(Photo by Will Price/West Virginia Legislative Photography)
Northern Panhandle politics are front-and-center in the intra-party spar between Republicans in the West Virginia Senate.
Freedom Caucus member and constitutional lawyer Laura Wakim Chapman (R-Wheeling), a freshman Senator who emerged as one of the most conservative members of the legislature, faces a primary challenge from local businessman Joe Eddy (R-Wheeling), founder of Eagle Manufacturing. Eddy was recruited by the state and local business community and found a supporter in Senator Tom Tabuko, Senate President Randy Smith’s loudest detractor in the legislature. Chapman also earned the support of Governor Morrissey, who carried her district in the 2024 Republican primary for Governor. Both candidates are running in State Senate District 1, containing all of Hancock, Brooke, and Ohio counties, as well as part of Marshall County.
The primary contest will be expensive, given Eddy’s ability to self-fund his campaign as well as Chapman’s allies in the arch-conservative wing of West Virginia Republican leadership. In the general election, the winner will face Delegate Shawn Fluharty (D-Wheeling), who is expected to run a competitive campaign. Given Chapman’s arch-conservative politics, political science 101 suggests that she is a weaker candidate in the general election. Regardless, the Governor and Smith believe that the district is Republican-leaning enough to hold, regardless of the Republican nominee’s ideology and the political environment this November. The State Navigate general election forecast suggests that if a showdown between Chapman and Fluharty took place today, Chapman would have a 12% chance of losing to Fluharty, with a 9.5% margin of victory. Despite that, most Republican insiders we’ve spoken with believe that Fluharty would beat Chapman in a general election in November. It’s worth noting that in 2024, Fluharty outran our projected margin for his re-election by ~10%.
In 2022, Chapman handily won the Republican primary for the Northern Panhandle’s State Senate District 1, garnering 69% of the vote against an opponent who spent practically nothing on her campaign. That’s a warning sign for Chapman given that Eddy will run a well-funded campaign, and thus almost certainly do better than Chapman’s previous opponent. Still, Chapman has two key advantages in the primary: an incumbency advantage, and the fact that it’s a rarity in Republican primaries for arch-conservative incumbents to lose to a candidate who is not as seen as conservative as them. Overall, conventional wisdom suggests that Chapman should currently enjoy a higher level of support this far out from the election.
Over the weekend, State Navigate went into the field to put said conventional wisdom to the test. We surveyed 415 likely voters in the upcoming Republican primary for State Senate District 1 on May 12th, asking them who they plan to vote for, what their top issues are, and whether an endorsement from the Governor affects their vote.
About State Navigate & Our Polling Team
State Navigate is a startup nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to becoming a compass for state legislatures everywhere. Our bipartisan polling team consists of alumni of FiveThirtyEight, political scientists, and polling experts. Last year, State Navigate was the most accurate pollster in the country for the 2025 election cycle. Our polling work is often called our “Costco Hotdog,” as it’s a loss leader; State Navigate barely makes a profit off of the polling we do. State Legislative District polls typically cost ~$2,000 to run for a ~300-400 likely voter sample, and statewide election polls typically cost ~$3,500 for a ~700 likely voter sample. Public polling on state governance and especially state legislatures is a rarity, so we try to make our polling as affordable as possible for sponsors to help fill this gap.
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Top Results
Our poll backs conventional wisdom: Laura Wakim Chapman has more support in the primary than her opponent right now. She starts off with 40% of support amongst likely Republican primary voters in the district, to Joe Eddy’s 15% (a 25-point lead), with 46% of likely voters saying they are wholly undecided.
Candidate Support Levels: 13% of likely voters say they are “definitely” in Chapman’s camp, with another 15% saying they will “probably” back her, compared to 4% of likely voters who say they will “definitely” vote for Eddy, and another 6% who say they will “probably” back him. When undecided voters are pushed to choose a candidate, Chapman garnered more than twice as many voters as Eddy, with 18% of undecided voters choosing Chapman and 8% choosing Eddy.
Top Issues: After asking about the horse race, we asked respondents about the top issues that’ll impact their vote in the upcoming Republican primary. Voters could select up to three issues. The most frequently selected issues were inflation and cost of living (39% of voters selected this), supporting President Trump (37%), and Social Security and Medicare (36%). The next tier of importance were immigration and securing the border (34%), beating the Democrats in November (28%), and jobs and the economy (27%) . The least salient issues are health care (19%), crime and public safety (16%), and “fighting transgenderism” (12%). 7% of voters selected “something else” in their top three issues.
Morrissey Endorsement: Our next question asked voters, “If Governor Morrisey endorsed a candidate in a Republican primary, would that make you more or less likely to vote for that candidate?” to determine how much of an impact the Governor’s support will make here this May. ⅓ of likely voters said that they’d be more likely to support a Morrissey-backed Republican in this primary, and 1-in-10 said they’d be less likely to support a Republican in a primary with a Morrissey endorsement. A majority of voters, 56%, said that an endorsement from the Governor would not have an impact on their vote choice.
A similar breakdown can be found when isolating to wholly undecided voters as well: 26% of undecided voters said they’d be more likely to back a Morrissey-endorsed Republican, 10% said they’d be less likely, and 64% said it’d have no impact. Of those who say they’d be more likely to vote for a Morrissey-backed Republican in a primary, 43% are already planning to vote for or are leaning toward Chapman, 22% are planning to vote for or are leaning toward Eddy, and 35% are undecided.
Key Findings
Demographics: Unsurprising to those who know the demographics of West Virginia Republican primaries, the average voter in this election will be white, over the age of 65, and lack a college education. A majority of voters in our survey are over the age of 65, almost the entire electorate is white, and over ⅔ don’t have a four-year college degree.
Ideology: This is a conservative electorate through and through. 66% of voters identify as either conservative (43%) or very conservative (24%). Another 6% say they’re slightly conservative, 16% say they’re moderate, and 6% say they’re some sort of liberal.
Undecideds: Despite typically making up a third of the overall Republican primary electorate, a disproportionate percentage of undecided voters can be found in Hancock County, containing the towns of Weirton, Chester, and Newell. 35% of undecided voters are from Hancock County, and 41% are from Ohio County despite Ohio making up nearly half of the primary electorate. It’s likely that both candidates hailing from Wheeling explains this phenomenon: Eddy supporters break down as 35% Ohio, 42% Hancock, 22% Brooke, while Chapman supporters break down as 57% Ohio, 24% Hancock, 14% Brooke, 4% Marshall. Just 40% of Ohio County voters are wholly undecided, compared to 50% in Hancock and 53% in Brooke.
Respondents’ Vote Choice Timeline
Here is a dot map of raw respondents to our poll. Note that the dots are randomly located within a respondent’s precinct and do not reflect actual respondent locations therein.
Team Notes & Analysis
It’s the economy, stupid: Remarkably, inflation and the cost of living are about as important to likely voters as supporting President Trump. Given national polling and last year’s election results, this is a major warning sign for Republicans, as more voters nationally trust Democrats on inflation and the cost of living. The fact that this issue is just as important amongst Republican primary voters shows that, unless Republicans earn voters’ trust on this issue nationally before the midterm elections, a blue wave is all but inevitable; the wave could be tall enough to also flip Senate District 1, especially if Chapman emerges victorious in the primary.
The least important issue to this conservative electorate? Transgender politics. We even decided to use conservative jargon to see how likely primary voters are to react to terminology used by conservative activists, adding a “Fighting Transgenderism” option to the list of nine issues. A measly 12% of likely voters say this is in their top three issues that will decide their primary vote. This is an incredible finding, given the frequent references to transgender politics in Republican primary and general election ads.
So, not only is the dynamic of the cost of living and inflation being the most important issue and transgender politics being the least important issue true in general elections, as we saw in our Virginia general election polling last year, it’s also true in this Republican primary, and likely most other Republican primaries as well.
Awareness of Morrisey’s support shouldn’t affect the topline: About 35% of those who say a Morrisey endorsement would make them more likely to vote for a candidate are undecided, and Chapman does well with them and is likely to pick up those on the fence that share this belief. But Chapman also leads 42-9 among those who would be much less likely, and those could move to Eddy, canceling out some of the positive effect. If the race becomes more polarized around the governor and we see proportionate shifts, we would expect it to fall pretty closely to the current toplines.
Ideology drives turnout: The more conservative a respondent is, the more likely they are to show up and vote, and “Very Conservative” respondents will likely make up a higher share of the electorate than what our poll shows. That shouldn’t impact the state of the race, but it does mean that Morrisey punches above his weight with his endorsement, being more persuasive to the “Very Conservative” bloc.
Primary voters here care less about electability: We included two explicitly partisan-oriented motivations when asking which issues would have the biggest impact on voters’ choices in the primary: “supporting President Trump” and “beating the Democrats in November.” Likely voters were almost 10 points more likely to choose “Supporting President Trump” over “Beating Democrats in November.” And Chapman performs a bit better with voters who prioritize support for the President: she leads by 32 points among these voters, while her lead shrinks to 23 points among voters who prioritize winning in November. This matters because the lone Democrat in the race, state representative Shawn Fluharty, has significant cross-partisan appeal: he won his Wheeling area seat in 2024 by 15 points, even as Trump carried the district by 13 points, so whoever wins the Republican primary will face a potentially competitive race in November.
This poll should serve as a baseline, not a prediction: Let’s address the elephant in the room, the primary is 68 days away. Eddy went up on radio and digital a week before our poll was conducted, and he’s already at 15%. Chapman also received nearly 70% of the vote four years ago and is at 40%, and isn’t visible on the campaign trail yet. Both candidates have a path to winning the upcoming primary; if Eddy can pull off some of Chapman’s soft support and win over undecideds, he wins. If Chapman can hold her own with voters leaning her way and persuade undecided voters who are indifferent to the Governor by appealing to their top issues, she wins. Obviously, Chapman has an easier path, but primaries are highly volatile electorates that zig and zag, so consider this a snapshot in time. We’d love to be able to conduct a follow-up poll to this race closer to the election to see how things have shaped up over the next two months.
Duplicate responses were taken out: As is practice in the industry, anyone who tries to submit multiple responses to our surveys were removed from our sample and any duplicate responses were also removed. Typically this happens when someone sends the survey to family, friends or colleagues. One very eager Chapman supporter and one very eager Eddy supporter tried to submit multiple responses to our survey, and while they largely would have canceled one another out, we removed all responses from those supporters and friends.
Methodology & Toplines
This survey was fielded from February 27-28, 2026, among 415 registered likely Republican primary voters in West Virginia’s 1st State Senate District. Respondents were chosen from a voter file provided by i360. Text messages containing a link to an online survey designed by the State Navigate Polling Team and hosted on the SurveyMonkey platform were sent to respondents by AllianceForge. The survey was weighted by age, race, gender, education, and county, with benchmarks derived from the voter file and data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. The margin of error is 4.8% for a 95% confidence interval. The survey was designed and conducted by State Navigate. This survey was not sponsored by any party, candidate, or candidate’s committee.
