SEATTLE — After the most turbulent political campaign of our times, it’s remarkable how King County and Seattle voted just the same overall as we did the last time.
And I mean exactly the same. Four years ago, Donald Trump got 22.2% of the vote countywide against Joe Biden. This election — after the second impeachment, felony convictions, Biden dropping out late and all the other historical drama — Trump got … 22.2% of the vote countywide against Kamala Harris.
The nation moved right. Around here we were becalmed on a deep blue sea.
Except: Beneath the surface, there was some surprisingly strong roiling of the currents.
Parts of the city of Seattle and King County — the parts home to immigrants and people of color — did in fact tack toward red MAGA-world.
Analysts have now looked at voting patterns down to the precinct level. In King County, the place that moved the most toward Trump compared to 2020 is on the plateau just east of Auburn, in and around the Muckleshoot tribal lands. The core precinct where Muckleshoot tribal headquarters is located shifted nearly 15 points to Trump.
In Seattle, the most Trump-friendly precinct is now in the Chinatown International District, having eclipsed the Broadmoor Country Club. The CID shifted about 11 points toward Trump compared to 2020.
Some parts of the Rainier Valley moved strongly toward Trump as well, such as the Dunlap neighborhood and New Holly near Othello. Outside Seattle, both Tukwila and Sea-Tac, two communities popular with recent immigrants, also shifted red, though all remain blue overall.
“Some of these shifts are huge,” says Andrew Hong, a data analyst for the Washington Community Alliance, which works with communities of color and helped me analyze the precinct results.
“The floor of support that working class voters of color gave to Democrats for all these years is falling out from under the party,” Hong said.
“Democrats are obviously taking losses in all of the most diverse precincts,” echoed Ben Anderstone, a data maven for Progressive Strategies NW, a political consulting firm.
These are preliminary figures, as counting isn’t finished yet. Results may change, they said, but probably not enough to alter the overall picture. Which is: Richer Seattle getting bluer, poorer Seattle getting Trumpier.
In Seattle, none of these precincts voted overall for Trump. In Chinatown for instance, the main precinct is voting about 35% for Trump this time, while four years ago Trump earned 20% there, and eight years ago he got just 12%. That’s a tripling of support.
“Chinatown is the most profound move toward Trump in terms of raw numbers in the area,” Hong said.
Swinging to the left meanwhile were Madison Park and Briarcliff, the western ridge of Magnolia that looks over Puget Sound.
“Democrats got their largest boosts in the waterfront precincts of Seattle,” Hong says.
It’s fascinating, as the conventional wisdom is that Seattle’s waterfront areas are more conservative. Convention goes out the window when Trump is on the ballot.
Right now, incredibly, he’s more popular in parts of the Rainier Valley than he is in Windermere or the gated community of The Highlands. Who would have predicted that when he first came on the scene?
In some wealthy areas of city, politics has been scrambled by Trump.
Broadmoor voted overwhelmingly to repeal local Democrats’ signature tax policy, the capital gains tax on the wealthy. It’s the only precinct in Seattle to side with that GOP initiative. At the same time, they voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate for president — who was promising to raise capital gains taxes on the wealthy.
Back to voters of color. In a post-election briefing, analysts for AAPI Data, a group that monitors Asian American and Pacific Islander trends, said both Asian and Native American voting margins for Democrats have been dropping. Nationally, the Asian vote dropped 30 points in about a decade.
“It’s remarkable to see this decline since 2012,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder of the group.
Why is all this happening?
When I wrote last spring about the Chinatown International District drifting toward Trump, the Northwest Asian Weekly suggested it might be related to perceptions about who gets helped and hurt by immigration.
“There is some distrust of (the Democrats’) border policies because they appear to be equivalent to Seattle’s progressive politics of ‘favoring’ those experiencing homelessness and substance abuse disorders over working-class or low-income people who live in the community,” the paper wrote.
One community activist was quoted as saying: “In both cases, they are taking care of outsiders rather than locals.”
Chinatown and Little Saigon are two of the most neglected parts of the city, so that sentiment could be real. After years of the city allowing drug markets to cripple Asian-owned businesses along Jackson Street, it should be no shock if voters there start casting about for change.
Hong, the data researcher, said he suspects the drivers are economic. Growing up Asian in South Seattle, he knows other Asian and naturalized immigrant voters there who backed socialist Bernie Sanders, and later shifted to Trump.
“There’s a commonality between the Somalis in Sea-Tac, Chinese Americans in Chinatown, the Muckleshoot and all types of immigrants at New Holly,” he said. “I don’t think it’s about race. It’s a class realignment. These are working class, generally non-college people shifting away from the Democrats.”
Hong said it’s even more striking because Trump lobbed virulent insults at immigrants, such as that they’re “poisoning the blood of the country” or eating the cats and dogs. Yet some communities of recent immigrants found enough reason to back him anyway.
“If that’s not a wake-up call for Democrats, then I don’t know what would be,” Hong said.
Democrats here locally just won everything, though. So I’m not sure they’ll hear this particular wake-up call. Not unless they first do some soundings into the deep blue sea.
