The 36th presidential election in the United States took place in 1928, and was contested by Herbert Hoover of the Republican Party, and Al Smith of the Democratic Party. Prior to the national conventions it was generally accepted that Hoover and Smith would lead their parties' tickets, and both men were widely respected and admired in the political sphere. Despite this, they both faced significant opposition from within their parties, however neither set of opponents could rally behind a candidate, and both Hoover and Smith won convincing nominations at their respective national conventions. Results Herbert Hoover won in the third Republican landslide in a row, making him the 31st President of the United States, and the first to be born west of the Mississippi River. Hoover received 58 percent of the popular vote, taking almost every state outside of the south, as well as several southern states which had been regarded as Democrat strongholds. Smith took just 16 percent of the electoral vote, and much of his failure has been attributed to the US' strong economy under Republican leadership, as well as anti-Catholic sentiment among the US population, and his anti-Prohibition stance. No third party candidate managed to receive more than one percent of the popular vote.

The state of West Virginia was established in 1863, and has taken part in all U.S. presidential elections between 1864 and 2016. In these forty elections, West Virginia has awarded the majority of its electoral votes to the nationwide winner 29 times, giving a success rate of 73, percent. West Virginia has always been won by a major party candidate, with the state voting for the Republican and Democratic nominees twenty times each. There were, however, two occasions where faithless electors voted for a candidate who did not win the popular vote in the Mountain State; these were in 1912, when one elector cast a ballot for Woodrow Wilson, and in 1988, where one elector protested the lack of accountability for electors in the electoral college system by reversing the positions of the presidential and vice presidential nominees. West Virginia has gone through phases of aligning itself with major parties, voting mostly for the Republican nominee between 1896 and 1928, and then siding mostly with Democratic nominees between 1932 and 1996. Between 2000 and 2016, however, Republican winning margins grew with each election, and in the 2016 election, Donald Trump received over two thirds of the popular vote. In the 2020 election, West Virginia proved to be a comfortable victory for Donald Trump, who won the popular vote by a margin of almost forty percent.

As of 2020, no U.S. president has ever been born in West Virginia (including the eight born in Virginia before West Virginia seceded in 1863). The only major party candidate to have come from West Virginia was John W. Davis in 1924, who actually lost the popular vote in his home state by a five percent margin. West Virginia's allocation of electoral votes grew steadily in the late 19th century, and peaked at eight votes between the 1912 and 1960 elections. However, the population has fallen from over two million people in 1950 to just 1.8 million people in 2020, and its allocation of electoral votes has also decreased during this time. As West Virginia's population continues to fall, its allocation of electoral votes is expected to drop to just four in the 2024 election, which would be the lowest in the state's history.