“As goes Washington state, so goes the rest of the country,” says Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for Real Clear Politics in Washington, D.C.
Really? It’s true. Precisely because our ballot is such a circus of openness, and the vote is held so late in the election cycle, Washington’s “top two” primary has become a trendsetter vote for which way the political winds are blowing.
Blue wave, or red? Most of the big shifts going back three decades have been forecast first by what happened in Washington’s quirky primary.
“You’ve got a unique thing going on, where all the candidates appear on the same ballot, no matter the party, and voters are free to choose from any of them,” Trende said. “It’s better than the polls.”
Most states have closed systems, where voters must register by party and then choose only from that party’s candidates. California has an “open” primary like Washington, but it’s held much earlier, in March. For some reason ours has been more predictive of the general election in November — both in this state and nationally.
It works like this: You add up all the votes cast in the federal races, for Democrats and Republicans, and compare them. This broad metric has been a fairly reliable forecast for which party will have an edge nationally going back to 1992.
We’re hardly a battleground state, so the results have to be judged on a curve. Trende has found that if Democrats get more than 60% of the total primary vote here, it signals a blue wave may be coming.
That’s what happened in 2018 — the party totaled 62% of the vote in our primary. Then Democrats nationally rode a “Trump resistance” vote that November to retake both the U.S. House and Senate.
If Republicans can keep Democrats down closer to 50% here, it’s red wave on the horizon. That’s what happened in the Tea Party “shellacking” of 2010. (Democrats got only 50.1% of the total Washington primary vote.) In the famed Republican revolution year of 1994, Democrats’ share here was only 45.2% — one of the only times the blue party hasn’t won a majority.
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An in-between primary vote — with Democrats winning around 55% — signals probably no big change. That’s what happened in 2022, as Democrats won 56% here in August, the first sign that the much-hyped GOP red wave that year wasn’t going to roll in.
“It’s pretty uncanny how well the Washington primary works for giving the overall state of play,” Trende says. “It’s not perfect, it doesn’t always play out exactly. But it’s been a great rule of thumb guide.”
How can this be, when more than half the people in our left coast state don’t participate? When in the dog days of summer there’s few forums or debates or attention paid? When the ballot’s so long that the one name, besides a few incumbents, that really jumps out is … Goodspaceguy?
“It’s kind of crazy, and I don’t know the answer,” Trende says. “You may be having low turnout or it may seem like a boring election, but what happens in that primary overall will probably turn out to be a story.”
I don’t know the answer either. But my best guess for why we’re a bellwether is: Freedom.
In Washington, believe it or not, we have more political liberty than anywhere else. The parties have zero control over who appears on the ballots. Candidates can be whatever they wish in their wildest dreams (as proof, there’s a guy running for lieutenant governor for the “Liberal Republican Party.”)
It’s not just the candidates. The voters are all “free agents” with no party registration who have 100% freedom to choose from the entire loopy list.
It’s a bloody mess. But it’s a uniquely Washington state bloody mess.
Most important, it’s unfiltered. In a politics calcified by incumbency, gerrymandering and party tribalism, where it can feel like the fix is in before any votes are cast, this is as close as it gets to a pure expression of where the people are in all of American politics.
Wow, what a speech. If that doesn’t inspire you to wade through that mess of a ballot and cast a vote by Tuesday, can anything?
pardon my conspiracy clouded mind but this seems to be an effort to confuse the uninformed and result in an outlier candidate win a contest with a favored candidate.