Barone mentioned at the time that the sitting WV House Speaker (as of 1990) coveted Rahall’s House seat, so presumably had the district not been merged with the 2nd or 3rd (since the 2nd and 3rd were merged instead), he probably would’ve run and won against Brewster in 1992.
I was looking at the polling data for the coming race this year, the Dem polling firm says Rahall is ahead by 12% while the GOP one says Jenkins is ahead by 14%. The primary is next Tuesday, and it will be curious to see how strongly Rahall performs, as he does have a challenger.
I expect the WV House to flip to the GOP for the first time since the 1928 elections (the Dems are ahead just 53-47). Before the 2012 elections, the last time they came close was in 1942 (50D-44R) and 1972 (57D-43R). The post-Watergate/Carter elections were so unbelievably devastating that the GOP dropped from 43 to 9 (!) seats by 1976. The Senate may take longer, but as I cited not so long ago, the Dems are ludicrously overrepresented there, 24D-10R (Jenkins’ switch brought it up from 9). In the 2004 elections, they were at 21D-13R.
This is rather similar to Arkansas, which had a gargantuan Dem Senate majority until recently when the floor finally collapsed (from 2000-2010, the GOP was outnumbered by 27D-8R and in 2 elections the GOP took 13 seats and went to 21R-14D). As with AR, once the GOP gets control of the WV leg, it’s unlikely to relinquish it for a long time to come.
New poll from “DFM Research” (who?) has Rahall up by 9.
Interesting that the WV GOP had a better year in ‘42 than ‘46, at least in the state House (in the US House it was 3-3 in ‘42 and 4-2 R in ‘46). Boy ‘42 was a massive gain, from 20 seats to 44.
Some big swings, 1922 was a brief disaster.