Tag: WA-Sen

The key to Demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­toral resilience in Wash­ing­ton State isn’t just King Coun­ty. Rather, it’s the abil­i­ty to con­sis­tent­ly car­ry impor­tant swing coun­ties like Sno­homish, What­com, or Thurston. 

Cred­i­ble polling indi­cates that a Pat­ty Mur­ray vic­to­ry is the most plau­si­ble out­come of this con­test. That was the case before Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics pro­nounced it a “tossup” and it’s the case now. 

52% of sev­en hun­dred and sev­en­ty respon­dents inter­viewed by Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling this week said they’d vote for Mur­ray if the elec­tion were being held today, while 40% said they’d back Smi­ley. 8% were undecided. 

The real rea­son for despair is that Sen­ate Repub­li­can Leader Mitch McConnell is shov­el­ing more than $60 mil­lion into unex­pect­ed­ly dif­fi­cult con­tests to hold onto seats of retir­ing Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Rob Port­man and Pat Toomey in Ohio and Penn­syl­va­nia. Smi­ley has raised a lot of mon­ey but appears large­ly on her own.

With an increas­ing cho­rus of pun­dits and jour­nal­ists assess­ing that the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s hopes of recap­tur­ing the Unit­ed States Sen­ate this year are dim­ming, nation­al and state Repub­li­cans are engag­ing in a big coor­di­nat­ed push to try to con­struct and sell the nar­ra­tive that Wash­ing­ton State is in play for the Repub­li­can Par­ty this year, despite a lack of evi­dence sup­port­ing that contention.