Did this story’s headline make you click on it? A Trump precinct in Wallingford??? Say it ain’t so!!!
Well, it ain’t.
Last week King County Elections released it’s precinct-level voting data from the November 2024 general election. Precincts are essentially a grouping of registered voters in a radius of a few blocks. If you attended the 2004 (Kerry/Dean/Kucinich), the 2008 (Obama/Hillary), or the 2016 (Hillary/Bernie) Democratic Presidential Caucus, the group you were divided into was your precinct. These are essentially your immediate neighbors. And in Wallingford, your neighbors mostly vote for Democrats.
Wallingford voting for Democrats is no surprise, but I was curious at how a high rate we did so. I looked at the King County voting data for the precincts that make up what I consider to be the historic boundaries of Wallingford. I know this is highly controversial, but for this exercise I used N 50th St to the north, I-5 to the east, Lake Union to the south and (gasp!) Aurora Avenue to the west as our neighborhood borders.
There are 32 precincts in this boundary, with 13,650 registered voters. In the 2024 election, 12,026 of these registered voters cast a ballot—an impressive turnout of 88%, which is 8 percentage points higher than the turnout in greater King County.
It’s fairly safe to say that of these 12,026 voters in Wallingford, only 578 (or 4.8%) were happy with the result at the top of the ticket. The other 11,448? Disappointed, to say the least. But the 10,972 voters (91.2%) in Wallingford who cast a ballot for Kamala Harris for President—as well as the 476 who voted third party (led by Jill Stein’s 174 votes)—can take some solace in the fact that they likely backed the winning horse in every other race on the 2024 ballot, with only one exception.
Statewide, Democrats swept every race, from Governor on down. Our Democratic candidates for federal office, Maria Cantwell and Pramila Jayapal, won in their typical landslides. More locally, our state representative and city council races went to the more left-leaning candidate, and the Seattle transportation levy passed. Wallingford backed every one of these winners.
Wallingford voted down all four of the right-leaning, corporate-backed statewide initiatives, three of which failed. While our neighborhood voted overwhelmingly (80% to 20%) against I-2066, which repealed the Washington Decarbonization Act, it did pass statewide, and represents the lone deviation (except for You Know Who) between Wallingford’s voting preference and the final election result.
Wallingford’s votes trended far more liberal than the rest of King County, typically leaning 10 to 20 percentage points to the left of the county’s overall results. And while no Republican candidate did well in King County, Jaime Herrera Beutler did manage to crack 30% of the vote for Commissioner of Public Lands, her relative success likely a result of her vote to impeach Trump over January 6 while she was a member of the U.S. House. Herrera Beutler received 14% of the vote in Wallingford, the only Republican to exceed 10% in our dark blue neighborhood.
So where is the Trumpiest precinct in Wallingford? It’s SEA 43-3787, the four square blocks between Wallingford Ave, Densmore Ave, 40th St and 41st St. If you walk these blocks, don’t expect lawns littered with MAGA signs or Joe Rogan’s voice blaring from coal-rolling trucks, because even the Trumpiest neighborhood in Wallingford still voted 86% for Kamala Harris.
So there’s that.