MORGANTOWN – West Virginia voters turned the Republican supermajorities in the state Senate and House of Delegates into mega-majorites Tuesday night.
The GOP-Democrat balance in the House will go from 78-22 to 88-12 come January, under the new 100 single-member district map. In the Senate it will go from 23-11 to 30-4.
All results are unofficial pending canvassing.
Four incumbent House Democrats lost their races while 11 won – three of those in Monongalia County (meaning Monongalia County Democrats will make up 25% of the entire Democratic House caucus).
Closest to Mon County, incumbent Democrat Lisa Zukoff of Marshall County lost the race for the new 7th District the Republican. A Mountain Party candidate took a distant third and did garner enough votes to serve as a spoiler.
The 12th Democratic win went to a candidate who defeated a GOP incumbent facing sexual harassment allegations.
One Democrat win occurred in a new single-member district pitting Democrat and Republican incumbents against each other. The GOP incumbent had served for only a few weeks, having been appointed to a vacant seat.
Republican candidates in 21 districts sailed in without Democratic opponents. One Democrat, incumbent Sean Hornbuckle of Cabell County, had no opponent for the new 25th District seat.
Senators serve four-year terms and half of the 34 seats come up for election every two years. On Tuesday night, voters gave 16 of 17 races to the Republicans.
Four incumbent Democrats lost, including Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin of Greenbrier County. Incumbent Democrat Richard Lindsay of Kanawha County lost to former Delegate Mark Hunt, who served in the House as a Democrat. Incumbents Ron Stollings of Boone and Hannah Geffert of Berkeley also lost.
Stollings lost to former U.S. Attorney and state GOP chair Mike Stuart. Geffert lost to GOP Delegte Jason Barrett.
The sole Democrat to win Tuesday night was incumbent Mike Woelfel of Cabell County.
As we previously reported, the local race for the 13th Senate District covering portions of Mon and Marion counties – along the I-79/68 corridors – was close. Republican Mike Oliverio – who held the 13th District seat as a Democrat before running for Congress in 2010 – defeated Democratic Delegate Barbara Evans Fleischauer by 162 votes.
Oliverio tallied 13,459 votes (50.3%) to Fleischauer’s 13,297 (49.7%).
Fleischauer emailed a comment on Tuesday morning that she’d also posted on Facebook: “Thankful and proud. I want to thank the hundreds of volunteers who campaigned for me and the thousands of people who trusted me with their votes. I am proud of our campaign. While the results thus far are not what I had hoped, I plan to await the official results from the canvass.”
While voters gave victories to 16 Republican Senate candidates, they didn’t do the same for the Senate’s property tax plan.
Amendment 2 – which would have changed the state Constitution to enable the Legislature to exempt the property tax on business inventory, equipment and machinery, and the property tax on motor vehicles – was crushed in a landslide, with 310,811 votes (65%) against and 167,695 (35%) for.
Senate GOP leadership had a plan to reimburse counties from state budget surpluses for lost property taxes ready to unfold come January, had the amendment passed.
Republican Gov. Jim Justice opposed it, speaking against it regularly during his COVID briefings and on his statewide “community conversation” tour. He called the vehicle tax portion of the amendment a bribe to secure big breaks for big businesses and came out with his own vehicle tax bill to counter it. He said his bill will be the first one he introduces in January.
And apparently enough Republican voters agreed with Justice to sink the amendment. (For comparison, the two GOP candidates for the two U.S. House of Representatives seats tallied a combined 310,248 votes, while the Democratic candidates received only 148,553 between them; with an Independent receiving 10,194.)
Republican voters also chose not to stand behind Republican legislative proposals to amend the constitution to keep courts from meddling in impeachment proceedings (Amendment 1) and to give the Legislature more oversight of the state Board of Education (Amendment 4).
Falling with the other three amendments was one that simply intended to eliminate a sentence from the state Constitution that’s been ruled unconstitutional by federal courts.
Amendment 3 was called the incorporation of Churches or Religious Denominations Amendment.
Churches incorporate in order to obtain some legal protections, such as liability, and to make it easier to borrow money and purchase property. The amendment would have deleted the sentence prohibiting the granting of charters from the Constitution and replace it with one saying, “Provisions may also be made by general laws for the incorporation of churches or religious denominations.”
The state of Virginia’s Constitution contained a similar clause that was declared unconstitutional by a federal court in 2002 for violating the First Amendment. Virginia and West Virginia were the only two states with such a ban.
Starting in 2003, then-Secretary of State Joe Manchin began granting charters and all subsequent secretaries have done the same. More than 400 had been granted by April 2021 when the resolution was adopted. State code also allows the granting of charters.
Pundits will likely speculate that Amendment 3 fell because of the fervent opposition to the others. No effort was made to educate the public about it and it got lost in the fog.
Tweet David Beard @dbeardtdp Email dbeard@dominionpost.com
