White men in Washington state

[Crumpets]

Seattle is both an extremely liberal city and one where the booming industry is male-dominated. This leads both to people self-selecting, and being more inclined to relocate to Seattle if it is culturally/politically similar to them, as well as having a moderating effect on would-be Republican white men elsewhere. This last point is particularly noticeable on the East Side of Seattle's suburbs, where many of Microsoft's wealthiest employees live - these areas are competitive/lean Republican in most local elections while voting 70+% for national Republican candidates, and swinging wildly away from the Republicans when they went from Romney to Trump.

Another thing about the tech industry, is that many people who are a part of it have a sort of reverse-West Virginia effect going on. Democrats are seen as the more friendly of the two parties to innovators and those on the cutting-edge, while Republicans are viewed as the party of luddites. Just as a life-long Dem will vote Republican if they think their job is at stake, even the most tech-broish of tech bros knows that their prospects are better under a Democratic president.

Third point: the "old guard" of Washington democrats, while small, is predominantly union-driven. Boeing workers, commercial fishermen, longshoremen, and loggers made up the backbone of the Washington Democratic party for decades before it became a reliably blue state (and again, all male-dominated industries). Unlike the old guard of other state's Democratic parties (working-class whites in the south, the Rhode Island elite, what have you), this is a group which still fits snugly into the modern Democratic party - maybe Boeing workers more than loggers - and are groups that, unlike auto workers or coal miners, have really not had a substantially harder time climbing out of the great recession than your typical middle class family or tech worker. In other words, the new and old Democrats really tend to see eye-to-eye a lot more than in other parts of the country, and were unified in their opposition to someone who made no overtures to either group in the last election. Loggers are kind of an exception to this, and many logging-heavy areas have been swinging against the Democrats for a while now.