The West Virginia Republican Party has surged from irrelevance to dominance over the course of a generation. The shift took wing with the 2000 General Election when George W. Bush won the presidency and carried West Virginia while Shelley Moore Capito was elected to Congress for the first time.
In 2021, Republican voter registration overtook Democratic registration for the first time since 1932, and since then the number of voters who align with the GOP has continued to grow.
Today 42 percent of all voters (508,956) are members of the Republican Party, while just 28 percent (332,111) are registered as Democrats. Notably, Monongalia County, which has long had a Democratic majority, is now just a few hundred registrations away from flipping.
The numbers, and the ongoing trend, give the West Virginia Republican Party a significant advantage in elections. However, dominance can foster arrogance, and the decision by party leaders to exclude independent voters from the Republican primary is an example.
Last Saturday, the Republican Party Executive Committee rejected attempts to reverse a previous decision and reopen the primary to independent voters starting this year. Party purists believe choosing Republican candidates should be a decision for Republican voters and not subject to influence from voters who reject the party label.
(Read more here in a commentary from T.J. Meadows.)
Fair enough. But it also sends a powerful message to independent voters that they are not welcome in a significant event in the political process. House Speaker Roger Hanshaw (R, Clay), who favored keeping the primary open, said this week that now his own father cannot vote for him in the primary because he is registered as independent.
The number of independent voters in West Virginia continues to grow. Twenty-five percent, or 305,183 individuals as of the end of December, have said through their registration that they want to vote, but they do not want to be affiliated with either party.
A recent Gallup Poll found that nationally, 45 percent of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025. “The independent percentage has increased markedly in the past 15 years,” according to Gallup.
Political parties that want to grow and establish a bigger tent acknowledge the shift and welcome independents, and that creates an opportunity for West Virginia’s struggling Democratic Party. It desperately needs a boost, and the Republican Party has handed it an opportunity.
The Democratic message to the over three hundred thousand independents is simple: “The Republican Party has stated clearly that it does not want you in their club. Even those of you who voted for Trump are excluded.”
Delegate Scot Heckert, chair of the Wood County Republican Party and a supporter of keeping the Primary open, said, “(Independents voted for Trump three times. They would probably vote for JD Vance (in 2028). They brought us from way behind to the supermajority. And now we’ve turned our back on them. The party has spoken. It is what it is, but I believe it’s the beginning of the end of the supermajority for (the) Republican Party.”
Back in the 1980s, the West Virginia Republican Party started its rebuild, and one of the important steps came in 1987 when the party opened its primary to independents. The Democratic Primary would remain closed for almost 30 more years until it finally opened to independents in 2017. By then, the Democratic Party slide was on an irreversible course.
The West Virginia Republican Party is in no danger of losing its supermajority anytime in the near future. However, if history is any indication, GOP leaders may one day regret their decision to prohibit independents from participating in their party’s primary.