Washington Primary results thread (both parties; “polls close” at 11pm ET)

[NOVA Green]

On the Dem side, I'm going to freely admit that I'm a lot more uncertain.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was Oregon-like, with Sanders winning nearly everywhere but landsliding in few places.

I think Bernie could well lose Adams, Grant and Franklin counties, and possibly Yakima county when you look at similar areas in Eastern Oregon like Malheur and Umatilla counties and a higher Latino proportion of the population.

Also, Snohomish has the potential for a Hillary win when you compare it to Washington, County Oregon demographically, including a higher income level and potential for decreased Bernie supporter turnout without delegates at stake.

Wouldn't be surprised to see Pierce county be only a narrow Bernie win and possible Hillary flip and King county being lower in Bernie margins than Multnomah county in Oregon.

I think metro Seattle-Tacoma will be closer in overall margins than metro Portland

[NOVA Green]

Hillary's win here gives me a bad feeling about Sanders's chances in California.

Sanders never really had a chance in California. Seeing how Seattle voted, Hillary will win Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Solano and Napa counties. Maybe even San Francisco and Marin.

So are you now predicting how Asian-Americans are going to vote in the Bay Area based upon early King County results?

[NOVA Green]

Hillary's win here gives me a bad feeling about Sanders's chances in California.

Sanders never really had a chance in California. Seeing how Seattle voted, Hillary will win Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Solano and Napa counties. Maybe even San Francisco and Marin.

So are you now predicting how Asian-Americans are going to vote in the Bay Area based upon early King County results?

Not calling you a hack, but have been spending some time looking through Asian-American precinct and county data and still am confused as to your explanation as to the rationale as the variance in Bay Area counties without explanation. You might well be right.

[NOVA Green]

The late vote will start coming in in about an hour.

Although according to the SoS website only some counties are scheduled to update today.

Notable being some of the more populated counties: Clark, King, Pierce, Snohomish, Thurston, amongst others.

FWIW: Bernie took about 60-65% of the "late vote" in Oregon, so there might be some significant changes in overall numbers.

Clark, Spokane, Kitsap should all flip to Bernie today and wouldn't be surprised to see dramatic shifts in King and Pierce counties and Snohomish move closer to 50-50.

We are still waiting on some final numbers from late votes in Oregon, in several larger counties, so wouldn't be surprised to see this limp on for another week or so in Washington as well.

[NOVA Green]

First batch in; new totals are:

Clinton 357091 53.52%
Sanders 310135 46.48%

So Sanders is already starting to tick upwards.

So... if Sanders wins... it means something?

Well in the big scheme of things of course not. However, the final numbers do give us additional data points on the whole "primary vs caucus" discussion, turnout levels and patterns of returns in vote-by-mail states, and ultimately one more election geek thing to talk about while we wait for the final round of elections.

[NOVA Green]

Spokane county has flipped from Clinton to Sanders

Where are you seeing this?

I haven't checked all of the county websites yet, so basically the changed numbers so far are from Clark and Lincoln, and Spokane counties?

[NOVA Green]

So King county added another 16k votes 48-52 Hillary.
Spokane county 4.6k 60-40 Bernie.
Pierce county another 9k votes 53-47 Bernie

[NOVA Green]

Looking at the map...I don't understand how Sanders could be so relatively close to Clinton and yet have a map with the percentages in each county that exist. If I didn't know the statewide figures and looked at that map, I would have thought Clinton won by 12 points or more. King County was over one-third of the vote, nearly 60% Clinton and was Clinton's best county in the state.

It all has to do with election night returns 49-51 Clinton if we remove King County and appears to be 50-50 as of "First Wave" mail in ballot returns and will likely change even more dramatically tomorrow.

Of the 60k ballots counted today in Washington, results are 55-45 Bernie.

There are an estimated 111k "ballots on hand" to be counted and approximately 41% are from King County, and likely we will see a significant drop in the Hillary percentage in King County with "Wave Two" ballots that will probably trend closer to the "Wave One" of the late vote.

Note that King County basically has one of LOWEST reported voter turnout rates at 27.6% only higher than Snomomish, Whitman, and Yakima county.

What this tells me is this, based upon similar patterns of vote-by-mail returns in Metro-Portland, is that there are a large number of votes yet to be counted in King and Snohomish counties, and the county election offices are focused on day-to-day business while they move through the slow process of counting ballots in what is essentially a meaningless election on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the house.

I love vote-by-mail, but unfortunately it makes it extremely frustrating trying to actually get final votes in contests where there is no political impact nor urgency to finalize the vote counting.

Edit: Saw the other responses after writing this. I do not see Bernie winning this considering what appear to be the overall turnout levels BUT, there is a similar trend that we will see in Washington state regarding extremely poor performance in small-town and rural parts of the state, even though King County will essentially give her the win in the low-turnout beauty contest, combined with a few heavily Latino counties in Eastern Washington that I predicted before, and likely a HOLD in Pierce county and Snohomish flip.

Key question is where final King/Pierce/Snohomish numbers end up, honestly I have no idea what the next few days numbers from those counties will show, based upon Metro-Portland numbers where we saw two counties flip from Hillary to Bernie within 48 hours and Multnomah county go from a 10 point to a 20 point lead within 4 days.

Vote by Mail has its downsides...

[NOVA Green]

IIRC Washington tried to switch to a primary and the DNC werected the ones who got in the way - hence the beauty contest.

I thought that Washington Republicans pushed for a March primary for both sides and the Dem SoS opposed it for some reason to the point that Op-Eds in major newspapers in Washington State were calling to voters to vote just to send a message to the SoS so that Washington State could actually be the first West Coast state and largest Western state to have a primary where we could actually have a voice in national elections, where usually the West Coast is last to vote?

[NOVA Green]

Looking at the map...I don't understand how Sanders could be so relatively close to Clinton and yet have a map with the percentages in each county that exist. If I didn't know the statewide figures and looked at that map, I would have thought Clinton won by 12 points or more. King County was over one-third of the vote, nearly 60% Clinton and was Clinton's best county in the state.

It all has to do with election night returns 49-51 Clinton if we remove King County and appears to be 50-50 as of "First Wave" mail in ballot returns and will likely change even more dramatically tomorrow.

Of the 60k ballots counted today in Washington, results are 55-45 Bernie.

There are an estimated 111k "ballots on hand" to be counted and approximately 41% are from King County, and likely we will see a significant drop in the Hillary percentage in King County with "Wave Two" ballots that will probably trend closer to the "Wave One" of the late vote.

Note that King County basically has one of LOWEST reported voter turnout rates at 27.6% only higher than Snomomish, Whitman, and Yakima county.

What this tells me is this, based upon similar patterns of vote-by-mail returns in Metro-Portland, is that there are a large number of votes yet to be counted in King and Snohomish counties, and the county election offices are focused on day-to-day business while they move through the slow process of counting ballots in what is essentially a meaningless election on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the house.

I love vote-by-mail, but unfortunately it makes it extremely frustrating trying to actually get final votes in contests where there is no political impact nor urgency to finalize the vote counting.

Edit: Saw the other responses after writing this. I do not see Bernie winning this considering what appear to be the overall turnout levels BUT, there is a similar trend that we will see in Washington state regarding extremely poor performance in small-town and rural parts of the state, even though King County will essentially give her the win in the low-turnout beauty contest, combined with a few heavily Latino counties in Eastern Washington that I predicted before, and likely a HOLD in Pierce county and Snohomish flip.

Key question is where final King/Pierce/Snohomish numbers end up, honestly I have no idea what the next few days numbers from those counties will show, based upon Metro-Portland numbers where we saw two counties flip from Hillary to Bernie within 48 hours and Multnomah county go from a 10 point to a 20 point lead within 4 days.

Vote by Mail has its downsides...

Yeah, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on at least.

Well one of the real issues with this Vote-by-mail structure is that absolutely nobody has any ideas of how many ballots are still outstanding....

We can assume that Washington State primary turnout is approximately half of Oregon's vote-by-mail numbers, significantly skewing the overall electoral Demographics regardless of Hillary being a an overall better fit for Washington than Oregon amongst the Democratic electorate.

Look particularly at ballots postmarked from registered voters in Washington state in college in other states.... military ballots in one of the states with the highest proportion of active service members in the country, including many career military personnel from Fort Lewis, McCord, Bremerton, etc... as well as what appear to be extremely low turnout numbers in the highest income and educated counties in the state that historically vote overwhelmingly Democratic in GE and National elections.

Multnomah County Oregon is at 70% turnout with VbM and King county is only at 27% as of today...

No question that margins will narrow significantly even though Hillary appears to have won King County by large margins.

[NOVA Green]

Yakima county reported a few more votes; Margin shrinks from 5.9% to 5.84%. The more important  dumps of votes will start coming in an hour or so.

That was a pretty crazy vote dump too -- it was 58% Democratic compared to 63% Republican on Election Night, and Sanders narrowly won when Clinton got 55% on Election Night.

The "Second Wave" swing doesn't surprise me, since we saw the same think with vote-by-mail in Oregon, presumably since ballots are basically counted closer to the order received.

The "estimated ballots remaining" numbers on the SoS website are interesting too, since there were 3,000 total estimated outstanding and 2,866 additional Dem votes were added, so yeah maybe Dems vote later than Reps in Eastern Washington?

BTW: Do you have the precinct #s for JBLM (Fort Lewis-McChord)? I have only four precincts identified by navigating the maps on the SoS website makes it almost impossible to identify, but of those four Bernie is winning the military vote and am interested in the base trendlines and what it might mean for larger base areas in Cali.

[NOVA Green]

Yakima county reported a few more votes; Margin shrinks from 5.9% to 5.84%. The more important  dumps of votes will start coming in an hour or so.

That was a pretty crazy vote dump too -- it was 58% Democratic compared to 63% Republican on Election Night, and Sanders narrowly won when Clinton got 55% on Election Night.

The "Second Wave" swing doesn't surprise me, since we saw the same think with vote-by-mail in Oregon, presumably since ballots are basically counted closer to the order received.

The "estimated ballots remaining" numbers on the SoS website are interesting too, since there were 3,000 total estimated outstanding and 2,866 additional Dem votes were added, so yeah maybe Dems vote later than Reps in Eastern Washington?

BTW: Do you have the precinct #s for JBLM (Fort Lewis-McChord)? I have only four precincts identified by navigating the maps on the SoS website makes it almost impossible to identify, but of those four Bernie is winning the military vote and am interested in the base trendlines and what it might mean for larger base areas in Cali.

Late ballots tend to be more Democratic, often driven by King County.  They've been slightly more D so far.  Yakima is an outlier, though.  I guess the Latino vote came in late, although it's interesting that Sanders is also winning the late vote, since Clinton is at 56% in heavily Latino precincts.

JBLM is 28-574, 28-578, and 28-579 (Fort Lewis) plus 28-580 (McChord AFB).  It's voting 69% Sanders and 49%-35% Trump.

Overall, Sanders is getting 69% in military precincts across the state and Trump is winning over Cruz, 53%-33%.  (Cruz is winning the air force vote and Trump isn't doing that amazing on the other bases, either.)

Thanks! Those were the four precincts I had identified, although I also looked at State District 2 to try to assess what some of the "offbase" vote might be looking like.

[NOVA Green]

King county has reported now, similar margin as before 57.44-42.56 in King, and 52.74-47.26 overall. 

So basically "Wave Two" only 51-49 Bernie with an additional ~25k ballots, and only an estimated 7k total ballots to be counted?

If these estimated ballot numbers are close to the truth, looks like King County might have one of the lowest turnout rates in the state...

[NOVA Green]

Yakima county reported a few more votes; Margin shrinks from 5.9% to 5.84%. The more important  dumps of votes will start coming in an hour or so.

That was a pretty crazy vote dump too -- it was 58% Democratic compared to 63% Republican on Election Night, and Sanders narrowly won when Clinton got 55% on Election Night.

The "Second Wave" swing doesn't surprise me, since we saw the same think with vote-by-mail in Oregon, presumably since ballots are basically counted closer to the order received.

The "estimated ballots remaining" numbers on the SoS website are interesting too, since there were 3,000 total estimated outstanding and 2,866 additional Dem votes were added, so yeah maybe Dems vote later than Reps in Eastern Washington?

BTW: Do you have the precinct #s for JBLM (Fort Lewis-McChord)? I have only four precincts identified by navigating the maps on the SoS website makes it almost impossible to identify, but of those four Bernie is winning the military vote and am interested in the base trendlines and what it might mean for larger base areas in Cali.

JBLM is 28-574, 28-578, and 28-579 (Fort Lewis) plus 28-580 (McChord AFB).  It's voting 69% Sanders and 49%-35% Trump.

Overall, Sanders is getting 69% in military precincts across the state and Trump is winning over Cruz, 53%-33%.  (Cruz is winning the air force vote and Trump isn't doing that amazing on the other bases, either.)

Where are you guys finding precinct-specific data?

The Secretary of State web site has a little "Precinct Results" link at the bottom for about half the counties.  King releases their Election Night precinct results tomorrow afternoon.

See: http://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/clark/

So Alcon, what precincts do we need to look at in Seattle to have an idea of the Asian-American vote in the West Coast?

This obviously has huge implications for the Dem Primary vote in Cali in particular, where Asian-Americans are the 3rd largest ethnic group with relatively high overall voter turnout rates, and encompass over 25% of the vote in (3-5) counties in the Bay Area alone.

Seattle in particular has both Chinese and Filipino American populations, similar to SF and East Bay, as well as a large Vietnamese population which is especially significant in South Bay.

I ran some precinct numbers for the most heavily Asian-American precincts in Metro Houston ( Sugarland and Texas HD-149) and it looked like Hillary won by 30-40% in areas with a 40% Asian-American population.

Still, some significant differences in the primary calendar, countries of origin, disposable household income, and occupational sectors, make this extremely suspect with West Coast demographics.

So here is a 2010 Census Tract Map of Seattle by % of Asian-American population. Are there any key precincts or indicators of support for candidates in the 2016 Primary?

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view&id=15248

[NOVA Green]

Just for reference, Obama won the 2008 beauty contest 354,000 to 316,000, right now Hillary is up 412,000 to 374,000.  King seems to be the dominant difference in both the result and increased turnout as Obama won 100,000 to 76,000 while Hillary won 158,000 to 117,000 (with a couple of thousand votes left).  Why the big increase in turnout and vote for Hillary vs 2008?

Well, this definitely raises some interesting and broader questions, and also shows the different demographic coalitions between the '08 and '16 Dem primaries. Although it doesn't totally surprise me that Hillary won King County, the apparent margin of victory here is much larger than one might expect.

1.) Electoral Composition- Overall turnout level appears at <40% compared to ~70% in Oregon, and so skewed older, wealthier, and "traditional" Democratic demographics, all populations where Clinton has outperformed her 2008 numbers throughout the primary season.
2.) Metro trends- The largest swings towards Hillary in the PacNW between '08 and '16 basically occurred within the two respective Metro areas in Oregon and Washington (Portland, and Seattle-Tacoma). For example, Hillary received only 30% of the vote in Multnomah County, Oregon in '08 but 41% in '16. King County, Washington Hillary received 42% in '08 and a whopping 57% in '16, so an even greater swing likely due partially to the electoral composition, dramatic improvement in her performance among African-Americans, and apparently also apparently significant improvement over her '08 numbers among Jewish and Asian-Americans, where there are significant population in Seattle and King County overall, although I haven't dug into the '08 precinct data.
3.) Non-Metro trends- Hillary actually had a virtual collapse of support among small town and rural-Democrats between '08 and '16 that was most pronounced in blue-collar areas including many New Deal Democratic strongholds that have been trending Republican since Bill Clinton and the DLC shifted the party towards Free Trade in the '90s. In fact, Hillary had over half of Washington counties, trend against her in 2016, including heavily in SW Washington, and much of Eastern and NE Washington state.
4.) Several other factors that may or may not contribute to the 2008 vs 2016 Washington State Dem primary swings. Election timing (2008 primary held only 2 weeks after caucuses so higher "insurgent candidate" enthusiasm. Oregon Media markets- TV markets in SW Washington covering the late May primary. Establishment support- Obama endorsed by Dem Governor in '08. No major Bernie Dem Party endorsements in WA State.

So what could explain the extent of the Clinton swing in King County?

1.) The Iraq war was the major contrast between the two candidates in the 2008 primary in the PacNW, and was particularly concentrated in Metro Seattle and Portland. I believe was the major factor in uniting the urban liberal base of the party with Democratic leaning "independent" voters, and possibly somewhat of an opposite effect in "downstate" parts of the region.
2.) The 2016 contrast is much more diffuse, but it is focused more on economic themes, "establishment politics", and how far and how fast to move forward on economic justice that play differently within different segments of the Democratic Base. Higher income Democrats are less receptive to Bernie's message, and it does appear that the greatest Hillary swing in the NW are in areas with the highest county incomes, including four counties in Puget Sound (King, Pierce, Thurston, and Kitsap) accounting for a chunk of the Hillary swing in King.
3.) Free Trade- Although this is an issue where Hillary's position has shifted dramatically over the primary season, and probably helped Bernie in many parts of Washington and Oregon state, I think this could have cost him some points in King County, and likely Pierce as well, where there are a large number of jobs tied to the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, as well as export-related jobs in general. Bernie going after Boeing was probably huge as well, with 82,000 current jobs in Washington State, as well as an ever larger number of retirees, and likely cost him dearly among many King County voters.

[NOVA Green]

Thanks for the info, NOVA

Hey--- could be totally off-base, but been tracking the '08 and '16 Dem numbers using '08 as the baseline, and King County does stand out as a major outlier, even when compared to similar although lesser swings in the three Metro-Portland counties since it went from one of her worst counties in Washington State to one of her best.

Now all that being said, I am convinced that if Washington State had moved to a March Primary only, as the State Republican Party and many Washington Democrats were urging to give the Pac-NW an "early vote" in the primary season, and even if it were a closed primary a-la-Oregon, that Bernie would have won, albeit with a much lower delegate haul and probably closer to a 54-46 Bernie margin, or basically an 8-10 point Bernie win significantly lower than the Oregon primary results.

All being said, I totally support Washington State moving towards a Democratic Primary earlier in the calendar, where a more liberal voice can be heard within the party on social, economic, and foreign policy issues, and essentially can play a major role representing the voice of West Coast Democrats that alone represent a solid block of 77 electoral votes, and although we have a few representations of the Mountain West in the form of the Nevada and Colorado caucuses, basically the Democratic Party nomination for the past 24 years has been decided early on in the South, with the MidWest and Northeast as an afterthought....

# WestCoastDemocrats