I love looking up those outliers during landslides that switch sides to the losing party. It saddened me that 2006 had NONE for the GOP, close misses in Georgia.
ME-2 is one of the them from ‘94, I’d love to get it back.
Looks there were more GOP House loses in 1920 than I thought.
Besides MD-1 there was the other one I was already familiar with, KY-8, Republican King Swope (cool name) had won the formerly rat seat in a 1919 special, didn’t hang on.
There were also 2 open seat loses, NY-28 and OK-5 (who’s GOP incumbent John Harreld was elected to the Senate).
<<<<<<<<<<BTW, there were pockets of Black population: in the Southernmost county of McDowell, it had enough influence to send a husband and wife, Black Republicans, to the State House of Delegates in the ‘20s. It was a populous mining county back then.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Neat, what were their names?
Another thing about WV in where it differed from Southern states was that Blacks were enfranchised there, and why they had political power at a time when their neighbors did not. Democrats wanted to implement Jim Crow, but Republicans opposed it (and in the coal mining areas, the GOP business owners needed out-of-state Black workers, so it was why they came flooding in).
One source claimed McDowell County, the epicenter of “Black WV” had a whopping 24% Black population as of 1950 (when it had nearly 100,000 people), unmatched by any other county in WV and more in line with more urban locales elsewhere. Going back to 1880, when it was rural and undeveloped, there were all of THREE Blacks (!).
http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh54-5.html
The article also said that because of the large influx of Blacks to the county that it sent a Black member to the WV House beginning with the 1914(?) elections. It must’ve been Ebenezer Howard Harper (although another source said he began serving in 1917). He apparently served for a few non-consecutive terms until his death in 1927 (he was struck by a car, survived, but his right leg was amputated and it appeared lingering effects from that led to his death).
Republican Governor Howard Gore appointed his widow, Minnie Buckingham Harper, who served for a year, but didn’t run again (1928). She apparently had the singular distinction of being the first Black woman to serve in any legislature in the U.S.
However, upon further research, it was not McDowell County that first sent Black Republicans to the legislature in WV, but nearby Fayette County, and as early as the 1896 elections (attorney and teacher Christopher Payne) and continuously into (at least) the 1910s. Black participation in politics in WV also extended back to when Booker T. Washington helped to urge the move of the capital from Wheeling to Charleston. Even in WV’s ugliest Gubernatorial campaign in the history of the state, 1888, Blacks provided the narrow margin of victory for the Republican candidate. However, Democrats used all their powers to have their votes tossed out, taking more than a year, to seat the Democrat loser (not until 1896 would the GOP officially claim the office, again with overwhelming Black support).
Since coal mining began to dwindle in the mid-20th century, Blacks left those areas when the jobs went away and the populations (and their percentages) have drastically declined. It’s curious that the rise of Robert Byrd happened just as they were heading for the exits, since it is unlikely his brand of politics would’ve gone over well in the decades before. As it was, he beat the pro-civil rights GOP Senate incumbent Chapman Revercomb in 1958 (although I have no reliable figures in the matter, I would tend to think Revercomb probably got the bulk of the Black vote).