Less than a month after the midterm elections, the West Virginia Legislature’s Republican supermajority added one more member. Not through any democratic process, mind you, but because Putnam County Sen. Glenn Jeffries pulled a Jim Justice and switched from blue to red.
Jeffries was elected to represent then-Senate District 8 first in 2016 and again in 2020 — as a Democrat. His party change comes halfway through his second term. While Jeffries’ post-election defection from the Democratic Party doesn’t have a practical effect on the balance of power, his actions represent a betrayal of principle and trust.
When someone runs for office as part of a specific political party — either Democrat or Republican — voters expect that candidate’s values to closely, if not exactly, align with the values represented by that party. There may be bipartisan consensus on certain issues, like the need for better infrastructure or expanded broadband, but there tend to be stark ideological differences when it comes to fiscal policy and individual rights. It’s the distinctions in those differences that voters are looking for when they head to the ballot box.
And that’s what makes switching political parties post-election such a deep betrayal. Voters sent Jeffries to the Senate with the expectation that he would support policies that align with their own values; now, he belongs to a party that, in many ways, represents the opposite. Those voters have essentially had their voice in the Legislature stolen from them.
Jeffries is not the first West Virginia politician to switch parties in the last decade. Five others have done so: Gov. Jim Justice famously switched from Democrat to Republican less than a year into his governorship as he aligned himself closely with newly elected President Donald Trump; Evan Jenkins served as a Democrat in either the House of Delegates or the state Senate from 1994 to 2014, but he switched to Republican in July 2013 to campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of the 2014 election; then-Democratic Delegate Jason Barrett switched to the GOP in December 2020, shortly after the election, and this year he was elected — as a Republican — to the Senate; Mick Bates was a Democrat in the House of Delegates from 2015 until May 2021, when he changed his party affiliation to Republican, then subsequently lost in the 2022 Republican primary; and Daniel Hall switched halfway through his term (2012-16) and in doing so flipped the West Virginia Senate to Republican control in 2014.
Politicians who switch parties may claim that their values and legislating strategy won’t change, but that’s not entirely true. They are now beholden to an entirely different constituency: not the one that voted them in, but the new one that will determine their political future. Jeffries is less likely to cater to the demands of the Democratic voters who sent him to Charleston than he is the Republican voters who have the power to send him back. He may eventually have to answer to the voters he left behind in the 2024 General Election — but first he has to make it through the Republican primary, which means those are the voters he’ll work hardest to appease.
Politicians should not be allowed to deceive voters by running on one party’s platform, then legislating on the other’s. While there’s nothing to be done for someone retiring at the end of their term, any politician who plans to run for reelection on the opposite ticket should have to wait to change their party registration until no later than the end of January of the election year in which they are running (e.g., Jan. 31, 2024, for the 2024 elections). It’s not a perfect solution, but perhaps it will put some honesty back into a political game that seems to thrive on deception.
