WA turns a deeper shade of blue as national results reveal Trump’s strength

By Brendan Kiley, Hannah Furfaro and Margo Vansynghel

Seattle Times

Pearl Hanna sunk into her chair Tuesday night, a corner of despair among the hundreds of lively election-watchers at Stoup Brewing on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

“I’ve lost hope in this country,” the 30-year-old said, scrolling her phone to a New York Times forecast favoring Donald Trump as the next president of the United States. “Everything’s awful.”

The presidential race — a stormy two years of felony charges, assassination attempts and one midstream candidate switch — wasn’t finished at that hour, but Republicans were encouraged.

“So far so good,” Trump supporter Nancy Forsberg said at a conservative election night party in Kirkland. “I’m really hoping Trump wins.”

Washington is in the time zone that gets to watch it all unfold as polls close and results trickle in, sending shivers of anxiety and hope throughout the electorate. On Tuesday night, Seattle slumped into a deeper shade of blue.

By 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, with Wisconsin’s release of big batches of votes from Milwaukee and Racine, Trump jumped past the required 270 electoral votes. And in a comeback for the ages, the former president and now president-elect remained ahead in the popular vote, too.

In Washington, Harris secured the state’s 12 Electoral College votes, walloping Trump 58% to 39% in Tuesday’s count. The Secretary of State’s Office reported over 3.2 million ballots returned by 5 p.m., a 64.6% turnout. The number is sure to climb as votes are counted over the coming days.

“We hope she’ll be president,” outgoing Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee said in an interview Tuesday night. “If it goes the other way, we honor the votes and we soldier on.”

Washington’s support for Harris comes as no surprise. Its electoral votes haven’t gone to a Republican since Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in 1984.

The state is so predictable, it hardly got any attention during this campaign.

Washington’s only prominent mention came in the two presidential debates, as Trump made false claims about 2020’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP.

“They took over big chunks of Seattle,” Trump said in his June debate against President Joe Biden. “I was all set to bring in the National Guard. They heard that. They saw them coming and they left immediately.”

CHOP, which lasted from roughly June 8 to July 1, did not involve “big chunks” of the city and was dispersed by local law enforcement.

At the Wildrose Bar on Capitol Hill, a couple of blocks from the former CHOP site, Reena Sidhu jiggled her leg nervously while checking a map of election results on her phone. Her friend Chloe Guillot was disheartened to be back at the Wildrose, watching her third election involving Trump.

“I couldn’t vote the first time Trump ran, and now this is the second election having to vote against him,” Guillot said. “And the fact that it just gets closer and closer every year is incredibly disappointing, as somebody who wants to believe better in this country.”

Gloomy moods and dire warnings

Trump’s rhetoric about Seattle fit the dim mood of the 2024 race, in which each candidate emphasized what they were against more than what they were for.

Trump scowled over what he said America was not: not vital, not safe, not even functional, and undermined by “the enemy from within.” As Trump told supporters during a speech in Florida: “Your country is being turned into a third-world hellhole ruled by censors, perverts, criminals and thugs.”

The campaign argued for Trump as the singular figure who can make things right. During an Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden (where speakers made headlines for repeated racist and misogynistic barbs), the jumbotron declared his final-stretch slogan: “Trump will fix it.”

The Harris campaign was also animated by negatives — particularly that she is not Trump, whom she cast as vindictive, insecure and dangerous. Harris secured hundreds of endorsements from Republicans, including former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” Harris said in an Oct. 29 speech in Washington, D.C. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”

But her campaign had trouble communicating to voters what, exactly, that to-do list entailed.

Four years of preparation

The former president spent much of the campaign raising the specter of voter fraud, revisiting the 2020 loss has refused to concede — which resulted in a rash of violent threats against election workers and the insurrection of Jan. 6.

“The death threats to elections officials, their staff, their families — that was real trauma,” said Kim Wyman, a Republican who served as Washington’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2021. She then worked in elections for the Department of Homeland Security and is now senior fellow in the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Election Day, she said, appeared to run smoothly, with a few exceptions. Bomb threats, which the FBI attributed to Russian sources, were called in to polling places in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Navajo County, Arizona.

One thing election workers cannot control, Wyman added, is the public’s ravenous hunger for instant results. Each state has its own election laws — some, like Pennsylvania, cannot begin processing ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. “Based on what we’re seeing,” she said, “we’re probably not going to know who won until later this week.”

But every day without definitive results gives people time to fill the void with narratives of fraud. “Foreign, malign actors will take doubts about an election process and amplify them with synthetic media (A.I.) or fake online personas that look like someone in the U.S. when it’s actually a bot farm in Russia.”

A bipartisan history

It’s been 40 years since Washington voted Republican for president.

Biden took the state in 2020 (58% to Trump’s 39%), and Hillary Clinton prevailed in 2016 (54% to 38%) but lost the general election.

During the 34 presidential elections since Washington became a state in 1889, it has cast its collective vote for 15 Republicans and 19 Democrats.

Over those 135 years, Washington voters backed losing presidential candidates only 10 times.

Now, make that 11.

rendan Kiley; is a Pacific NW magazine staff writer. Reach him at bkiley@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2507.

Hannah Furfaro: hfurfaro@seattletimes.com; Hannah Furfaro covers mental health for The Seattle Times.

Margo Vansynghel; Margo Vansynghel is The Seattle Times arts economy reporter.

Seattle Times staff reporter Taylor Blatchford contributed to this report.