Jefferson County sees a blue splash in midterm election

There are swing counties. 

And then there’s Jefferson County. 

At least that’s what a Republican friend once remarked to John Doyle, a former Jefferson County delegate and member of the county’s Democratic Executive Committee, over lunch. 

On Tuesday, Jefferson County — located at the easternmost tip of the Eastern Panhandle — swung again. Having voted nearly straight ticket Republican in 2024, the county replaced three of four Republican incumbents in the House of Delegates with Democrats. 

Two county commissioner seats, both held by Republicans, were also won by Democrats. And both Democratic challengers in the midterm election carried the county. 

The county is also where now Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, moved in the mid-aughts. 

Doyle, reached by phone on Wednesday morning, said he expected to see some seats flip, but did not expect the blue wave to crest on the shores of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. 

Local issues surrounding the Valley Link transmission line project, data centers and a proposed bottling plant drove the election, Doyle said. 

“On all three of those issues, you had voters that were outright opposed, others just seriously suspicious of what was going on and they did not believe that the legislators or the county commissioners were giving them all the information,” Doyle said. “I really think the election coalesced around transparency and accountability.” 

Steven Roberts, the chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Executive Committee, said he believes national issues surrounding affordability, particularly the price of gas, led Jefferson Countians to vote Democratic. But those local issues also played a factor — and the local Republican ticket wasn’t in agreement on how to handle them. 

“Even though we like to really try to push forward and go into free market values, how that’s interpreted a lot of times is across the spectrum,” he said. “We had candidates that were for some of those issues and against some of those issues and across the board.” 

Over the last two decades, Jefferson County voters have shifted the pendulum between the two parties dramatically. In 2008, President Barack Obama won the county, as did nearly every Democrat on the ballot. 

Democrat dominance weakened over the next decade — the county voted around 60% for Morrisey’s first run for state attorney general — until a full flip towards Republican politics in 2016, the first year President Donald J. Trump won the White House. 

Roberts said Jefferson County encapsulates a trend seen in “purple” — neither solidly Republican nor Democratic — areas of the country. 

“That’s the nature of purple, and that’s the nature of modern politics right now,” he said. “It’s on both sides of the spectrum. There is a lot of frustration and anger that builds up once a sitting party has been there for a little bit.” 

Over the years, Jefferson County has transformed from a rural, agricultural based county where apple trees and bean fields lined the roads to a bedroom community for workers who commute to the Washington, D.C. area. 

“That growth tends to come in waves,” Doyle said. “You’ll have a period of a half a dozen years where there’s this wave coming over the Blue Ridge into Jefferson County, and then for a few years it will slow down and be merely a ripple, and then it’ll pick up again. Each wave brings a different group of newcomers with different ideas.” 

Winning elections is one thing — the task now, for the both the newly elected Democratic delegation and commissioners, is to govern. 

“In the Democratic Party it’s a fairly easy thing to be against everything,” Roberts said. “One of the real problems that the Democrats are going to have in the future is that they really don’t have any plan. All they have a plan to do is to run against the issues of Republicans because of some of the complex and sometimes dynamic issues that are not easy to address.” 

Doyle, who Jefferson County voters in the past had placed in office and tossed him out, said the newly elected need to be in tune with the needs of the constituents. 

“If someone is elected to either county commission, state legislature, whatever, it is important to understand the nature of the county, and a lot of people who are elected don’t,” Doyle said. “If you understand it can swing violently the other way at any time, you have a better chance to hold your seat and withstand that swing.”