CHARLESTON, W.Va. — In the past 30 Presidential elections, West Virginia voters have supported the winning candidate 23 times, according to Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
“That’s a 77 percent batting average,” said Kondik on Monday’s MetroNews “Talkline,” about those votes since the first election in 1896.
Over the years, Kondik said West Virginia has flipped sides from Republican to Democrat, including the 1932 election where much of the country voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt and remained Democrat for a long time afterwards.
“If you start in 1932 and go to 2000, really the only times that West Virginia voted republican were in really huge wave years for Republicans,” he said.
West Virginia voted for Richard Nixon in his second term in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in his second term in 1984, when both won all but one state. Kondick said even in years, like 1980, when Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, West Virginia voted for Carter. In 1988, George H. W. Bush won nearly 40 states, but West Virginia was not among them.
“Less than 30 years later, West Virginia went from being one of the more reliably democratic states in the electoral college to one that is pretty reliably republican now,” Kondrik said.
As for 2016, Kondrik has all 50 states rated for the electoral college for the upcoming election. He said he predicts the Mountain State will remain mostly Republican because it’s tough to imagine West Virginia will “snap back and go Democratic” right after President Barack Obama leaves office.
“I think there’s some hope amongst democrats that maybe if Hillary Clinton is on top of the ticket, some places in Appalachia will be a little bit better for democrats than they’ve been, but there’s not a whole lot of evidence that that is going to happen.”
Kondrik said there’s “no reason to think that Hillary Clinton is going to be a pro coal candidate” and that it’s “just not where the Democratic Party is today.”
Kondrik wrote in his Sabato’s 2016 Crystal Ball Electoral College Rating that, among other states, Ohio has picked the winner the most in 28 out of the last 30 Presidential elections. New Mexico has only missed the winner by a few times as well. Mississippi has voted against those winning candidates the most, in just 13 of the last 30.
West Virginia has missed choosing the Presidential candidate seven times, including 1916, 1952, 1968, 1980, 1988, 2008 and 2012.
To read each state’s current number of Electoral College votes click here.