If the past is prologue, the election map in West Virginia will look almost entirely red with just a few spots of blue after all the votes are counted from Tuesday’s election.
West Virginia has turned heavily Republican over the last 25 years, and the GOP now dominates local and statewide races. Forty six of the 55 counties have more Republicans than Democrats.
A detailed map of the 2020 General Election by the New York Times depicts nearly all of West Virginia as slightly red or deeply red. Donald Trump carried West Virginia easily with 69 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for Joe Biden.
But in many parts of West Virginia, Trump finished seventy to nearly eighty percentage points ahead of Biden. For example, in Grant County Trump received 88 percent of the vote compared with just 11 percent for Biden.
The Democrats were relegated to tiny pockets of blue found primarily in the state’s more urban areas, such as Beckley, Bluefield, Charleston, Elkins, Fairmont, Huntington, Martinsburg, Morgantown and Wheeling.
There were also splashes of blue in a couple more rural areas—a few precincts in Jefferson County, particularly in Harpers Ferry, a couple in Tucker County, parts of McDowell County—but other than those there simply were very few places where Biden received more votes than Trump.
So, what has changed since 2020?
Joe Biden is not on the ballot, but what chance does Kamala Harris have of outperforming Biden in this year’s election? Not much. The national Democratic Party has written off West Virginia since Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in 2000, ceding the state’s four electoral voters to the Republican nominee.
While Republicans running for office in West Virginia ensure that voters know they support Trump, most Democrats try to keep a low profile on the presidential race. “I’m concentrating on my race,” is a common refrain among them.
The Republican advantage in voter registration has expanded in the last four years, from an equal number of Democrats and Republicans in 2020 to a 41 percent to 30 percent margin for this election.
Every West Virginia election has a few surprises, but the emphasis here is on “a few.” The math and the recent history are determinative. The blue geysers of Democratic support in West Virginia area real, and they will be there again this election year, but they are just that—singular fountains of more moderate and liberal voters who are overwhelmed by the red waves.