The WV WASP has obtained the official statewide voter history file from the 2026 primary election, broken down by county, party, and ballot type. The numbers tell a story about West Virginia’s closed Republican primary that goes well beyond the policy debate the WASP has been covering since January. For the first time, the debate can be measured in actual voters and actual participation.
The headline finding: 40,046 West Virginians registered as Independent or No Party Affiliation participated in the May 12 primary but were not eligible to vote in Republican contests. That is 31.9 percent of the entire Republican primary electorate. For roughly every three Republican primary voters, another voter participated in the primary but could not participate in the Republican nomination contests.
This is not a projection or an estimate. It is the actual count of voters identified in the voter history file who participated in the primary but, because of their registration status, were ineligible to vote in Republican contests under the closed-primary rules adopted by the Republican State Executive Committee in January 2024 and retained in January 2026.
The Statewide Picture
Total primary voters statewide: 252,394.
Republicans cast 125,603 ballots, 49.8 percent of all primary votes. Democrats cast 85,187, or 33.8 percent. The combined Independent and No Party Affiliation total was 40,046, nearly 16 percent of all primary participation.
The Republican statewide primary advantage over Democrats was 40,416 votes. The 40,046 voters who were ineligible for Republican contests nearly match the entire margin by which Republican primary participation exceeded Democratic participation statewide.
That does not tell us how those voters would have voted in a Republican primary. It does show the size of the electorate that participated in the May primary but was outside the Republican nomination process.
One additional detail inside that 40,046 number deserves attention. Of the voters who were ineligible for Republican contests, 33,182, or 82.9 percent, were registered No Party Affiliation. Only 6,864, or 17.1 percent, were registered Independent.
That distinction matters because the voter history file does not identify these voters’ political views or tell us why they chose not to affiliate with a party. What it does establish is that the overwhelming majority of the voters excluded from Republican contests were not registered members of another political party. They were registered with no party affiliation at all.
Five Counties Where Democrats Outvoted Republicans
The closed primary’s most counterintuitive results show up in five counties where Democratic primary turnout exceeded Republican turnout.
