Last week was a slow news week when it comes to my specific beat of West Virginia state government news. Reporters who cover the same beat had similar opinions when I talked to them.

There are weeks when it is not uncommon for me to write as many as 15 stories per week or sometimes four stories in one day. I certainly don’t mind a busy week, but last week was mostly quiet.

Sure, there was the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia’s summer meeting at the Greenbrier Resort at the beginning of last week, which saw many state elected officials address the group and talk about West Virginia’s moment for natural gas and how we can power the nation and blah blah blah.

No offense, but I’ve heard all of this before and I’ve heard it for years. And I am supportive of our natural gas industry. But it’s hard to watch lawmakers shake the pom poms about the state’s natural gas industry — or our fossil fuel industry in general — when just to our north Pennsylvania is getting a $90 billion investment in energy and data center/AI investments.

We’ve got all eyes on business and industry in West Virginia right now, with people rallying against a power line from Pennsylvania to Virginia that must cut through part of West Virginia, and a data center project in Tucker County that wants to be powered by a small natural gas plant.

Opponents of both of those projects bring good points to the table. But companies are also watching how we treat those projects, which could determine whether those companies decide to locate here or choose our surrounding states. We need less cheerleading and more planning, otherwise we will see a repeat of the hype around cracker plants that turned out to be a pipe dream.

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Then at the end of the week, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., came to West Virginia for reasons I still can’t really understand for three stops. My Wheeling Intelligencer/News-Register colleagues covered Sanders’ stop in Wheeling Friday.

It’s often pointed out for me that Bernie won the Democratic primary for president in 2016 over former senator/secretary of state Hillary Clinton. And as I always have to point out, that’s back when you still had a lot of conservative-leaning Democratic voters who voted for Sanders as a protest vote against Clinton, but who otherwise voted in the general election for President Donald Trump. And then those voters fled, and continue to flee, the Democratic Party in West Virginia.

The Sanders visit excited a very small subset of progressive Democratic voters in a state where they are vastly outnumbered by MAGA Republicans. With progressive victories in elections in New York City and in the Seattle area, some see going to the leftward extreme as the answer to the current right-ward extreme.

In-state groups, such as WV Can’t Wait (the remnants of Stephen Smith’s failed 2020 primary campaign for governor) and Bluejay Rising (the remains of Zachary Shrewsbury’s failed 2024 U.S. Senate primary campaign), are coming to life heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

WV Can’t Wait has had trouble gaining much traction in the state, getting only a handful of affiliated candidates elected in 2020 and 2022 (many of whom have already lost re-election since). The group was largely absent during the 2024 election cycle. And as reported by me, WV Can’t Wait has had some campaign finance transparency issues, not to mention the group has its own enemies within state Democratic Party politics.

Bluejay Rising was founded by Shrewsbury, a Southern West Virginia community organizer and self-professed “socialist” and his 2024 campaign manager. Shrewsbury came in second in the 2024 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate to former Wheeling mayor and late U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd aide Glenn Elliott, who received 45% of the vote in a three-person race that included former coal baron Don Blankenship with nearly 19% of the vote.

Shrewsbury only received 36% of the vote — a percentage which likely would have been lower had it only been a two-person race with Elliott. When you combine the Elliott and Blankenship percentages, nearly 64% of the 101,712 voters who cast ballots in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in 2024 wanted someone other than Shrewsbury.

The theme of Sander’s tour is “fighting oligarchy.” The Oxford Languages dictionary defines oligarchy as “a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.” Sanders believes our politics is controlled by a wealthy elite. He cited the influence of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others on the Trump administration. Then again, the recent Democratic campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion during the 2024 election.

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Michael Pruser, the director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, does a monthly roundup of state and national voter registration numbers. As of the end of July, the Republican Party in West Virginia picked up an additional 1,621 voters, with total GOP party registration breaking 500,000 compared to only 398,547 registered voters at the end of 2016.

By comparison, the Democratic Party had the majority in voter registration in 2016 with 571,267. But the Democratic Party dipped below 500,000 registered voters at the end of 2020 and Republicans took the voter registration majority at the beginning of 2021. July saw the Democratic Party lose 175 voters, taking total voter registration to 354,446.

Where Republicans should be a little concerned heading into the 2026 midterm primary is the “other” voter registration category, which mostly includes unaffiliated voters. July saw 1,436 voters jump into the other category, taking total voter registration to 351,872. That’s up from 306,971 voters in the “other” category in 2016.

Unaffiliated voters will not be able to vote in the Republican Party primary in 2026, though they can still vote in the Democratic Party primary next year. The state Republican Party still has time to change its mind and reverse course. However, I don’t see that happening.

How unaffiliated voters react to being barred from the GOP primary next year could make Democratic Party candidates more appealing. But not if Democratic candidates think leaning into national progressive issues is the way to West Virginia voters’ hearts.

(Adams is the state government reporter for Ogden Newspapers. He can be contacted at sadams@newsandsentinel.com)