-Welcome to "City Inside/Out."
I'm your host, Brian Callanan.
This year's presidential election marks
a turning point in US politics.
Plus, a crowded local ballot will mean leadership
and possibly policy changes in Olympia and Seattle.
-God bless you and God bless America.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
-In a stunning comeback,
Donald Trump is president once again with a wave
of Republican support across the country.
Washington state races are tilting in the other direction.
-I'm running for governor to fix what's wrong
and do what's right.
-It won't be easy,
but I've never been satisfied with the status quo.
-Democrat Attorney General Bob Ferguson won
the governor's seat over his Republican opponent,
former U.S. Congressman Dave Reichert.
But Democrats could face some challenges
from a series of statewide initiatives.
-Initiative 2066 ensures natural gas remains an option.
-I-2066, which would stop local governments from banning
or discouraging the use of natural gas,
had a 51 to 49% lead on election night.
The three other initiatives,
which would have ended the capital gains tax
and Climate Commitment Act,
would have allowed state residents to opt
out of long-term care insurance, have failed.
-We need to get past ideological theories.
-And I've built a reputation for getting things done.
-For the Seattle City Council's citywide position 8 seat,
Alexis Mercedes Rinck took a strong early lead
over incumbent Tanya Woo,
and voters have said yes,
full speed ahead to a transportation levy
that's the largest in city history.
-My job is done.
-What message are voters sending at the city,
state, and national levels?
-This year of the woman turned out to be the year of the man.
-Our panel of election experts weighs in.
-This is a very partisan election.
-I do think that if I was on the current council,
I'd be a little worried.
-A look at early election returns
next on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪
And welcome once again to "City Inside/Out."
I'm Brian Callanan with you,
and I have a group here that can add a lot of perspective
to these early election returns, including David Horsey,
editorial cartoonist for The Seattle Times.
David, great to see you. -Good to see you.
-And here we go with Erica C. Barnett.
She's also here, publisher and editor of PubliCola.
Erica, great to see you too.
-Great to see you.
-And also with us, Stuart Elway.
Yes. It is that Stuart Elway.
He's been conducting public opinion research since 1975.
Stuart, thanks a lot for being here.
-Great to be here. -All right. Let's do this thing.
David, I wanted to show our viewers one
of your editorial cartoons from The Seattle Times.
It's been a yo-yo of emotions over the past several weeks
and looking at polling numbers,
but it looks like that yo-yoing has finally come to rest.
Donald Trump is going to be our 47th president.
What thoughts do you have about that?
-Well, um, yeah,
the yo-yoing was apparent with all my friends
who were just up and down
and the phrase Democrats finally settled on
I think was nauseously optimistic.
-Right. -Well, now we're just nauseous.
-Okay.
-It's funny, this always was a very possible result,
but I think people had kind of --
there was a lot of denial
because it's like we had four years of this.
Can we possibly go through another four?
And apparently we're going to find out.
-We are. We are.
-Well, now, last night, Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show"
had a segment where he showed the prognostication
of famous pundits through several election cycles,
all of which were wrong.
So anything we say today, who knows?
You never know for sure.
But my guess is this is going to be
the first term on steroids. -Okay.
You'll have plenty of things to draw, I would imagine that.
Erica, I wanted to borrow an opening line from one
of your recent stories on PubliCola,
which says "The dreaded presidential election
is finally upon us."
And I've heard so many similar sentiments from people.
This unease or anxiety about the 2024 elections.
Before we jump into the local issues,
is that sense of dread gone
now that the presidential election is over?
What are you feeling?
-Well, it's interesting.
I want to actually quote really quickly from something
that Josh Marshall wrote on "Talking Points Memo."
He said "There is clarity in this result.
This is who we are."
And he wrote a great piece about it.
And I think that sense of dread is gone,
because we know that this is who the majority of Americans,
at least Americans who vote, are.
They want this.
They know they're going into this clear eyed.
They know who Donald Trump is.
They know what he will do and what he has promised.
And they've said, "Yeah, we want that."
And so I think that removing that sense of dread,
you know, is, you know, maybe a tiny silver lining.
We know what we have to do now.
And it's not debate, you know,
whether Kamala Harris ran a good or bad campaign.
It's not, you know, having riots in the streets.
It's not, you know, protesting, you know,
having a back and forth about whether the vote was legitimate.
I mean, this is a mandate.
And so I think that that clarity
is a tiny, tiny, tiny silver lining.
-Okay. All right.
I thank you for that.
Stuart, I just wanted to ask you,
so many national polls showed this dead heat
in the presidential race,
but it really appears to be a landslide win for Trump.
It looks like he'll win the popular vote.
Republicans will control the House and Senate.
What do you make of what happened?
-Well, it couldn't have gotten any closer.
Mathematically, it wasn't possible for the polls,
but because the national and the seven swing states
were all within 1 or 2 points,
which is margin of error stuff, and it was always possible.
And they were talking about that the swings could all go one way
or the other or anything in between.
Well, they all went one way,
and it's not the way that people around here
thought it was going to go.
-Yeah. Did it surprise you at all?
-Yeah, it did, because I really thought that it wouldn't.
The odds of all the swing states going one way
or the other is pretty high. -Yeah.
-And, you know,
the other thing is Clallam County lost
its bellwether status.
It was the last county in the country
to get the presidential race right the last 10 elections.
And they went for Kamala last night.
-I'm sorry about that, Clallam County.
-I know -Stuart,
maybe I can stay with you.
No surprises in our state in the governor's race, I guess.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson had a big lead early.
Never lost it. Dave Reichert really --
This race was decided before election night, it seemed like.
And your poll showed,
it seems people really stuck to party lines in our state.
-This is a very partisan election.
You ask people, how would you register to vote,
which I do in my polls.
We don't in this state,
but I ask them that in the polls.
And then I ask the independents, how do you typically vote,
more Democratic, more Republican?
There's a 17-point gap
favoring Democrats in this state over the last several years.
You go from our votes in this across the last night,
president, Senate, governor, attorney general,
lieutenant governor, all the way down to insurance commissioner,
all those were within a couple of points of that 17-point gap.
-Wow. -It looks like -- I got it here.
It looks like the same chart all the way across.
The only one that's different is land commissioner.
It's a little closer. 6-point gap right now.
And who knows.
There's still as many as a million votes to count.
-Okay. -And in that race...
-Yeah, please.
-...I think the only reason
the Republican candidate did a little better is
because she was actually anti-Trump in the sense
she vote to impeach him.
-Jaime Herrera Beutler voted to impeach.
-It made her much more appealing.
-She got bonus points.
-Dan Newhouse, though, looks like he has a lead after.
-Yeah.
-And he's the other person that voted to impeach Trump.
-It's close.
-David, I wanted to jump back to the governor's race
and illustrate the point,
you see what I did there,
if I may, with one of your cartoons here,
because I thought this was interesting.
Back in August, you had this cartoon here,
a nod to maybe the Olympic equestrian competition.
You're making the point that Reichert really couldn't
overcome being tied to the Trump campaign,
which was thoroughly unpopular in this state.
Maybe not nationwide.
What's your take on the governor's race
going to Ferguson?
-Yeah, well, I don't think there was ever any doubt.
I mean, two years ago,
I think you could have said he's the guy
that will come through.
And, you know, Tip O'Neill famously said,
back in the olden days of politics,
that all politics is local.
It's not true anymore. All politics is national.
That was driven by national politics
as much as any other race.
Reichert, the stuff he was running on
really wasn't policy or anything.
It was, you know, crime and all these scary issues
that Republicans are using everywhere.
But because of that gap in this state
and the power of especially King County
to dominate the state politics, he never had a chance.
I mean, I think he's the best possible
Republican candidate.
-Right.
-There were a lot crazier people.
But... -Yeah.
Maybe I can get some thoughts from you, Erica.
All these state executive offices
were up for grabs this year.
It looks like Democrats are in the lead.
Democrat Dave Upthegrove barely made it out
of the primary,
but he was up against the former Congresswoman
Jaime Herrera Beutler.
Were there any surprises for you when it came to the state races?
-Well, if we can go to the initiatives for a second,
I would say that, you know,
the routing of three of the four
Brian Haywood-backed initiatives,
the the carbon pricing, long-term care --
-Allow me. -Yes, thank you.
-So I'm talking about 2117 would gut the Climate Commitment Act,
take away the carbon tax credit system.
That failed.
2109 would end the capital gains tax.
That failed.
2124 would allow residents a choice
to participate in our state's
long-term care insurance program.
Advocates say that would effectively end that program.
That measure failed too.
The one that did at least have a lead on election night was 2066,
which would stop local governments from banning
or discouraging the use of natural gas.
That did have a slim lead.
I just want to make sure I have that background.
-Thank you.
That's much better than I would have described it.
So I do think -- you know, I mean,
that was that was a body blow to those initiatives.
And I mean,
I don't remember exactly how many millions of dollars
were poured into those initiatives.
But I mean, you know, the backer of them was at gas stations,
you know, giving people discounts on their gas
to the national average to illustrate
that the Climate Commitment Act made gas more expensive
by about a quarter a gallon, according to the state.
And yet all of that failed spectacularly.
And I thought that was really interesting
because I don't cover state politics directly,
but just as a voter looking at the initiatives
on the ballot,
I mean, I don't think it was entirely clear what
these initiatives would do, that they were, you know,
bad from a progressive point of view,
that they would gut all these things
that we have committed to.
But nonetheless, voters in the state didn't fall for it
and voted down those three.
So that was a little bit surprising.
Just the margin of error on those,
or the margin on those, rather.
-It fit into this partisan pattern.
This was a package of initiatives.
We've never quite seen
such a coherent package put forward before.
-All originated by the state Republican Party.
-All originated by the state Republican Party
in an attempt to go over the head of the legislature
to undo keystone programs
that the Democrats passed during the legislature.
And Republicans didn't like them.
They couldn't stop them in the legislature.
Well, let's go to the people.
And they all got beat. So it --
Well, except the one.
So it fits this whole pattern
that we saw of a very Democratic,
partisan election across the board in the state.
-Does it chill the idea
of the state Republican Party possibly doing that again,
using the initiative process in this way?
What do you think?
-Yeah, it might. It might.
And as Erica pointed out,
there was a lot of money spent,
and they didn't come very close on three of those.
-Yeah.
-So they'd have to -- you have to think pretty carefully
about the next time you try this.
-Yeah.
-I thought that was especially encouraging.
I thought -- At one point I was convinced
that the carbon initiative in particular
would pass simply because it seemed
like you could have such an easy sell.
"Hey, lower your gas prices."
-"Vote yes, pay less."
-And I thought that would appeal across the board.
But happily, I think voters in the state
seem to be a little more tuned in and intelligent than --
-It took a while.
As you mentioned, they are --
They were complicated.
They were all technical to start with.
And they're written, you know --
Ballot titles are written by lawyers, not real people.
-And there was that fiscal impact statement this year.
-And then to put that put that on there,
and then you had to vote yes to repeal it and no to keep it.
So it's very complicated.
So as we're polling throughout this,
you could just see people working their way through it.
There was -- And it followed party lines.
Republicans voted on their side on all of them.
Democrats voted on their side on all of them.
But there are only a 5% that are undecided on all four.
And as it went on, you could see that.
So people were reading their voter's pamphlet
and working their way through it.
And they thought about these.
-Yeah. David, you framed this as a vote on the initiatives here
to move either forward or backward
on issues like climate change, long-term care,
taxing capital gains there.
Backward, as you saw it,
would be a yes vote on this measure here.
In terms of what happened here,
it almost seemed like that Democratic
versus Republican side overcame any of the pocketbook issues
that voters might look at in these situations.
-Yeah. And usually a simplistic sort of pocketbook appeal
is pretty effective.
But it seems like people went beyond that.
And probably because it was such a partisan thing,
people knew where these came from, you know,
from this guy with a bunch of money
who moved into the state
and decided he wanted to change everything.
I'm sure there was some resentment there.
But, yeah, it was a pleasant surprise.
I mean, you know, it would have destroyed whatever legacy
Governor Inslee is leaving us.
So I'm sure he's really happy this morning.
-Yeah. Yeah.
We'll see where the rest of it goes.
But I thank you for that.
Erica, I wanted to switch gears, if I could,
and take a look at the city council race.
Citywide position 8.
This is that one-year term before an election
for the four-year term in 2025.
Incumbent Tanya Woo really was fighting from behind
on this one since the primary here.
Alexis Mercedes Rinck, seen as a more progressive voice,
had more than 50% of the vote in the primary,
was 12 points ahead of Woo,
and she only increased that lead on election night 57% to 42%.
What did you see happen on election night with this race?
-Well, I was actually in the crowd
at Alexis's party last night.
It was a very interesting experience,
just to go back briefly to the presidential race,
because the presidential race results were sort of off
in a corner and nobody was paying attention to them.
And there was just like --
-Oh, they were kind of paying attention.
-Mm. -Oh, really? Okay.
-I mean, it didn't feel that way.
And there was just like absolute jubilation in the room.
People screaming, people crying.
I mean, so excited about about her win
and also about Shaun Scott's win in the 43rd.
And, you know, and I think rightly so, because, you know,
if you look actually at election night last time,
Alexis Mercedes Rinck had 46%, was ahead of Tanya Woo,
but not by the margin that she had last night.
And I expect that will only increase the gap
as it did during the primary election.
So, you know, I mean, I think, you know,
it's just a rejection both of Tanya Woo herself,
who has never been elected --
She was appointed to the position
after losing her last race to Tammy Morales.
And, you know, and people at least last night were saying
that they view it as a rejection of the council's
current politics, which are more conservative than in the past.
And so now Tammy Morales will have
a progressive ally in Alexis Rinck.
-And a few positions are up next year.
I'm thinking about the city attorney, the mayor as well.
And position 9, Sara Nelson's seat there as well.
Does this bode --
Any thoughts about that, how this might impact those races?
-Well, it's going to be a different electorate.
Because we have odd-year elections ordinarily for
city council races. -That's fair, yeah.
-And of course there is a move to push those races
to even years because there's higher turnout,
more people vote.
So it's hard to say because it's just --
it's going to be a different crowd of people.
But I do think that, you know,
Mercedes Rinck is the youngest person ever
to be elected to city council.
She is, you know, proudly progressive.
And this is a citywide position.
So voters across the city said that this is what they want.
And so I do think that if I was on the current council,
I'd be a little worried.
-Yeah.
-Because, you know, their sort of, you know,
fiscal responsibility and good governance policies,
you know, involve a reversal of what the previous council did.
-I see another yo-yo cartoon.
-Yeah, right.
Might be. Might be. -Absolutely.
-David, you haven't drawn much about the city council recently,
but any thoughts about this,
bringing on possibly it looks like Alexis Mercedes Rinck.
Maybe the general populace is saying we need to balance
this majority moderate council out with some
more progressive politics?
-I kind of shy away from attributing, you know, swings.
I think it actually may have more to do with
what Erica was mentioning,
that this happened to be a big turnout election.
And in this city,
that tends to favor a more progressive candidate.
-Yeah.
She had a lot of support from Democratic groups
around Seattle.
-So, you know, everybody's out there.
But that's not the case usually in off-year elections.
So we'll see if it means anything other than that.
Right now that's all I would say it does mean.
-Okay, I know there's a lot to look at there.
Stuart, I just wanted to look at this whole concept of how
divided our electorate seems to be --
progressive, moderate, et cetera,
and I'm just wondering how energized they are to vote.
I was looking at the stats the day before Election Day.
The Secretary of State's office said 2.8 million people
had already cast a ballot in our state,
compared to 3.6 million in 2020.
I just wanted to get your feeling on this.
Are voters tired of the elections?
Feeling disenfranchised? What are you --
-Well, I was surprised by that, too.
I was expecting -- The turnout four years ago was 84%.
And I was expecting something like that.
I mean, given everything that was on the ballot
from top to bottom.
We had all these state offices we've talked about.
Four of them were open seats.
-Right.
-Ordinarily, that would generate a lot
of enthusiasm and excitement.
And the state races just seemed like sort of,
you know, the opening act.
The focus -- This election was about Trump.
And we talked earlier about this,
but the Democrats have made every
Republican candidate middle name is Trump.
-Yeah. Right. -In Washington state.
And it works. It's been working.
And even in our national poll,
our poll on the presidential race,
half the people who are voting for Kamala Harris, half, 50%,
said they were voting to keep Trump out
more than to put her in.
So somehow there just wasn't the same impetus.
We don't know what the final turnout is going to be,
but I don't think -- it's not going to hit that 84%.
-Just if I can -- -Yeah.
-Do you think part of it is that everyone knew
how the state was going to vote,
and knew it had no effect on the electoral college?
-I do think that's part of it.
I think the idea we've been a one-party state for so long
that none of these state offices we've talked about
is a surprise, and none of them was even competitive.
-I mean, just to add another factor,
I mean, I do think that at the national level,
we can't discount the fact
that people did not want to vote for a Black woman.
-Mm.
-And I think that -- I mean, we're always going to be --
or maybe not always,
but we have been for a very long time a Democratic state.
The fact that, you know, people voted, you know,
were motivated in 2020,
you know, is, you know, is its own story.
But I think in this case,
I mean, there was a lot of sexism,
there was a lot of racism,
and there's a lot of just kind of passive, like,
lack of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris
that I think came out of that
for a certain percentage of the electorate.
-Yeah, very much a boys versus girls type of thing.
And I just saw Ohio's one example from election night.
Kamala Harris was able to get a 5% advantage
in terms of the woman vote,
but then Trump had a 14-point advantage
when it came to the male vote.
-That was pretty true all over the country.
-Yeah, it really did spin out that way.
-My colleague Danny Westneat --
-Yes. He brought it up. Yeah. -Yeah.
"This year of the woman
turned out to be the year of the man."
-Yeah, very much so. -Or the bro.
-Yeah, I don't know if we have time to get into that one,
but, Erica, we need to get close to wrapping up here.
I did want to touch briefly on Seattle's transportation levy.
Largest in city history.
Passed on election night, 67% to 33% margin.
What do those numbers tell you?
-I mean, it was very interesting to see that gap
because I've covered
this levy in previous iterations of it in past years.
I don't think it's ever been quite that wide.
It could be wrong, but I mean incredibly wide gap.
Virtually no campaigning publicly, which was also --
-Other than Alex Peterson, the former council member,
coming out against it. -Against it. Yeah.
So I mean, I think
that voters are just used to funding things this way.
And there's a sense that like, "Well, if we want sidewalks,
if we want bike lanes, if we want our buses to run,
if we want cars to not, you know, go into potholes,
we have to do this."
And so I think we've just kind of aligned ourselves that way.
I mean, I believe this transportation levy
was first passed --
It was under Nickels. So it's been around for a while.
-Bridging the Gap. Had a few names.
-Bridging the Gap was the first one.
And I think people are just used to it now.
And it wasn't a big surprise.
The city budget was written to sort of assume
that the levy didn't pass,
but I think it was really written to assume
that it did pass.
-30% of the Department of Transportation's
budget relies on that.
-Right. Right. -That's a lot.
-Yeah. So pretty overwhelming result.
I mean, we love levies,
but we seem to particularly love fixing potholes.
-Okay, okay.
Well, we'll see what happens next with that.
David, I did want to wrap up with you.
You brought up the fact in a cartoon around Halloween
that a second Trump term might be something to be feared.
You wrote that Trump has reawakened
the worst angels of our nature --
misogyny, bigotry, intolerance, xenophobia.
What are your concerns about a second term?
-Misogyny and bigotry. -Yeah, right.
Okay, I think I made the list. Yeah.
-And what I -- I think it's my biggest fear
is actually less Trump than the people
he's going to be bringing in that we're not --
were more on the fringes in the first term.
These are people that are going to do some radical things
or attempt some radical things.
-He's looking for loyalists,
not people from the Republican Party.
-Exactly. And I think it's quite possible,
given his age and his lack of energy,
he'll just say -- he'll be happy being the king,
the figurehead, and these other guys are going to go wild.
-Yeah.
-The federal government is going to be chipped away at
and taken apart.
Foreign policy is going to be crazy.
We'll be allies of Russia. -Oh, boy.
-There are all sorts of fun things.
-Okay, I'm not sure what you're going to draw next,
but I can't wait to see it.
-Well, the only good thing about this election
is I have now just an endless supply of things to deal with.
-Material. Material for sure.
Stuart, some final thoughts for you.
I know some pollsters were predicting political chaos
in the weeks after Election Day.
I don't know what past elections have taught you here
or what your thoughts are ahead.
What are we going to see in the next weeks, months?
-Well, I don't think we're going to have the chaos.
We're not going to...
Kamala's not going to file suit.
She's not going to,
you know, call forth an army to storm some building.
So I think there's sort of the resignation
that Erica was talking about or the --
somehow it's taken off the anxiety
because we've seen it before.
We kind of know what we're in for.
And right now, we're just trying to imagine
how bad it's really going to be.
-Okay. We have a lot to imagine here
over the next four years, for sure.
I thank you all for your input, and we will be right back.
What are people saying on social media
in the aftermath of Election Day 2024?
One person writes...
Another person comments...
We'd like to know what you think.
Send us an e-mail at contact@seattlechannel.org.
Thank you for that input.
Thank you all for your contributions as well,
and we will see you next time on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪