Washington on Tuesday will elect a new governor for the first time in a dozen years. We’ll elect a new attorney general, at least two and potentially as many as five new members of Congress, and a new public lands commissioner.
We’ll decide on four statewide initiatives that could lower taxes, blow a hole in the state budget and cripple one of the nation’s most ambitious climate agendas.
Nobody cares.
We exaggerate, but, well, only kind of.
Interviews with two dozen voters from around the region show one contest, and one contest alone, is dominating the public’s attention, fueling hope and fear, optimism and anxiety. It is not the race for insurance commissioner.
The race for the presidency, pitting Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Donald Trump, is at the top of voters’ minds, even as the winner will almost certainly not be decided here. The multibillion-dollar campaign is being waged almost entirely in seven states far from the Pacific Northwest.
The local races — for governor, senator, Congress, initiatives, you name it — aren’t exactly forgotten, but they are decidedly in the shadows, voters say, despite the millions of dollars spent on campaigns here.
“It really crowds out everybody’s attention span for all of the smaller stuff, which is probably more directly impactful on my life,” said David Phillips, 38, a public health researcher, as he dropped off his ballot at North Seattle College last week. “But I’ve got to pay attention to the bigger one that has the biggest impact on the world.”
Phillips, like many in the heavily Democratic Seattle region, spoke of a potential Trump victory with a near-existential dread. Voters are apprehensive, uneasy, stressed, scared.
So much, Phillips said, of what Trump says and does — threatening to use the military on Americans, deliberately undermining confidence in elections, falsely claiming victory — is unique to him, sui generis.
“This is terrifying, terrifying rhetoric,” Phillips said. “Somehow it’s like it’s become normalized to describe half of the voting electorate as the enemy.”
Local candidates may not be wild about being drowned out, but they tailor their messages to what voters are paying attention to.
Bob Ferguson, the Democratic candidate for governor, is closing his campaign with an ad showing his opponent, Republican Dave Reichert, in split screen with Trump, along with grainy footage of Reichert praising Trump.
Southwest Washington’s 3rd Congressional District is traditionally Republican and voted for Trump in 2020. There, in one of the most closely watched congressional races in the country, the first-term incumbent Democrat, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, trying to stem the national tide, won’t say which presidential candidate she voted for.
Tracey Gilman, dropping off her ballot at Redmond City Hall last week, was voting for Harris, thinking about reproductive rights and the state of democracy, and concerned about chaos.
Suburbs like Redmond, both locally and nationally, used to be contested territory or even lean Republican but have surged toward Democrats since Trump emerged to lead the GOP.
“I’m a little concerned with Trump,” Gilman said. “It sounds like chaos.”
She wasn’t much discouraged by Washington’s bit part in the Electoral College race happening in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt.
“If we all said that, who knows what would happen, right? Every vote counts,” she said. “You still have to do your part.”
Sandy Robinson, 78, is retired after working for Vancouver Public Schools and is the kind of swing voter the presidential campaigns are battling over, albeit in other states.
She sees voting as a civic duty, but nothing on the ballot really stuck out, except the presidential race.
She worries that “everything is so expensive” and “there’s way too much crime in our area.”
“That stuff they had about getting rid of the police is crazy,” Robinson said.
She said she’s a Christian and “I don’t think you should kill babies,” but “a woman should have the right to an abortion if she’s going to die.”
Harris, she said “is a little bit overboard on some things,” but Trump is “a little bit wacky, to say the least.”
“I just went ahead and voted for Harris because I think she’s maybe just the lesser of the two evils. I’m afraid if he gets to be president, things will get to be violent,” Robinson said.
For Chuck Lysen, 54, a King County Metro bus driver who lives near Northgate, the presidential race has nothing to do with issues, it has to do with the candidates and character.
“She’s an honorable, hardworking public servant and has been throughout her career,” Lysen said. “The exact opposite could be said for the other candidate. The amount of stress and anxiety that I had for four years listening to his sound bites damn near put me in the grave. It’s so disheartening to think that half the country is aligned with his mindset and thought process.”
It is easy to forget — with Washington almost certain to go to Harris and the Seattle region overwhelmingly so — that there are lots of voters, of every kind, in every corner of the nation.
In Washington, which voted handily for Biden in 2020, two-thirds of the state’s 39 counties voted for Trump.
King County, one of the bluest metro areas in the country, had more Trump voters in 2020 than all of Wyoming, which was Trump’s single strongest state.
