We’ll go ahead and answer that question for you right away. Your Seattle neighborhood voted for Hillary Clinton.
Trump won the election by motivating whites without a college degree and improving in many key areas on Mitt Romney’s 2012 numbers. He saw big gains in places far and wide, from Maine to Minnesota.
One place he did not make gains was the Puget Sound region. Crosscut’s Ben Anderstone dug into the election results to figure out why the Seattle region not only bucked the trend on Trump but also voted for Clinton more than it voted for Barack Obama.
It’s no surprise that King County went Democrat. We all knew that was going to happen. But as Anderstone points out, there’s usually a few outlier neighborhoods like Clyde Hill or Hunts Point that go Republican. However, that wasn’t the case this year at all. Even in areas where Trump’s ideal demo call home, there wasn’t the kind of referendum that the country saw around other cities.
Anderstone thinks the fact that the Puget Sound region is doing well economically right now undercut any potential gains that Trump would have gotten with his messages about how things are terrible.
That’s not to say he didn’t make big gains in certain regions (Grays Harbor County, Marysville), but the real surprise might just be how Clinton surpassed her predecessor’s numbers by a lot. She didn’t just win Puget Sound, she crushed Trump more than Obama beat Romney. Across the state, Clinton improved on Obama’s numbers by 1.8 percent. In Mercer Island, she improved by 25.6 percent. In Sammamish, it was 29.7 percent. Whether it’s what Clinton was saying or what Trump was saying, the region was all-in on her.
Perhaps that’s why so many in the Seattle area are feeling the way they do these days. Not only did they buck the national trend, but they did so about as aggressively as any region in the nation.