In Berkeley County, third party candidates polled high

While much ink has been spilled on the Democrats’ victories both in West Virginia and nationally, a couple of third party candidates had strong showings in Tuesday’s midterm elections. 

In six races, a single third party candidate represented the only alternative to Republicans and Democrats for voters in West Virginia House of Delegates and state Senate races. While most challenges were handily won by Democrat or Republican, two races in Berkeley County resulted in strong, competitive showings for the third party candidate. 

State Sen. Jason Barrett, R-Berkeley, won 60% of the vote in his race against Libertarian candidate Travis Bost in the 16th Senate District, which covers Berkeley and Jefferson counties. And in Martinsburg, Constitution Party candidate Tara B. McCoy received 43% of the vote in her race against Republican incumbent Del. Mike Hornby, seven points higher than Hornby’s Democratic challenger in the 2022 election. 

Barrett said with the current political climate, he figured anyone running against a Republican would have a “floor of 35%” of the vote. 

“I think the results in my race, and what we saw in Jefferson County, speaks to the momentum Democrats had nationally and how some of that spilled over into West Virginia,” Barrett said. 

Barrett also noted that in the Eastern Panhandle, with its proximity to Washington, D.C., national trends tend to impact the area more than the rest of the state. 

“A lot of the news people are watching is Washington based,” Barrett said. “You also have a lot of people who work in D.C. but live in the panhandle. So national politics plays a role.” 

Bost, a resident of Gerrardstown in South Berkeley County, closed the gap on Barrett’s home county, winning 5,013 out of 12,973 votes cast in the county. In Barret’s first election, he beat incumbent Democrat Hannah Geffert by 4,200 votes. 

And Bost did it on virtually no money. State Senate seats are typically six-figure affairs – in the Northern Panhandle, the race between state Sen. Laura Chapman, R-Ohio, and Del. Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, exceeded $500,000. 

Barrett raised $264,000 in the race, to Bost’s $1,000. 

Bost, whose first foray into politics was a failed campaign for Berkeley County School board in 2022, said the issues of swirling around local control of data centers and a proposed power line coming through Jefferson County led to the strong showing. 

“There were some avenues to pick up some of the disaffected voters that maybe didn’t have an option,” Bost said. 

Barrett said he believes that the pushback against data centers isn’t unique to his area, which is expected to have one soon. 

“We saw in this election a national pushback to data centers,”  he said. “Even though people use them everyday, they don’t want them in their backyards.”

Bost said by having no Democrat in the race, he was able to appeal to Libertarian-leaning voters who would otherwise be concerned about spoiling the vote for a Republican. 

“I also think the people that realized that, ‘hey, I can vote for Travis Bost. He shares a lot of the same ideas that Mr. Barrett has, but he’s better in some areas than maybe he is,’” Bost said. 

Bost said to make up for the cash differential – which opens the doors to peppering yards with signs and stuffing mailboxes with fliers – he turned out to any community event he could find. 

“Opportunities, like this, to earn media (attention) whenever I had the opportunity to go on the radio or go to a forum, I made sure I was out there talking to the people,” Bost said. 

Bost said he hopes the run will raise the profile of Libertarian Party policies in the state. 

“We like to say Republicans claim to be fiscally responsible, but you talk to just about any Libertarian, and they will say we’re really the real fiscally responsible people and economically literate group,” Bost said. “And there’s not a lot of legislative history with Libertarians, obviously, but we have a lot of legislative history of Republicans running as especially conservative, but not governing that way.” 

For Democrats in Berkeley County, the strong showings indicate that had they fielded candidates in the House 93rd or the Senate 16th, things could’ve been different, according to county party chair David Valente. 

“Yeah, we’re definitely going to target that,” Valente said. “We ( will) work with our friends in Jefferson next time to find a candidate to run against Patricia Rucker for that election, but in four years, we’re definitely going to be scouring Berkeley for a candidate that will run against Jason.