After the candidate filing date passed for the 2026 election, the West Virginia Democratic Party announced a surge in candidates running on their ticket.
With more than 100 candidates vying for seats from the U.S. Senate to the state House of Delegates, it’s a remarkable turnaround from when the party could only contest about half of state legislative seats in the 2024 election.
Twelve years ago, Democrats lost control of the state legislature after more than 80 years dominating West Virginia politics. Since then, their seats have dwindled to a handful. In the last election, West Virginia and Oklahoma were the only two states in the country where every single county voted in favor of Donald Trump.
While the party touted the increased number of candidates and the number of women filing for office, it didn’t go too far into who these people actually are.
Here are five Democratic candidates who have never held office and why they’re running:
A mother seeking help for kids with disabilities
Marisa Jackson, 43, moved all over the state. Originally from Cross Lanes, Jackson has lived in Parkersburg, Morgantown, Huntington and Craigsville.
In Craigsville, a town of 2,100 in Nicholas County, she gave birth to her middle son Maxwell. When she and her husband came home from the hospital, they believed they had a healthy baby boy. But as he grew older, it became evident he had developmental problems.
Maxwell was born with Fox G1 syndrome, an extremely rare developmental disorder.
Living in a rural town, Jackson said she remembered spending hours on the road getting her son to appointments.
“You get a little tidbit of information here, and then, ‘we recommend that you go to this place,’ and then you get a little bit of information here, and, ‘now we recommend that you go to this place,’” Jackson recalled.
Now the family lives in St. Albans and takes trips every six months to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for treatments. Navigating different medical systems and doctors taught Jackson that West Virginia doesn’t have the best access to medicine, especially for rural people.
“It’s all disconnected. They’re (doctors) are connected within their own system, but it isn’t what’s best for the patient,” she said.
Jackson also learned to get help for her child, and has since helped other families do the same thing in the state. Her advocacy work turned towards activism after then-Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, and his successor JB McCuskey, launched lawsuits against the federal government over changes to disability law.
The case concerned Jackson because it could overturn the laws that protect her child.
“Myself, along with another friend of mine, began a grassroots movement that quickly kind of snowballed,” she said. “It happened rapidly, and we grew really quickly, and we got the attention of the attorney general.”
And in February 2025, McCuskey filed a brief stating that his office would not try to overturn the entire law.
This year, Jackson is running for House of Delegates in the 58th District, the St. Albans area. She said her journey to run for public office has been a long one, and she hasn’t done it alone.
“As far as people who have families, who have children with disabilities, many of us are just trying to make it day to day and handle the challenges that come that way,” she said. “Not all people have a lot of support outside of their immediate household, and I feel very fortunate that I do.”
When Jackson, who also runs a business selling her artwork, has a moment to herself, she likes to paint and garden.
An immigrant who knows the value of freedom
Ace Parsi, 44, knows what it’s like to live in a society without civil liberties. Born in Iran, Parsi lived the first 8 and a half years of his life in the country’s authoritarian theocracy.
Parsi said the United States and Israel’s recent bombing campaign hits close to home. One of his earliest childhood memories is finding shelter from bombs during the Iran-Iraq War.
“I just remember, all my cousins and uncles and aunts coming into our apartment, because it was supposed to be a safer place in Tehran,” he said. “And I remember there being things that would go on the television screen that would basically be warning us to go to a windowless room, so everybody would go into the bathroom, which was the only windowless room in the house.”
Parsi’s family fled the country and settled down in Pennsylvania, where he became involved in politics beginning in 2004. After attending Penn State University, he went on to work as a reading specialist in school, but soon found himself wanting to change education because the curricula were too standardized.
He recalled teaching a group of first and second graders from a prepared sheet.
“So I thought, ‘Oh my God. Like, how many kids in this school are just incredibly bored out of their mind?’” Parsi said.
For 15 years, he worked in education policy, trying to effect that change. During that time, he met his wife and decided to move to her hometown of Morgantown to raise their daughter.
They regularly attend bluegrass and country concerts. He likes to dance, even while he works.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever put it online, but I love to dance, and I love just — you let loose,” he said.
And it’s his daughter who has gotten him to run, for the very first time, for the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Ultimately, that’s what’s gotten me into this race, is that I have a daughter who is, you know, just a little bit older than I was when my family fled an authoritarian regime, and I want her to have those freedoms for years and years to come,” Parsi said. “So I am almost a little bit of a Papa Bear.”
A Panhandler who wants to make home clean and affordable
Lucia Valentine, 29, grew up on the Potomac River. As a child in Jefferson County, she remembers going down to the bank to play.
Like many kids in the Eastern Panhandle, Valentine attended college at Shepherd University. While majoring in music, she took a course in environmental policy and fell in love with the subject. After graduation, she made a career of it.
“I lobbied on Capitol Hill for a couple years, worked for Moms Clean Air Force, and then the West Virginia Environmental Council, where most of my policy work is focused around clean air and clean water and protecting public land,” she said.
When Valentine isn’t campaigning or lobbying, she’s hanging out with cows and chickens on a farm, bicycling or running. A few times a year, she gets together with friends to sing at shows at a few local coffee shops.
During the 2024 election, Valentine ran in the House of Delegates 97th District race, losing the reliably Republican area by 1,300 votes. Despite the loss, Valentine said she was happy to see more interest by voters and carefully weighed another run.
“We swung the district left by four points, and really made a lot of progress, kind of closing in that gap by focusing on reaching out to everyone of every party, like Democrats, independents and Republicans,” she said.
But running again would require putting in more long hours raising money, door knocking, phone calling and meeting voters. And being a young person eking out a living in the Eastern Panhandle, where the cost of living is more on par with Washington than the rest of the state, is hard enough.
“I’m committed to staying here and trying to fight for my community. But at the same time, you know, as someone who’s in their late 20s, I realize how hard it is to try to afford to buy a house here, to try to find a good-paying job,” Valentine said.
So she’s thrown her hat in the ring once again. Like last time, she’s focused her campaign on balancing the growth in the Eastern Panhandle with maintaining rural life and making sure people can afford to live there.
But with the recent announcement of a $4 billion data center coming to her area, those issues have come into sharper focus, she said.
“The fact that the state would come in and have such a huge say over something that so drastically changes the community is something that I’m totally against,” she said.
A young clerk focusing on dollars and cents
Colin Savage, 20, has lived in Terra Alta his entire life. The tiny town on the edge of Preston County is home to a park, a couple of bars and 10 churches.
Savage has always had an interest in civics and history. During his junior year of high school, he joined a program where he was a student observer for his county school board. He’d sit in the room with the adults, watch the decisions being made, then report them back to his colleagues.
Last year, Savage watched the Legislative Session.
“Last year, they prioritized things that mostly came out from Washington. Like the DEI stuff, the social issues. You know, they prefer to cover that stuff first, instead of the fact that there are West Virginians without clean water,” he said.
It’s no secret that the part-time Legislature is filled with doctors and lawyers and business owners. While there are more middle class and working class professions represented, like coal miners and teachers, they are the exception rather than the rule.
Savage is a sales associate at his hometown Dollar General. He knows what it’s like to live with family because he can’t afford a place of his own.
“It’s not easy for people to survive off this economy,” Savage said. “I’ve just been luckier than most folks, but I still know that it’s not easy to survive in this type of economy and for this job.”
And he sees people trying to stretch their last dollar to afford groceries. He said the government shutdown last October isn’t the only time he’s seen people struggle to make it.
“I have customers who really stretch out their SNAP (food stamps) because it’s not close enough to the next time they’re going to get their services reloaded,” he said.
Savage is running for the House of Delegates for Preston County’s 84th District. When he isn’t working or on the campaign trail, he said he likes to read about the American Revolution.
The “Mouth of the South” searching for a future for Wyoming County
Rachael Hawkins-Church, 50, likes to run her mouth. She’ll run it to anybody who is willing to hear. That’s how she got roped into running for the House of Delegates in Wyoming County.
A few months ago, she started attending the Wyoming County Democratic Executive Committee meetings.
“It ended up that I talked almost as much as the people running the meetings, and that’s when they kind of rounded on me and said, ‘You, you need to run,’” Hawkins-Church said.
Over the years, Hawkins-Church has done a little bit of everything since graduating from Pineville High School. She’s worked as a DJ and programming manager for a local radio station — that’s where she got the name, “The Mouth of the South.” She’s done medical transcription. Today, she works the counter for an arcade in town.
She plays Dungeons and Dragons with her family, plays video games and reads. She estimates she has thousands of books in her house, thanks to a connection at the Pineville Library.
Despite never donning a lantern hat and a pickaxe, her life — like most in the southern part of the state — has been touched by the boom/bust cycles of coal.
Her family owned a mining supply company for years. Her husband worked as a gate guard. As coal production dropped in the region, she’s seen people struggling as they’re left behind.
“I’ve seen people from Wyoming County going up in the northern part of West Virginia. I’ve seen people driving from Kentucky and Virginia to West Virginia,” she said. “They’re driving long distances and then sleeping in their cars when they’re working and going home on the days they’re off. And that’s not tenable for anyone, and especially someone who’s in that kind of industry.”
Part of her run is trying to help her community move beyond the coal it was built on.
“It is not an infinite resource,” she said. “We need industries for people to work in that are not coal-oriented, because as much as the state depends on coal, there’s not a future like there used to be. So there needs to be some moving towards other industries. I’ve seen what tourism has done for my immediate area. That’s one immediately that we can put more people in and bring in more money to the state.”
Over the last legislative session, water issues in the southern coal counties came to the forefront — and the current set of elected officials failed to do anything for them. Like many in her area, Hawkins-Church said she’s been personally affected by the crisis.
“I drink bottled water. I cook with bottled water. I give my cats bottled water,” she said.