The Progressive Paradox: How the Democratic Party Won Rural Western Washington, 1976 - 2024

Conner Huey, Harvard University

As political realignment in the United States has seen white working-class voters shift support from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, rural Western Washington presents a progressive paradox - despite being a rural white working-class region that has experienced substantial union decline since the 1990s, the region has supported the Democratic Party since the 1970s. Limited scholarship exists examining negative cases of non-existent political realignment. My research intervenes in this puzzle by examining the case of rural Western Washington from 1976 to 2024. Employing a historical institutionalist approach, I explore candidate quality and organizational network theories to understand the Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas’ political development, utilizing original data and mixed methods, particularly archival, ethnographic, interview, and quantitative methods. Throughout this period, Democratic candidates have been of higher quality than Republicans across a variety of metrics. Along with winning voters in their own right, liberal candidates have shaped the structural conditions necessary to preserve Democratic success, such as preserving community institutions like organized labor in Kitsap. However, while organized labor historically played an important role in socializing the region into possessing liberal sympathies, path divergence emerged during the 1990s when organized labor collapsed on the Olympic Peninsula while surviving in neighboring Kitsap, offering liberals and conservatives the opportunity to reshape structural conditions on the Olympic Peninsula. Yet, conservatives have proven unsuccessful in socializing voters due to underinvestment in conservative community institutions like NRA-affiliated gun clubs to reshape social fabrics. Instead, in light of diminished social capital to socialize voters on the Olympic Peninsula and to bolster liberal organizing in Kitsap, beginning in the early 2000s, liberals have developed a highly coordinated organizational network that has proven more effective in mobilizing voters than conservative equivalents due to greater intra-network collaboration, maintaining a robust local presence, and operating on longer temporal horizons.

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 Presented in Session 8. US Political Movements