The best shot we tend to have for those seats is when they come open. It was unusual in AR when in 1992 3 of the seats were open without incumbents, and we picked up 2 of them (one was the heavily GOP seat, the 3rd). Had it happened in 1994, it’s quite likely we would’ve won all 4 of the seats, but instead there were the 3 open seats again in 1996 and we only held, again, just the GOP one of the 3rd.
In the case of WV, the incumbents just sit there for years and decades. Because since 1958 there has only been 3 people to sit in the Senate seats (Byrd, Jennings Randolph, and Rockefeller), most of the Dems know it may be never that they’re going to move up. Byrd was the last sitting House member to move up (Randolph had been a House member in the ‘30s and ‘40s and was out of office a dozen years before he made a comeback). Excluding Shelley Moore Capito, the other 2 members have been in a long time. Alan Mollohan inherited the seat from his dad in 1982 (the 1st hasn’t elected a Republican since 1966 when Moore-Capito’s father held it prior to becoming Governor in 1968). In the case of Nick Rahall, he has held the seat since 1976 (his nonagerian predecessor, Ken Hechler, who was still actively seeking office in this decade, is still around). That district, the heavily union-mining area of southern WV, hasn’t sent a Republican to Congress (in part) since 1956 and (in total — since the district used to cover 3 House seats, now 1 because of drastic population losses) since 1926. It’s funny how it still eventually drifted back our way at the Presidential level. It’ll be nice when we can finally get it back in our Congressional column. Of course, John L. Lewis will be spinning in his grave. He’d be horrified the politically similar district on the KY side has already been recaptured by us (albeit with a porky semi-RINO).