Blue City, Red State

I lived in Seattle for my first four years of school, be­fore our fam­ily moved to Clark Coun­ty, where I completed High School. I re­turned to Seattle for college at UW (which took more years than I care to admit) and then lived there for about ten years after.

I've always been a "Seattleophile." I'm a regular reader of the Seattle Times and an enthusiastic visitor, riding ferries, visiting SAM (hint: it's a museum), eating in Pioneer Square and getting a coffee about every ten minutes.

Still, I'm amazed when I read in Seattle- area papers how surprised the locals seem to be when people from outside Seattle com­plain about the Washington's Seattle-centric politics.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat wrote last month about two state Senators who are officially Democrats, but have joined with the Republicans in that chamber to form a working majority. (They let out a few anti-Seattle snarks as they went over.)

After pointing out the troglodyte attitudes of many non-Seattle-area members of the state legislature, Westneat comforted himself by saying this:

"I don't know, it seems the rest of the state is becoming more like Seattle, not less. Whit­man County, way out in the Palouse, just voted for both legal pot and gay marriage!"

Okay, here's the deal, Danny. That's a perfect example of the exception proving the rule. If you took all the Seattle-area trans­plants who work and study at WSU and re­turned them to their natural rainy habitat, you can be sure that Whitman County's results for those measures would have been just like to the rest of eastern Washington's. Besides, Republicans Mitt Romney and Rob McK­enna both received comfortable majorities of the vote in that county, despite WSU's influ­ence. In fact, Republican nobody Michael Baumgartner even outpolled Senator Maria Cantwell in Whitman County by 79 votes.

The other day I decided to kill some time on my computer by splitting out the vote re­sults from last November's election between the Seattle area and the rest of Washington. The Seattle-Tacoma metro area contains over half the State's population, and it's deep, deep blue. The rest of the state, however - even including some other blue counties in western Washington - is as crimson as WSU's jerseys.

I added up totals for four big counties in and around Seattle: King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap. (I used numbers from the Secre­tary of State's website). Together, those four counties accounted for just over 56% of all voters in Washington. Then I added up the totals for the state's other 35 counties. Here's a breakdown for a few of the state-wide elec­tion results:

4 Big Counties Other 35 State Total President: Obama (D) 63.0% 47.4% 56.2% Romney (R) 34.6% 49.1% 41.2% Other 2.4% 2.7% 2.5% Total Votes 1,763,248 1,362,268 3,125,516

Governor: