Patty Murray’s King County advantage is important, but Snohomish is the bellwether

Lin­da Smith could­n’t do it.

George Nether­cutt could­n’t do it.

Dino Rossi could­n’t do it.

And Chris Vance could­n’t do it, either.

For Repub­li­cans, though, the dream of beat­ing Wash­ing­ton’s senior Demo­c­ra­t­ic U.S. Sen­a­tor Pat­ty Mur­ray lives on. Time and again, they insist she’s vul­ner­a­ble and spend a huge amount of mon­ey against her… so far, with­out success.

Tiffany Smi­ley and her oper­a­tives claim that this year will be dif­fer­ent. One recent Smi­ley ad fea­tures vot­ers who have sup­pos­ed­ly vot­ed for Pat­ty Mur­ray four times say­ing they can’t and won’t do so again. But are the indi­vid­u­als in these ads rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the broad­er Wash­ing­ton elec­torate? Data sug­gests no.

Cred­i­ble Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber 2022 polling indi­cates that Mur­ray has a ten point or greater lead over Smi­ley statewide. Mur­ray is poised for a vic­to­ry greater than the one she had twelve years ago when her oppo­nent was Dino Rossi.

Mur­ray’s advan­tage in King Coun­ty is huge: sev­en in ten vot­ers there backed her can­di­da­cy in August. A sim­i­lar fig­ure, 68%, said they were vot­ing for her in both the King Coun­ty sub­sam­ple of our mid-Octo­ber 2022 statewide poll as well as in our more recent coun­ty­wide poll, which fin­ished field­ing last week.

Repub­li­cans have per­formed poor­ly King Coun­ty for many cycles now, a trend that Seat­tle Times Dan­ny West­neat focused on in his most recent col­umn, head­lined: Sor­ry, every­where else: The election’s going to come down to King Coun­ty.

West­neat is cor­rect that King Coun­ty is home geo­graph­i­cal­ly to a piv­otal and large bloc of vot­ers. King Coun­ty has become increas­ing­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic as the Repub­li­can Par­ty has mor­phed into an extrem­ist enti­ty with auto­crat­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics, which is a huge prob­lem for any Repub­li­can run­ning statewide.

How­ev­er, if Repub­li­cans were as dom­i­nant every­where else as Democ­rats were in King Coun­ty, then the Demo­c­ra­t­ic advan­tage in King Coun­ty would not be the huge obsta­cle for Repub­li­cans that it is. If you want to know why Tiffany Smi­ley’s chances against Pat­ty Mur­ray are poor, then look to Sno­homish County.

Sno­homish, locat­ed to the north of King, is the state’s third largest coun­ty by pop­u­la­tion. It’s home to cities like Everett, Lyn­nwood, Mount­lake Ter­race, Edmonds, Marysville, Lake Stevens, Mill Creek, and Arlington.

The trio of King, Sno­homish, and Pierce (the lat­ter is the sec­ond largest coun­ty by pop­u­la­tion) account for a huge major­i­ty of Wash­ing­ton State’s pop­u­la­tion, and are some­times col­lec­tive­ly referred to as Cen­tral Puget Sound.

Mur­ray has­n’t always won Pierce Coun­ty, but she has always car­ried Sno­homish… always. And there’s a strong like­li­hood that she will again this year.

The key to Demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­toral resilience in Wash­ing­ton State isn’t just King Coun­ty, con­trary to what the head­line of West­neat’s col­umn implies. Rather, it’s the abil­i­ty to con­sis­tent­ly car­ry impor­tant swing coun­ties like Sno­homish, which has been known to lurch to the right now and again, such as in 2019, when it backed Tim Eyman’s I‑976, vot­ed down I‑1000, and elect­ed Adam Fortney.

Repub­li­cans have to do real­ly well across many swing coun­ties to suc­cess­ful­ly fol­low Slade Gor­ton’s “boa con­stric­tor strat­e­gy” for coun­ter­ing King Coun­ty’s elec­toral strength. Democ­rats, mean­while, don’t need a sweep of the swing coun­ties to win. They just need to pre­vent Repub­li­cans from run­ning the tables out­side of their strong­holds in King, Jef­fer­son, and San Juan.

Mur­ray has shown she can do this every six years.

Here’s Sno­homish Coun­ty’s vot­ing history:

Regard­less of who her Repub­li­can oppo­nent has been, Mur­ray has man­aged to reel in a major­i­ty. Even in cycles that were dif­fi­cult for Democ­rats, like 2010.

Dino Rossi came clos­er to Mur­ray than Rod Chan­dler, Lin­da Smith, George Nether­cutt, or Chris Vance, but even he could­n’t pre­vail across the swing coun­ties. Mur­ray kept Sno­homish in her col­umn and also won What­com, Kit­sap, and Thurston. Besides the usu­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic strong­holds of King, San Juan, and Jef­fer­son, she also car­ried Grays Har­bor and Pacif­ic. That was enough to off­set Rossi’s advan­tage in thir­ty out of Wash­ing­ton’s thir­ty-nine counties.

Grays Har­bor and Pacif­ic might not be with Mur­ray this year. They were long Demo­c­ra­t­ic bas­tions, but have increas­ing­ly gone Repub­li­can. It would­n’t be sur­pris­ing if Smi­ley won them this year along with oth­er rur­al counties.

But if Mur­ray holds onto Sno­homish, pre­vails in a few oth­er swing coun­ties like What­com and Kit­sap, and keeps Smi­ley at bay at Pierce Coun­ty, King Coun­ty will be in a posi­tion to pro­vide a rea­son­ably com­fort­able mar­gin of victory.