Despite winning big, WA Democrats find themselves in the doldrums

When Seattle pollster Stuart Elway asked Washington voters recently which political party they identify with, he noticed a big drop in enthusiasm.

Especially for the one that had just swept the 2024 state elections.

Voters who said they side with the Democrats plunged from 45% in October, prior to the election, to just 35% in January, Elway’s latest poll for Cascade PBS found.

That 35% figure is among the lowest for Democrats he’s recorded going back 20 years. That’s when the blue team first solidified its dominant hold on Washington, during the end of the George W. Bush administration.

Republicans’ share also dropped, by 6 points, from 26% to 20%. Meanwhile voters who say they don’t align with either party soared by 16 points, to 45%.

“Now that the election is over, everybody wants to be an independent,” Elway remarked.

The poll captures the murky future facing Democrats. They just won every statewide race here for the first time in 80 years. Yet there’s widespread angst within the ranks.

“Our brand is fundamentally broken,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, has been saying to anyone who will hear him out.

Nationally, new polls show Smith may be right. A Quinnipiac University poll this past week found the Democrats with a minus-26 rating, 31% favorable to 57% unfavorable — their worst showing in the 17-year stretch of the poll.

A CNN-sponsored poll found Democrats at their lowest spot with the public in more than 30 years.

Some of this is that nobody likes a loser — and the Democratic base really doesn’t like losing to Donald Trump. It might be why Washington Democrats appear to be getting so little credit for their big wins. The Trump loss nationally trumped it all.

The Quinnipiac poll shows that twice as many Democrats have negative views of their own party as Republicans do of theirs. So Democrats don’t even like themselves right now.

Fifty-five percent of Democrats told the CNN poll they feel “burned out” by politics. Only 13% described themselves as “fired up.”

What to do about this malaise? The state Democratic Party chair, Shasti Conrad, is arguing that Democrats nationally ought to copy Democrats here — by being more aggressively progressive.

“In a sea of red, Washington Democrats bucked the national trend,” she declared in an after-election report. “We delivered the strongest Democratic performance in all 50 states.

“Our losses in 2024 must not be allowed to make us turn on one another — OR on the policies at the root of our Democrat Party … I credit our success to the fact that progressive policies ARE popular.”

Smith says this papers over the party’s serious problems.

“We won. I get that,” he told the Washington State Standard. “But is it because we’re doing such a fantastic job, or is it because the Republican Party is simply unacceptable to over 50% of the electorate in the state of Washington? I’m of the opinion that it’s more the latter than the former.”

He name-checks crime and immigration as issues where Democrats “lack credibility” with voters.

Conrad cites the minimum wage, gun laws and “investments in education” as areas where voters in fact love the Democrats.

So should the party lean in left to get its mojo back? Go moderate? Hide under a desk?

The polls show the challenge. Right now Democrats are unpopular even with women, their strongest support group. The party’s failure to sustain abortion rights nationally may have taken a toll — it’s one thing to say you’re going to protect women’s rights, but then you have to actually do it.

This is Adam Smith’s point as well. In conversations I had with him after the election, he argued that Democrats do have a messaging problem. But more than that, it’s a governance problem. The sense of dysfunction coming out of some Democrat-run cities on the West Coast, especially with homelessness and crime, is a potent signal that Democrats can’t run things.

“I have Democratic colleagues in the House who bring it up all the time, from districts all over the country, that what’s happening in the cities is hurting them politically,” he told me. “They say: ‘You guys have to get it together out there.’ ”

Many progressive policies are popular, though. Proposals such as “tax the rich” poll very well. So locally, some Democrats say the base has become further bummed out that their new governor, Bob Ferguson, has ceded ground to the right on tax and budget issues.

“Ferguson isn’t reading the room,” argued Democratic organizer Robert Cruikshank in an email. “He passed himself off to the public over the last eight years as a hopeful challenger who will take on MAGA. That inspired people. Nobody’s inspired by what he’s shown as governor so far: dour austerity.”

The governance problem is real, though. One example is the public schools. Conrad praised Democrats for achieving “investments in education,” which is true — they’ve poured money into the schools. Voters here like this and broadly trust Democrats on schools more than the GOP.

But the results? The state has had a terrible “return on educational investment,” argues Marguerite Roza, a research professor at Georgetown University.

“Per-pupil spending has essentially doubled in the last decade (far outpacing inflation),” she writes. “Meanwhile eighth-grade math scores are in free fall.”

Washington’s eighth graders as a group have fallen about one and a half grade levels behind where they were in math a decade ago, according to new national test scores. That’s a crisis-level drop. Yet you don’t see a crisis-level response from state leaders, beyond appeals for more money.

The national corollary to this would be immigration. Americans previously had accommodating views on migrants, polls showed. But people clearly saw the Democratic administration lose control. So enough of them tipped back to the extreme of Donald Trump.

In the end, Trump probably is the north star that could guide Democrats out of the political darkness. Bouncing back probably hinges less on policy or performance right now than on one word: fight.

Does a party with aging leaders and a burned-out base have that fight in them? It’s one of the burning questions of the year, and so far they can’t seem to agree where to start.