-in ceremony last month. Racial differences have hardly registered in his short life, Hanna said.
During Obama’s first term in Washington, his father lost his job as a coal miner, and Hanna blamed the Obama administration’s environmental policies. “Once I learned more about his politics and how they were affecting our community, my attitude changed,” he said. “By 2012, I was definitely a Mitt Romney fan.”
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By then, he had also resolved to run for delegate in the state Legislature, to be a more forceful advocate for the state’s 44th District. He sums up his platform as “God, guns and babies.”
At Richwood High School — where almost all the students were white — he had served as class president for three years and as president of the student body in his final year.
Flooding severely damaged the school after his sophomore year, giving him his first taste of political action as the community debated how to rebuild. As a senior, Hanna began his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democrat, Dana Lynch, in the statehouse.
After school and on weekends, he knocked on hundreds of doors in an attempt to reach every registered Republican in his district, which covers one full county and parts of three others. He won his party’s primary by 45 percentage points in May.
“In the beginning, I knew the odds were against him,” said Andrew Gilson, who taught Hanna in Advanced Placement government class. Gilson assumed that his student was running mainly to gain experience for later in his career.
But Gilson’s opinion changed after Hanna’s landslide victory in the primary. “Well, maybe he’s got a shot here,” he recalled thinking. “Things were so fickle and fluid at the moment in politics, and even nationally.”
Hanna then toppled Lynch in the general election in November, winning by 25 percentage points. “It was kind of a surprise,” Gilson said, pointing out that the rural district is predominantly older, white and conservative. Voters are mostly focused on the economy, he said, while age and race are marginal issues.
Still, two weeks before voting, Hanna said, the Ku Klux Klan left small plastic bags filled with racist flyers and weighted with birdseed on the lawns of a couple of dozen homes in the district, some of which had signs supporting his bid.
“I don’t think it was a coincidence,” said Hanna, who contacted the sheriff about the bags. “I was surprised, of course. As a society, I thought we were past all these issues.”
The state’s population is 94 percent white and 4 percent black, according to the Census Bureau.
While fulfilling his official duties, Hanna will remain enrolled at West Virginia State University, a historically black institution with about 3,600 students that is now majority white. The campus, where he lives in a dorm, is conveniently located near Charleston, the state capital, but even so, he will be taking his courses online during the legislative session.
His legislative focus will be on education. He wants to create an elective course that introduces technical education in middle schools. “There are a lot of good-paying, high-skill jobs out there that don’t require a four-year degree,” said Hanna, an economics major. “We need to focus more on teaching kids about the opportunities in those fields.”
Recently, he joined a group seeking to divert money from the state’s surplus to help President Donald Trump build a wall along the nation’s southern border.
But he said he also recognized a need to work together with Democrats in the state.
“It’s the only way to make effective policy,” he said. “It’s like pulling on a piece of taffy. They pull from one side of the table and you pull on the other side.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.