Demo­c­ra­t­ic Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor Pat­ty Mur­ray’s sup­port in King Coun­ty remains strong and durable, putting her in a good posi­tion to win reelec­tion this month despite a mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar Repub­li­can attack cam­paign, a new coun­ty-lev­el poll con­duct­ed this week for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute has found.

68% of vot­ers in our sur­vey said in the aggre­gate that they had either vot­ed for Mur­ray or would be vot­ing for her, while 27% said they had vot­ed for Mur­ray’s Repub­li­can chal­lenger Tiffany Smi­ley or would be vot­ing for Smiley.

3% were not sure, 1% could not recall who they had vot­ed for and 0% said they did not vote for U.S. Sen­ate or would not vote.

This find­ing is iden­ti­cal — iden­ti­cal! — to the per­cent­age in the King Coun­ty sub­sam­ple of our mid-Octo­ber 2022 statewide poll who said they were sup­port­ing Mur­ray, which was also 68%. (The per­cent­age back­ing Smi­ley in our statewide pol­l’s King Coun­ty sub­sam­ple was 26%. Anoth­er 6% were not sure.)

The align­ment sug­gests that both of our polls — con­duct­ed weeks apart by dif­fer­ent firms using dif­fer­ent meth­ods — were sound­ly con­duct­ed and each have rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ples, which is always our aim with every poll that we do.

Repub­li­can firms have put out some garbage polls this week and last week sug­gest­ing that the race is a dead heat. Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics was suc­cess­ful­ly bait­ed into declar­ing the race a “tossup,” while a num­ber of mass media out­lets have run sto­ries sug­gest­ing that Mur­ray faces the prospect of being defeat­ed in an upset.

It’s chaot­ic and unpre­dictable elec­tion, so any­thing can hap­pen, but all of the cred­i­ble data that we have sug­gests Pat­ty Mur­ray is going to be just fine. This lat­est poll find­ing is a very wel­come addi­tion­al con­fir­ma­tion of pre­vi­ous data.

Mur­ray achieved an incred­i­bly impres­sive 70.09% show­ing in the August Top Two elec­tion in King Coun­ty against sev­en­teen oppo­nents, Smi­ley included.

That 70.09% fig­ure is impor­tant because it’s from an actu­al elec­tion that mil­lions of vot­ers cast bal­lots in. It’s some­thing we can rely on for com­par­a­tive purposes.

With 68% being just two points shy of 70%, what our polling indi­cates is that the tor­rent of Repub­li­can attack ads on tele­vi­sion and stream­ing ser­vices has been laugh­ably unsuc­cess­ful in gut­ting Mur­ray’s sup­port in the state’s largest county.

King Coun­ty is only a por­tion of the State of Wash­ing­ton, so you might be won­der­ing, why is a coun­ty-lev­el U.S. Sen­ate poll find­ing so significant?

It is sig­nif­i­cant because it shows that there has­n’t been move­ment towards the Repub­li­cans in the vote-rich heart of Wash­ing­ton State these past few days.

This sur­vey just came back from the field today. This data is hours old.

And it indi­cates that this race is quite sta­ble and free of dra­ma. Lit­tle has changed despite Repub­li­cans’ fran­tic efforts to put Wash­ing­ton into play.

We see no plau­si­ble path to vic­to­ry for Tiffany Smi­ley against Pat­ty Mur­ray if she gets pum­meled in King Coun­ty in this election. 

It is def­i­nite­ly pos­si­ble for King Coun­ty to be out­vot­ed — we’ve seen Slade Gor­ton’s boa con­stric­tor strat­e­gy employed a num­ber of times, includ­ing by Tim Eyman ini­tia­tives and by Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman.

But the boa con­stric­tor strat­e­gy only works if the num­bers for the Repub­li­can side in the big swing coun­ties are real­ly good and the num­bers for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic side in King Coun­ty aren’t that good. And in this con­test, we just aren’t see­ing that.

Vot­ers in King Coun­ty like Pat­ty Mur­ray. They like the job she’s doing. She and Pres­i­dent Biden are both pop­u­lar. Biden has a 67% approval rat­ing among the vot­ers we sur­veyed this week, while Mur­ray is right behind the Pres­i­dent at 65%. Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee also achieved a 65% approval rat­ing in this sur­vey. Mur­ray’s pop­u­lar­i­ty has changed lit­tle since our last coun­ty­wide sur­vey in the sum­mer, which is anoth­er indi­ca­tion that the Repub­li­can attack ads sim­ply aren’t working.

Repub­li­cans are free to dis­miss our polling and say we’re full of it, but elec­tions going back many years have vin­di­cat­ed our elec­toral pub­lic opin­ion research.

In 2020, for exam­ple, NPI was the only orga­ni­za­tion to pub­licly poll up and down the statewide bal­lot, and in every sin­gle con­test, the can­di­date who led in our sur­vey won. We also nailed the dynam­ics of Ref­er­en­dum 90, con­cern­ing com­pre­hen­sive sex­u­al health edu­ca­tion, find­ing that vot­ers were poised to approve it.

We believe that polling can­not pre­dict the future. Cred­i­ble polling can, how­ev­er, sug­gest what is plau­si­ble. Here, the most like­ly out­come is a Pat­ty Mur­ray victory.

Pat­ty Mur­ray’s clos­est ever reelec­tion win was in 2010, when she defeat­ed Repub­li­can Dino Rossi by 118,766 votes statewide (52.36% to 47.64%).

Rossi was able to win some impor­tant swing coun­ties, like Pierce, Clark, Spokane, and Skag­it, but he could not defeat Mur­ray statewide. Mur­ray’s strength in King Coun­ty and in coun­ties like Sno­homish proved too much for Rossi to overcome.

In that 2010 matchup — a con­test that our poll­ster found Rossi ahead in just days before Elec­tion Day — Rossi got 35.08% of the vote in King County.

This year, it looks like Smi­ley may fall sev­er­al points short of Rossi’s mark in King Coun­ty. She already failed to equal Rossi’s per­for­mance in the Top Two back in August. The same dynam­ic looks set to repeat again this month.

Our team thinks that’s going to be a fatal prob­lem for Smiley.

Here’s the exact ques­tions we asked and the respons­es we received:

Already voted (King County only!)

QUESTION: In the elec­tion for U.S. Sen­ate, who did you vote for?

Respon­dents who told us that they had already vot­ed were shown this question. 

• Pat­ty Mur­ray (D): 75%
• Tiffany Smi­ley (R): 22%
• Do not recall: 2%

Haven’t yet voted (King County only!)

QUESTION: The can­di­dates for U.S. Sen­ate in Wash­ing­ton are list­ed below in the order they appear on the gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot. Who are you vot­ing for?

Respon­dents who told us that they had not yet vot­ed were shown this question.

• Pat­ty Mur­ray (D): 58%
• Tiffany Smi­ley (R): 32%
• Not sure: 10%

FOLLOW-UP QUESTION ASKED OF UNDECIDED VOTERS ONLY: If you had to choose, who would you vote for?

• Pat­ty Mur­ray (D): 16%
• Tiffany Smi­ley (R): 9%
• Not sure: 66%
• Would not vote: 9%

Aggregate responses

COMBINED ANSWERS (AGGREGATE), ALL QUESTIONS:

• Pat­ty Mur­ray (D): 68%
• Tiffany Smi­ley (R): 27%
• Do not recall: 1%
• Not sure: 3%
• Did not vote on this: 0%
• Would not vote: 0%

Pat­ty Mur­ray’s name was always shown to respon­dents first and Tiffany Smi­ley’s name was always shown sec­ond. (That is the order the can­di­dates are list­ed on the gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot.) The can­di­dates’ pho­tographs from the voter’s pam­phlet state­ment were shown to vot­ers along­side their names.

Our sur­vey of 740 like­ly 2022 King Coun­ty gen­er­al elec­tion vot­ers was in the field from Fri­day, Octo­ber 28th until today, Thurs­day, Novem­ber 3rd.

The poll was con­duct­ed entire­ly online for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute by Change Research and has a mod­eled mar­gin of error of 4.0%.

Fol­low this link if you’re inter­est­ed in a detailed primer on the survey’s method­ol­o­gy along with infor­ma­tion about who took the poll.

Now, here are the num­bers from our statewide sur­vey last month:

Data from NPI’s October 2022 statewide survey

QUESTION: The can­di­dates for Unit­ed States Sen­ate in Wash­ing­ton State are Demo­c­rat Pat­ty Mur­ray and Repub­li­can Tiffany Smi­ley. Who do you plan to vote for in the election?

STATEWIDE ANSWERS:

• Pat­ty Mur­ray (D): 52% (+1% since June)
• Tiffany Smi­ley (R): 42% (+2% since June)
• Not sure: 6% (-2% since June)

KING COUNTY ANSWERS:

• Pat­ty Mur­ray (D): 68%
• Tiffany Smi­ley (R): 26%
• Not sure: 6%

Our sur­vey of 782 like­ly 2022 Wash­ing­ton State midterm vot­ers was in the field from Wednes­day, Octo­ber 19th through Thurs­day, Octo­ber 20th. The sur­vey was con­duct­ed by Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute and has a mar­gin of error of +/- 3.5% at the 95% con­fi­dence interval.

It uti­lizes a blend­ed method­ol­o­gy, with auto­mat­ed phone calls to land­lines (50%) and text mes­sage answers from cell phone only respon­dents (50%).

More infor­ma­tion about the survey’s method­ol­o­gy is avail­able here.

So: 68% and 68% for Mur­ray; 26% and 27% for Smiley.

Again, these fig­ures come from two polls con­duct­ed weeks apart by dif­fer­ent poll­sters at dif­fer­ent lev­els (state, coun­ty) using dif­fer­ent sur­vey­ing methods.

Yet the num­bers line up beau­ti­ful­ly — because this is a con­test with sta­ble dynam­ics and because we and our poll­sters fol­lowed the sci­en­tif­ic method.

It’s excit­ing to have fresh data avail­able to con­firm our pre­vi­ous polling and bol­ster our assess­ment that Pat­ty Mur­ray is well posi­tioned for reelection.

If you appre­ci­ate NPI’s research and want it to con­tin­ue in 2023 and beyond, we invite you to become a mem­ber of NPI or make a one-time dona­tion.