The 1900s had seen Virginia, like all former Confederate States, almost completely disenfranchise its black and poor white populations through the use of a cumulative poll tax and literacy tests.

[2] Unlike the Deep South, historical fusion with the “Readjuster” Democrats,[3] defection of substantial proportions of the Northeast-aligned white electorate of the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest Virginia over free silver,[4] and an early move towards a “lily white” Jim Crow party[3] meant that in general elections the Republicans retained around one-third of the small statewide electorate,[5] with the majority of GOP support located in the western part of the state.

However, in many areas — like in Tennessee during the same era — the parties avoided competition by an agreed division over local offices.

[2] Virginia was less affected than Oklahoma, Tennessee or North Carolina by the upheavals of World War I and the Nineteenth Amendment, although there was an unsuccessful challenge to lily-white control of the state's Republican Party in 1921.

Although West Virginia was a border state whose limited African-American population had not been disenfranchised,[7] Davis did share the extreme social conservatism of Southern Democrats of his era; he supported poll taxes and opposed women's suffrage.