Major Party Chairs React To Tuesday’s Election Results

West Virginia Republicans have maintained a supermajority in the state legislature following Tuesday’s election. But Democrats are slated to double their seats in both chambers.

Election results will not be official until canvassing is completed next week, but if preliminary results hold, Democrats will jump from two seats to four in the Senate, and from nine to 21 in the House of Delegates.

Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, and the Chair of the West Virginia Democratic Party, commended all the candidates who ran regardless of their results Tuesday night. Despite their losses, he praised candidates Ace Parsi, Rachel Fetty Anderson and Vince George for stepping up to run for federal positions.

“Those were races that everybody said were impossible. They got out there and they went to every county and listened to people, and they did a lot better than we’ve done in the past,” he said. “Getting over 40% of the vote is a big step in the right direction here in West Virginia. This is a tough playing field for Democrats here in West Virginia, but these folks did it anyway.”

Pushkin said a strong performance at the top of the ticket helped Democrats down the ballot, including more women in elected positions than before.

“We’re proud to have a Democratic caucus that looks more like West Virginia, looks more like America,” he said. “Unfortunately, West Virginia for a while had the lowest number of women representatives in the legislature. During the recruitment period, one of our goals was to change that. We recruited a lot of women to run for office. A lot of them were running for the first time, and a lot of them won, so we feel very good about that.”

He said voters sent a clear message to both parties to focus on things that matter.

“That’s what people are concerned about: things that affect their day-to-day lives. Whether it’s a high utility bill or the high cost of gas, or the AI data centers that are largely unregulated and being forced into people’s communities. That’s what people care about,” he said. “Access to clean drinking water. That’s what they want us to focus on. People are less and less concerned about these culture war issues that really don’t do anything to improve anybody’s life at all, unless you’re an incumbent Republican.”

For his part Del. Josh Holstein, R-Boone, and Chair of the West Virginia GOP says he’s relatively happy with the results despite Democrats’ gains.

“We’re still in a position of strength. We still saw the vast majority of districts return Republicans to the legislature,” he said. “Considering the national environment, we’re happy with the results. Obviously, losing any seat is not good, we don’t want that to happen. But again, considering how much of a swing we saw from the national perspective, we think we fared rather well last night.”

Holstein also said voters sent a message Tuesday, particularly those that stayed home.

“Voters that turned out said, ‘Hey, look, we’ve got economic concerns. We’ve got some concerns about gas prices and the war and some other things,’ and they made it very clear that that’s a priority of theirs,” he said. “What I do think is that a lot of Republicans across the country felt like they didn’t have enough to get out and vote. Particularly here in southern West Virginia, we saw a lot of races that shouldn’t have been tight that were tight. When you look into the numbers, the turnout was dramatically low. It was higher in urban areas and very low in rural areas.”

The historical trend of the ruling party losing traction in a midterm election gave Holstein some hope that Tuesday’s results are merely a blip and not the start of a flip in West Virginia.

“There’s historical precedent for it. I don’t think that means we’re down and out for 2028,” he said. “I just think that that means we’ve got to refocus on the priorities and make sure that we do a better job communicating with voters.”

Both chairs already have an eye on the 2028 elections.

“The goal for 2028 is to not to leave a single spot on that ballot open. When you put the right candidate up there, you never know what could happen,” Pushkin said. “The results from last night show that so we’re going to keep working because people of West Virginia need us to.”