Weird Voting in Washington State

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Dec 20

Like Oregon, Washington State is a rock-solid reliably Democrat state.  Fox News called the state for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for Joe Biden in 2020 immediately after the polls closed.  Like Oregon, Washington State votes by mail and has had the system in place long enough to have squeezed out the corruption.

Like Oregon, Washington State has been the scene of terrible rioting and violence - in its capital city of Seattle.  The city police chief resigned after the city council voted to defund the Seattle police department.  The state has been heavy-handed in its dealing with the pandemic.  Trump had been pressuring the state government to step in with military force to quell the violence, and Trump deployed U.S. Marshals to protect Federal property in Seattle, when the state government refused to do.

All in all, this would be a test case of whether the people of Washington State were looking for a change from the one-party rule they have voted for for decades.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton collected 1,742718 votes to Trump’s 1,221,747, and she carried the state.  In 2020, Trump increased his vote total to 1,584,651, but Joe Biden increased the Democrat nominee’s total to 2,369,612.  Trump’s increase was 362,000 votes (30 percent), while Biden’s increase was 627,000 votes (36 percent).  Third party votes collapsed in 2020, from 236,000 in 2016 to 99,000 in 2020 (58 percent).

We are confronted with the same question as in Oregon: where did all these votes come from?  Mail-in voting forces the citizens to be as politically engaged as the state can make them, but somehow 851,000 more votes were counted in 2020 than in 2016.  In a reliably Democrat state, the Democratic candidate increased his vote total by 36 percent while simultaneously increasing the Republican candidate’s totally by 30 percent, in a year when Democrat rule ought to be out of favor.

Maybe Washington staters drank the Kool-Aid to the point where they’ll die before they give up on progressivism, but why weren’t they so engaged to support Hillary Clinton in 2016?  If progressivism and the prospect of the first woman president wasn’t motivating enough in 2016, why would it suddenly be now with Seattle enflamed with progressivism?

Biden’s win of Washington State was not unexpected, but what was unexpected was that he would increase Democrat support over that of 2016 – even as Trump increased his support in the state!

Weird!

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