Vashon named the most liberal place in America

The organic farm stands and anti-vaxxers were a giveaway, of course. But now we have some solid evidence: Vashon Island is the most liberal place in the United States, according to a new political ranking. The Seattle mainland doesn’t even come close.

The rankings come from Crowdpac, an online political data service founded  in 2014 by a Stanford professor. Crowdpac analyzed all political donations to candidates on the federal and state level since 2002 for every city and town in America with a population greater than 6,000 — a total of 4,994 places.

Crowdpac assigns an ideological score to each candidate, then weights the donations according to those scores. In Crowdpac’s methodology, a donation to Bernie Sanders, for example, scores your town a lot more liberal points than one to Hilary Clinton. For Republicans, Rand Paul is weighted as the most conservative, and George Pataki the least. Donald Trump is the second-least conservative presidential candidate, according to Crowdpac — that’s a judgement call that some would certainly question, given some of his statements of late.

But they’re clearly “feeling the Bern” on Vashon — the island scored a nearly perfect 9.9 on the liberal scale. Ridgefield Park, N.J., is second with a 9.0. Here’s some perspective: Famously liberal Berkeley, Calif., ranks seventh with a score of 7.4.

As for Seattle, we’re slightly to the right of Queens, N.Y. We scored a 5.0 on the liberal scale, ranking us 144th. San Francisco is 33rd, but we did out-liberal Portland. The Rose City only ranks 239th.

To look up your home town, visit Crowdpac’s site.