State’s Challenges Push More Women To Seek Office As Delegates

Tuesday’s general election saw a nationwide wave of unlikely but successful candidates – from the first Native American female governor and the first openly gay male senator in U.S. history.  

In West Virginia, that trend showed up in the form of a record number of women running for the House of Delegates. 

“While we do have a super majority in both the House and the Senate, we have many, many people running, and a lot of those are women right now. I think that’s really the big story,” Marshall University professor Marybeth Beller said. “That is important to West Virginia. It’s also important nationally because West Virginia typically has had very few women.” 

U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito and U.S. Rep. Carol Miller both won re-election early in the evening. But in the House of Delegates, there were 65 women running for office. They represent an important shift away from the state’s male-dominated political landscape that’s seen some of the nation’s lowest percentage of women candidates. 

“I think that women feel the pressures of interest rates going up, mortgages, just groceries. Women are often the people who are doing the shopping in their homes and they’re feeling it,” WVU leadership professor Lisa DeFrank-Cole said. “We know from what the research tells us that women place priorities differently than men. And maybe they’re just feeling it in their pocketbooks.” 

There have long been key issues considered to be “women’s issues,” DeFrank-Cole said. But this year, many of those issues are the same things that voters are concerned about – like gas prices, housing and schools. 

“Women are more interested in education issues and childcare issues than their male colleagues are. They vote differently. Women tend to lean into issues related to education, children, families, that kind of thing. And men to focus more on finite resources, time and money,” she said. ” Maybe they’re getting that message that, ‘gosh, we can stand up and vote and run and win here in West Virginia despite those statistics.” 

Nineteen women, including some incumbents, were elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday.