Local Electoral Trends
By This story at the Seattle Times gives us a sense of the electoral trends here around Seattle.
It seems clear there is a delinking of the GOP from its financial base here in Seattle. Wealthy neighborhoods in Seattle continue to vote Democratic, but that’s no surprise. Bush saw his support erode in some of the wealthiest communities in the country: Medina, Mercer Island, Clyde Hill, Redmond, etc. The GOP losses were offset by gains in places like Enumclaw, Marysville, and Maple Valley–working class communities delinked from the metropole.
Even though these gains and losses cancelled each other out, I think this trend should be viewed as bad news for Democrats. I have a feeling the denizens of Medina are soft gains for the Democrats–give them a GOP candidate who’s less demonstrably incompetent and insane (or can credibly promote him or herself as such a person) and they’ll be back. On the other hand, the votes we lost we lost with a candidate who is neither incompetent nor insane, and may be much more difficult to woo back.
On an somewhat related note, here’s a precinct map for the 2004 for election for the puget sound. Note that Seattle has exactly one precinct that went for Bush. It’s directly south of the University, and appears as though it must contain significant parts of the arboretum. So, why is this the one Seattle precinct to go for Bush? I know it’s a very wealthy neighborhood, but it can hardly be the wealthiest, compared to some precincts in Magnolia, Madison Valley, etc. Also, I was always under the impression that a lot of faculty and university staff lived in the neighborhoods south of the canal, which would seem to work against voting trend. Who are the mysterious Republicans in our midst?
I’d also like to complain that finding the cover story from two days ago in the Seattle Times is damn near impossible through their own website, which demonstrates disastrous incompetence in web design in a city filled with competent web designers.