WV party registration for primaries

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

In WV, many counties that voted strongly for Romney are majority Democrat in voter registration, esp in the Southwest.

[Matty]

oklahoma 2.0

[Joe Republic]

What's with the (relatively) huge 'Other' share in Webster county?  Mountain Party?  (It was one of the seven counties Obama won in 2008, incidentally.)

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

What's with the (relatively) huge 'Other' share in Webster county?  Mountain Party?  (It was one of the seven counties Obama won in 2008, incidentally.)

the WV SoS website only shows 6 people as Mountain Party, so I really don't know.  Maybe a quirk in the way the county does things that has some independents counted as "other"?

[HAnnA MArin County]

Remaining a registered Democrat in West Virginia is probably just for nostalgic, ancestral reasons (my daddy and granddaddy were Democrats and would kick me in my behind if I didn't vote Democrat). I think it's just symbolic: West Virginia Democrats are trying to send a message to the party that "we didn't leave you, you left us." I'd imagine the same can be said for Oklahoma.   

[Adam Griffin]

Dots are gradient shifts; the larger mark is a county flip (Hampshire).

Two-way model:



Somewhere (maybe Potus still has it in his inbox), I made a GIF of WV partisan registration by county going back to 2006 or so. Very little movement in terms of flips over that time - I think 3 or 4 counties, tops.

In the last 18 months, WV has lost 30,000 Democrats and added 21,000 Republicans.

[Adam Griffin]

Remaining a registered Democrat in West Virginia is probably just for nostalgic, ancestral reasons (my daddy and granddaddy were Democrats and would kick me in my behind if I didn't vote Democrat). I think it's just symbolic: West Virginia Democrats are trying to send a message to the party that "we didn't leave you, you left us." I'd imagine the same can be said for Oklahoma.  

It's because they have closed primaries* and this is who still controls local contests. As you can see by comparing this to the registration figures in the GIF I posted above, there are only two counties (Wirt and Roane) where the majority party by registration wasn't also the majority winner of county contests (and those are two of the closest counties in terms of D/R registration).

*I guess you can call it "mixed", but the point is that you can't register as a Republican and decide whether Bubba Johnson (D) or Bobby McGee (D) wins dog-catcher in the de-facto general election that is the Democratic primary

[catographer]

That's gonna be weird, more Democrats voting in the WV primary than the Republican one. WV is becoming a relic of the 1990's in state and local elections.