CHARLESTON, WV (LOOTPRESS) – This week, the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office released the voter registration totals for the month of July 2021.
Republicans hold a statewide advantage of 34,177, sitting at 429,733 (38.23%) registrants. Democrats stand at 395,556 (35.19%) registered voters and Independents have 250,961 (22.32%) voters. The Mountain Party sits at 2,174 (0.19%) and the Libertarian Party with 8,892 (0.79%) members.
The July numbers reflect movement of nearly three thousand voters. Republicans led the gains adding 1,191 new registered voters. Independents picked up 1,010, coming in a close second. Meanwhile, Democrats lost 523 registered voters, continuing a multi-year slide in registration.
There are currently 24 counties that have a plurality Democratic voter registration lead including Monongalia, Logan, and Kanawha counties.
Thirty-one counties have a plurality of registered Republicans, most notably: Wood, Berkeley, and Putnam counties with large Republican leads.
The voter registration shift in West Virginia picked up steam in 2014 after Republicans gained both the West Virginia House of Delegates and the West Virginia Senate after decades of Democratic control. Since then, Republicans have held their majorities in both chambers, most recently seeing their margins increase broadly to obtain supermajorities in both the House and the Senate.
In 2016, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a massive margin of 172,720 according to voter registration statistics from the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office. Registered Democrats sat at 571,276 (44.74%), Republicans sat at 398,547 (31.21%), and Independents at 266,981 (20.91%). Since then, Republicans have made major gains, overtaking the Democrats in February 2021 for the first time by a margin of 9,438.
Voter registration statics can be obtained from the West Virginia Secretary of State’s website here: https://sos.wv.gov/elections/Pages/VoteRegTotals.aspx.