In last week’s presidential primary, more voters identified as Democrats than Republicans in some surprising places — like the Eastside’s Gold Coast towns of Medina and Yarrow Point. If the GOP isn’t playing in Yarrow Point anymore, can it have any prayer statewide?
When state Republicans gathered in Pasco recently for their convention, the chairwoman, Susan Hutchison, said the fate of the GOP doesn’t rest in Olympia or Washington, D.C. It’s in Snohomish County.
SnohoCo is our Ohio, she said. It’s Washington’s swing county. It’s the Peoria of Puget Sound.
“If we flip Snohomish County, we win statewide!” Hutchison enthused to the GOP crowd.
But a couple of days later, the voters there showed that’s a bigger “if” than ever.
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In last week’s presidential primary, voters were required to sign what amounts to a loyalty oath — a statement declaring “I am a Republican” or “I consider myself a Democrat.” Presidential primaries are the only time in our famously stubborn and independent state that voters are asked to publicly affiliate with one party or the other.
If you signed one of these oaths, your party affiliation is part of your publicly available voter-registration record for the next 60 days.
The problem for the GOP is that voters in Snohomish County just affiliated with the Democrats by an 18-point margin, 59 percent to 41. That’s no Ohio. It’s more like New York, one of the bluest states in the nation.
Which towns chose which party has turned out to be one of the most revealing results of a mostly meaningless election. The Democratic Party elected to ignore the primary for awarding delegates, while the Republican race was all but wrapped up already.
But the party-affiliation numbers, especially in King and Snohomish counties, were staggeringly bad for the GOP.
As Donald Trump might say, a yuuuge and incredible 72.5 percent of the King County primary votes were cast on the Democratic side. That gives the party a 45 percentage-point margin over the Republicans in the state’s biggest county, at least during that one snapshot of time.
Ben Anderstone, a Seattle political consultant for Democratic candidates, drilled deeper into precinct results and concluded the GOP got annihilated in exactly the places Hutchison says the GOP is wooing: the suburbs.
The size of the shifts are abnormally large for our glacial politics. When I did a statewide reporting project on the 2008 election, Sammamish out to Duvall was considered to be Ohio-like, in that it was split about 50-50 between the parties. But voters in that area chose Democratic ballots by a 26-point margin in last Tuesday’s primary, Anderstone found.
This was repeated across the suburbs. Even the Gold Coast communities of Medina and Yarrow Point, Republican strongholds our entire lifetimes, tilted Democratic for the first time. Fifty-three percent of Medina chose Democratic ballots, while 54 percent of Yarrow Point did. Only Clyde Hill remained narrowly Republican, 51 percent elephant to 49 percent donkey (which means it’s the new swing city!).
None of this means a Democrat is going to win these places in November, when the electorate will be much larger. But when I started out covering politics for the old Bellevue Journal-American in the 1990s, these towns hadn’t voted for any Democrat for president in 40 years — which was as long as they had been towns. So to have a majority of voters on the Gold Coast choose Democratic ballots in any election shows how much the region’s politics have changed.
“Trump may be doing permanent damage to the Washington GOP,” Anderstone concluded at the local news site Crosscut.
Maybe it’s Trump toxicity. But Trump did win the primary overwhelmingly, and there isn’t much evidence lots of voters were so turned off they stayed away. The GOP voter- turnout rate dipped, but only by 1.5 percentage points compared with 2008 when John McCain won here.
More worrisome for the GOP is that this is a double whammy of demography and math that has nothing to do with Trump. The parts of the state you can see from the top of the Space Needle are growing both bigger and bluer. And they’re simply doing this faster than the red parts of the state.
SnohoCo is our Ohio? The GOP can hope. If it’s really moved to Clyde Hill, then Snohomish will be the least of the GOP’s concerns.