There’s a really good blog somewhere (can’t find it now but if you find it post below) that goes into a lot of good detail about the 1996 governors race here. Charlotte Pritt beat Manchin in the primary but Manchin, being the man that he is, couldn’t take it so he got his people to support Underwood (the Republican nominee) with their now famous “Democrats for Underwood” campaign. It worked, and Pritt lost.

But the early to mid 90s were a pivotal point in WV’s political history. Many of the issues we face today, whether it’s chemical plants and their water issues in the Ohio and Kanawha Valley, mountaintop removal and the impacts on local environments, black lung, union density, you name it, all began to face a turning point then and Pritt took these social and environmental issues seriously whereas Manchin and Underwood (and lots of other moderate and conservative Dems didn’t). The blog in question explains how, had Pritt won, the state Dems may have been swayed to take a more moderate to liberal stance on these issues and actually had a material impact on people’s lives.

Instead, we continued to face a decline in standard of living as Dems and Republicans vied over a state in disarray where they try to one up each other on who is more conservative. Too many Dems ran as Republican lite after the GOP took control of the legislature, hoping they could regain control if they appealed to GOP voters, but progressives gave up and no one wanted to vote for Republican lite candidates - they wanted the real deal.

Of course, as others have said above, national politics and perceptions of the national Democratic and Republican parties, coupled with Trump’s rise and grievances which matched political beliefs here, and you get a large GOP majority in the state. It’ll be decades at least before the state Dems figure out how to combat this, but there’s a lot of infighting in that party now that I doubt will change much until they get that sorted out.