Number of elections | 33 |
---|---|
Voted Democratic | 18 |
Voted Republican | 14 |
Voted other | 1[a] |
Voted for winning candidate | 23 |
Voted for losing candidate | 10 |
Washington is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Since its admission to the Union in November 1889, the state has participated in 33 United States presidential elections.[1] It has had twelve electoral votes since 2012, when it gained a tenth congressional district during reappropriation based on the results of the 2010 U.S. census.[2][3] Washington has conducted its presidential elections through mail-in voting since 2012 for general elections and 2016 for party primaries.[4]
In the 1892 presidential election, incumbent president Benjamin Harrison received 41.45% of the popular vote in Washington and obtained the state's four electoral votes in his unsuccessful re-election campaign.[5] Washington generally favored the Republican Party in presidential elections until 1932, reflecting its state and congressional voting patterns.[6] The state was won by Progressive Party presidential nominee Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election; Roosevelt, who had been a Republican during his presidency, remains the most only third party candidate to have won Washington's presidential election.[6][7]
From 1932 to 1948, Democratic candidates won Washington in landslide victories for the presidency and state offices as a result of the Great Depression and New Deal.[6][8] Washington was characterized as a swing state for the remainder of the 20th century and voted 21 times for the winning candidate from 1892 to 1996.[6][7] Since 1984, no Republican candidate has won a presidential election in Washington.[9] In 2009, American journalist Ron Brownstein referred to Washington and 17 other states collectively as the "blue wall" due to its strong preference for Democrats.[10][11]
Washington is typically thought of as politically divided by the Cascade Mountains, with Western Washington generally being liberal and Eastern Washington generally being conservative.[12] However, due to Democratic dominance in the Seattle metropolitan area, which has the majority of the state's population, Washington is generally labeled as a blue state.[13][14] The state adopted a single-ballot blanket primary system in 1936 to replace earlier party primaries; until 2020, these were non-binding and not used to determine delegates in national party conventions.[15][16]
Washington state has signed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an interstate compact in which signatories award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the federal-level popular vote in a presidential election, even if there are other candidate won some of individual signatorys' popular vote. However, it has not yet gone into force as of 2023.[17]
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