Trump and Republicans made gains in nearly every state – but not in Washington

WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump swept to victory in Tuesday’s election by winning a bigger share of votes in nearly every state than he did in 2020, improving even in Democratic bastions like Oregon, California and New York – but not in Washington state.

As of Friday, with some votes still being counted, the once-and-future president had won a nearly identical share of votes in Washington this year – about 39% – to what he did four years earlier. His margin of victory in Spokane County even stayed level with four years ago, winning by about 4 percentage points in both elections.

While his fellow Republicans made gains in congressional races across the country, easily seizing the Senate majority, Democrats in the Evergreen State held onto two critical House seats.

The country’s rightward turn has prompted much soul-searching and finger-pointing among Democrats, but outgoing Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee struck a different tone in a news conference the day after the election, saying “people should come live in Washington state, because it’s a paradise of values.”

Cornell Clayton, a professor of political science at Washington State University, said relatively high levels of education, a good public education system and a population that’s increasingly concentrated in cities and suburbs may help explain how Washington bucked the national trend.

In an election year dominated by the effects of inflation, he suggested that workers in Washington’s high-tech industries have fared better than people in states where industrial economies have seen greater decline.

Clayton said blue states like Washington are likely to be important checks on the incoming Trump administration’s policies, something that Washington’s Gov.-elect Bob Ferguson and Attorney General-elect Nick Brown signaled during a news conference on Thursday.

“It makes state and local politics much more combative and interesting, because a lot of the major policy issues that might get passed at the national level will get pushback from states,” Clayton said. “I think that’s the one virtue of federalism, if you’re afraid of what Trump might do.”

Control of the House may take weeks to determine as votes in several key races in California are counted, but Democrats still have a faint hope of taking back the lower chamber as a buffer against GOP dominance in D.C. thanks to two Washington women whose support grew since 2022 while most of the country went in the opposite direction.

In Washington’s 8th Congressional District, which spans the Cascades from Wenatchee to the Seattle suburbs, Rep. Kim Schrier led Republican Carmen Goers by about 7.7%, a slightly better margin than her 2022 victory. The district had long been in GOP hands until Schrier won in 2018, a year when Democrats fared well amid backlash to Trump’s presidency.

In a statement on Thursday, Schrier said voters in her district had made clear that they want to be represented by “a pragmatic leader who is dedicated to working with both parties,” adding that she looks forward to continuing her efforts “to bring down costs for my constituents, protect a woman’s right to choose, and support local police and improve public safety.”

In southwest Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, the Columbian newspaper called the race Thursday night with Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez leading Republican Joe Kent by a margin of about 3%, after she beat him much more narrowly in an upset two years earlier. Like Schrier, Gluesenkamp Perez emphasized in a lengthy statement Thursday her commitment to listening to her constituents and working with Republicans.

“Some far-away pundits and prognosticators swore I would lose this re-election campaign from the moment I took office,” she said, but they “made a fundamental mistake by viewing this race through a partisan lens.”

Trump won more votes in the 3rd Congressional District than his Democratic opponents in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Gluesenkamp Perez has emphasized her district’s timber industry heritage and focused in her first term on legislation to help the working-class people who have increasingly abandoned the Democratic Party.

“Our community has never seen ourselves this way, and it’s not how we evaluate who merits our vote for Congress. This community was built by loggers with two-man misery whips, from trees too big to be felled alone,” she said, referencing an antiquated logging tool. “Today, the work in front of us is how we pass forward that gift, that spirit of cooperation to the next generation.”

In central Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, a race between two Republicans also showed the limits of the president-elect’s influence in the state. As of Friday, Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of only two House Republicans who remains in Congress after voting to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot in 2021, held a four-point lead over his Trump-endorsed challenger, Jerrod Sessler.

County-level vote totals from the Washington Secretary of State’s Office show that Trump generally improved his performance in already-red Eastern Washington while losing ground in most of Western Washington, as the Seattle Times reported. That suggests Democrats still have work to do to reach voters east of the Cascades, unless they’re satisfied with concentrating their influence in an increasingly dense area around Puget Sound.

Doug White, a Democrat who founded a political action committee called Rural Americans United after he lost to Newhouse in 2022, said his party needs to understand the “true needs” of people in areas like the Yakima Valley. He said he worries that people are straying from “democratic values,” which he considers separate from upper-case Democratic Party tenets.

“They’re what this country is based on, and that is opportunity for everybody, a level of equity across the board, helping those that are less fortunate so that they can rise and be able to be contributing members of society,” White said. “These are democratic values.”

Even in urban and suburban Western Washington, Democrats likely will rethink their approach as the United States enters another era of Republican rule at the federal level after what turned out to be a brief and unsuccessful interlude when President Joe Biden sought to end Trump’s hold on American politics. Rep. Adam Smith of Bellevue, one of the first Democrats to publicly call for Biden to step aside after a disastrous debate performance in June, signaled what that approach may include in a statement on Wednesday.

“We have a lot of work to do as a country to righten the course we are on,” Smith said after winning re-election. “We need to lower the cost of living, tackle corporate greed, make our communities safer, and support the working class. Just as crucially, we’ll need to find common ground with people we disagree with. We’ll need to improve the ways we handle political disagreements without resorting to extreme measures. I look forward to working on these challenges over the next two years.”