Former vice president and recently determined presumptive nominee Joe Biden swept the state and won all 28 delegates with 65% of the vote, winning all 55 counties.

[2] Senator Bernie Sanders missed the delegate threshold with little more than 12%, a stark reversal from 2016 when he had won all 55 counties, and David Lee Rice, an army veteran and resident of Parkersburg, West Virginia, who did not appear on the ballot in any other state, received 8%.

In the semi-closed primary, candidates had to meet a threshold of 15 percent at the congressional district or statewide level in order to be considered viable.

[12] In 2020, the strength Sanders had among traditionally more conservative Democrats, protest vote or not, almost collapsed, with most of the support swinging to Joe Biden.

[citation needed] In an indication of the alienation of the West Virginia Democratic Party from the national one, this primary marked the third consecutive time where a candidate only running in the West Virginia Democratic primary received a notable performance, with nationally obscure candidate David Lee Rice receiving 8.3% of the vote (a pattern which began in 2000, when local perennial candidate Angus McDonald won about 8%; since then, similarly unexpected results occurred in 2008 (then-withdrawn candidate John Edwards unexpectedly won about 7.5% of the vote), 2012 (Keith Judd, an imprisoned felon from California, won over 40%), and 2016 (Paul Farrell, a Huntington attorney, won about 9% and came close to winning a delegate from the state's southern congressional district).