Category: Thurston County (Page 1 of 16)

Will Thurston County deaths outstrip births again?

June 15, 2024 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Last year’s population estimates were historic in Thurston County, for at least one reason: for the first time since records have been kept, the number of annual births were outpaced by deaths. The county still saw a population increase because of in-migration. But, even those numbers were relatively flat, keeping with a recent trend of steady (if historically median) in-migration. Since the historic in-migration in Thurston County in the 1970s, the number of people moving here has bounced between 2,000 and 5,000 people each year, despite the increase overall in population.

The data below is based on last year’s population data release from the state.

In regard to how we got to a negative natural population increase, it looks like a combination of a flat birth rate since the recession and a rapid increase in deaths in the last few years. I’m not an epidemiologist, but it seems likely that the natural decrease is probably a combination of the impacts of generational population change (baby boomers getting older), obviously Covid and a flat birth rate.

One thing I’ll definitely want to do with the chart above is change it from raw population data to growth by year as a percentage to give a clearer trend from the 1970’s massive growth to today.

But now let’s look at the historic battle between birth and death:

Underlying data on births v. deaths in Thurston County

Source: Populations estimates (OFM)

While the gap in deaths vs. births was tightening in recent years, mostly because of the flat birth rate, the pandemic spiked deaths in Thurston County, driving the total number of deaths above births.

But, well we zoom out, we see that Thurston County is not alone in losing the battle with death.

Thurston County’s situation seems to be part of a statewide trend across all counties starting a decade or so back. Here are all natural change totals as a percentage of population, colored for increase (blue) or decrease (red):

Underlying data on county level natural population change.

Source: Components of population change (OFM)

Generally speaking, Washington counties had healthy natural population increases until the mid to late 1980s, and then they began sliding downward.

There seems to be a fascinating correlation in this particular data that deserves more exploration. The leading counties in this trend seem to follow a particular model. The counties that led the trend in this decline fall into two general groups: Pacific, Wahkiakum, Clallam, and Jefferson (declining Olympic Peninsula timber counties) and Garfield and Columbia (tiny upper Snake farming communities).

Re-examining the out-of-town (or just corporate) real estate investment in Thurston County

May 10, 2024 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Back in July 2021, I took a deep dive into the number of houses that were owned by corporate out-of-town investors. What I found then was the scale of investment was within the bandwidth of what could be expected.

It turns out I chose about the least opportune time to take a snapshot of corporations buying single-family homes. I didn’t track it at the time, but 2021 and 2022 were the largest years for this kind of transaction in the records I found. My first look was just a bit too early to catch it.

In this analysis, I will take a look at the four largest corporate owners of single family homes in Thurston County. I’ve been trying hard for months to finish this post, so the data I used is a few months out of date (January 2024). I assume nothing major has happened since then.

Counterintuitively, two of the four corporations are headquartered here in Thurston County: Rob Rice Homes and Walter Cox Company. The other two are out-of-town corporations, Invitation Homes (from Dallas) and Home Partners (Chicago). That said, their portfolios are on a completely different scale.

Prior to 2016, Rob Rice and Walter Cox were pretty much the only institutional buyers in Thurston County. Home Partners began to purchase in 2016 and then really took off in 2021. Invitation Homes not only appeared on the scene in 2022, but dominated the market, changing the scale altogether. Their 121 homes purchased just in 2022 was just a couple dozen shy of all the homes purchased by the top four since 1995.

It is worth noting that while Invitation dominated, Walter Cox (headquartered in Lacey) also bought more homes in 2022 than they had in any other year.

Comparing these purchases of the top four across the entire housing transactions in the county, you see the percentage go from barely perceptible to actually measurable (above 3 percent of all transactions) in 2022.

What is interesting is 2022 was not necessarily a banner year in home sales in Thurston County. The year prior was the all-time peak, with 2022 representing a cyclical slide down. These purchases also came at a time when mortgage rates were sliding up. The average price was also still climbing in 2022. These three combined: total sales sliding down, mortgage costs increasing with the climb in sale prices not abating, seemed to have combined to mean a mixture of circumstances that benefited corporate purchasers.

Despite this, the out-of-town ownership level in Thurston County (not counting our two local owners) is not high compared to the rest of the country. The Owned Away From Home analysis by Regrid:

Let’s talk geography:

Generally speaking, all the top four are clustered towards the edges of the northern Thurston County cities, especially towards southern Lacey and Hawks Prairie. There are some definite clusters:

Home Partners and Invitation are pretty typical, but with strong clusters in Hawks Prairie.
Almost all of Walter Cox houses are in two or three neighborhoods along College in Lacey.
Rob Rice follows a similar pattern, but with a broader reach out towards Tumwater.

Years built

This is interesting, because unlike the hockey stick of the purchase-by-year chart, the homes built-by-year is different. While there is a peak in newer homes by local Rob Rice in 2022 and 2023, most of the homes purchased have an average age of at least 10 years. Meaning, even though they’re newer than the average home in Thurston, they weren’t being bought directly from developers, but by individual sellers.

I’m not sure if I’m ready for a total revamp of my opinion about corporate ownership of single family homes. I feel there’s a bit of classist hand wringing about this phenomenon that doesn’t exist for people living in apartments owned by large out-of-town corporations. Additionally, apartments aren’t for everyone and buying isn’t for everyone. Not everyone lives in a place long enough to make buying a home make a lot of sense. And we shouldn’t relegate those folks to apartment living if they don’t want to. So, the moral framing of corporate ownership of single family homes doesn’t do it for me.

That said, a recent discussion in the Strong Towns community makes an argument that I do find compelling. That this isn’t an issue on a broad countywide or national level, but rather on the neighborhood level. Additionally, it can theoretically be a problem, especially with out-of-town owners causing a decline in the economic fate of a neighborhood. And, we know that corporate ownership in Thurston County is clustered in certain neighborhoods, so it is worth exploring that risk.

Getting back to the Regrid research, they find a correlation between household incomes and out of town ownership. They created a map that compares incomes against out of town ownership. Again, they didn’t measure all corporate ownership, just the ones that weren’t near where they owned homes. In Thurston County, they found one neighborhood in West Olympia that had a high correlation between low incomes and high out-of-town ownership:

What is interesting is that the neighborhoods with high clusters of corporate ownership in Hawks Prairie and south of Yelm Highway in eastern Lacey that aren’t on this map.

What further research I would like to see is taking an even finer comb to the Thurston data and measure parcel-by-parcel in the really high cluster neighborhoods and see what developments have the highest percentage of out of town ownership. Now that I think of it, it woudn’t be that difficult, but it is a measure for another post.

The (mostly) lack of evidence of the impact of race in Badillo-Diiorio/Scott race in for North Thurston Schools

November 11, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

For me, the most interesting election in the county this year was between a candidate for the North Thurston School district and her opponent, who had endorsed here.

In a more perfect world, no one would have voted for Stephanie Scott. She did not campaign and had endorsed Esperanza Badillo-Diiorio weeks before the primary election. But because she endorsed Badillo-Diiorio after the deadline to withdraw, Scott’s name remained on the ballot. And, probably more importantly, her candidate statement remained in the Voters’ Pamphlet.

In one of the oddest possible returns in the primary, Scott even finished ahead of Badillo-Diiorio for a few days as ballots were being counted before the primary was certified, possibly knocking a candidate she supported.

No one’s fault really, that’s just the way elections work. And, Scott did spend a lot of time campaigning for her opponent, so it wasn’t that big a surprise that Badillo-Diiorio will be certified the winner of the general election in a week or so.

But what I was interested in was the phenomena of two candidates with the names Badillo-Diiorio and Scott, where Scott was the candidate not really running.

Matt Barreto wrote an influential paper in 2012 (then a professor at the University of Washington) describing his finding of racism in the Yakima County results in a race between well-funded (and now Supreme Court Justice) Steven Gonzales and un-funded, non campaigning Bruce Danielson. Basically, Barreto compared the results for Danielson by precinct against those of other conservative candidates and found that Danielson would outperform those conservative candidates.

You can read Barreto’s entire study here.

Barreto’s example of an election impacted by racism looks like this:

Using a similar technique, the Badillo-Diiorio/Scott race looks like this:

Instead of using Republican candidates, I used the composite returns of the two non-Democrats (who could be fairly described as conservatives) who ran for countywide offices.

While Danielson outperformed the Republican in 100 percent of precincts, Scott only won 57 precincts compared to 49. Hardly a barn burner.

It is worth noting, that in Barreto’s analysis, he found racism impacting voting in Yakima and Grant counties (on the eastside) but did not find it in Snohomish County. It is very likely that Thurston County is more similar to Snohomish than Yakima or Grant.

What is left unaddressed here or in Barreto’s work, is why anyone would vote for a candidate who is actively not campaigning. Or, more specifically, in Scott’s case, endorsing and campaigning for their opponent.

I’m sure the lack of media coverage in the race had some impact. Most of what voters heard in this race likely came from the Voters’ Pamphlet, which did not provide a lot of difference between the two candidates. That seems to be born out in the results. Compared to the two other North Thurston school races, Badillo-Diiorio/Scott had more undervotes (people not voting at all) and write-ins.

So, in the end, it is likely just voters not entirely sure what to do. The majority of Scott voters likely would have voted for her opponent had they learned she was no longer in the race.

Three ways to think about pedestrian deaths in Thurston County between 2006 and 2020

January 2, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Somewhere back in the peak of the pandemic, there was a popular Facebook post here in Olympia that I thought was interesting. The post pointed at the signs distributed by Intercity Transit asking people to slow down. The social poster asked why we didn’t have signs asking for people to stop committing other crimes.

The idea was that anti-social behavior, visible homelessness and property crime were much bigger issues in Olympia than speeding and injuries to pedestrians because of speeding. Since then, I’ve been poking around for a way to compare like-for-like, to be able to compare the two sides of the argument, or just to get an idea of the scope of traffic related deaths in Thurston County.

So, I have been playing around with pedestrian death data from the federal Department of Transportation and come up with a few broad conclusions:

How being killed by a driver compares to any other homicidal death
When you’re more likely to be killed by a car and
(most interesting to me) where you’re more likely to be killed by a car

A note on the data itself: most of this comes from the Fatality Analysis Reporting data from the USDOT. Other data I cobbled together from TRPC, the Thurston County Coroner’s Office and WASPC. It is also worth noting that the FAR data I used only goes through 2020, but 2021 and 2022 saw record pedestrian deaths.

1. Pedestrian deaths and murders are in the same neighborhood

To get to the main premise of the now-lost social post itself, that we should pay closer attention to other crimes and not just pedestrians being killed by cars, I suppose the data carries that point. But when you consider the vast majority of murders (over 90 percent in 2017 for example) were committed by non-strangers, that puts deaths by pedestrians in traffic in another context.

When you kill someone with your car, there are a lot of reasons outside the generalized behavior of drivers and pedestrians. These include bad road design, lack of marked crosswalks, left turns and large, multilane roads.

Bad road design, lack of crosswalks and our dependence on so-called stroads seems to make pedestrian deaths a much bigger part of local government. Obviously, each homicidal (or man-slaughter or non-natural) death is one of importance for public policy. But, I think my reaction to the main premise of the now-lost social media post is that it is at best a wash.

2. September is the deadliest month

What is surprising here is that the winter months are lower altogether than summer months overall. You would imagine that more light would lead to fewer deaths. But, according to research on the temporal nature of pedestrian deaths, there are more car trips in the summer, which lead to more deaths.

3. Downtown Olympia, Old Lacey and Grand Mound

The most interesting part of the traffic data is that you can easily geocode it. Here is a map of all pedestrian deaths in Thurston County.

What you can see are a few clusters of activity:

Old Lacey/East Olympia:

To summarize, Lilly Road north of Martin, Martin Road east of Lilly are both hotspots within the hotspot. But given the reasons for pedestrian deaths cited above, this area seems to be rate fairly high. But it is worth noting that there were more deaths here than in other places with the same characteristics, such as Yelm Highway or Hawks Prairie.

Downtown Olympia:

What is surprising here is that there aren’t more deaths in downtown Olympia. State, Capital Way, Legion and Plum are all different sorts of thoroughfares. But, in terms of pedestrian density and the amount of traffic going through downtown, it could be easily assumed that there would be more here. Possibly, though, the infrastructure here is kinder to pedestrians, making it much more likely that drivers will be cued to notice them or drive slow enough to not kill them in the case of an accident.

Grand Mound:

This was a surprise hot-spot to me. But, I am always surprised by Grand Mound, to be honest. There is a lot going on down there. It was years ago when I noticed that the census tracts that made up Grand Mound had the same population as Tumwater proper (not including the UGA). The kind of rural/not rural development here probably is dense enough to encourage some walking. But also, is low density enough not to encourage slow driving that would prevent pedestrian deaths.

How an incumbent sheriff loses

December 18, 2022 / Emmett O'Connell / 7 Comments

Sheriffs have incumbency power. A lot of elected officials do, but with the acquittal of Sheriff Ed Troyer in Pierce County last week, it is worth looking into how sheriffs stick around and how some of them lose.

Troyer survived the court case (which would not have kicked him out of office), and will also not likely be subject to a recall effort. Recall elections are expensive and have a hard time getting off the ground. The Pierce County Council, which has officially shown its displeasure with Troyer, cannot fire the Sheriff. So, the next opportunity would be in a couple of years when Troyer heads back to the ballot.

For at least one answer about incumbent sheriffs, I want to go back to two Thurston County Sheriff campaigns, one from the mid-1980s and one from just a few weeks ago.

The call is coming from inside the house

Gary Edwards, 1986

Gary Edwards (who is now a county commissioner) had worked for the Thurston County Sheriffs Department for less than a decade, working his way up to detective by the mid-1980s. The then 39-year-old represented a new generation of law enforcement when he decided to challenge the sitting Sheriff, Dan Montgomery.

Montgomery apparently entered the race a weak leader, as one of the early articles on the race included five declared candidates, all from law enforcement backgrounds and two from other local agencies.

Interestingly, as a fairly high profile sheriff employee, Edwards would normally make the paper a handful of times from the late 70s to the early 80s. But, there were no mentions for a full calendar year until he filed to run in February 1986. Was Montgomery working to silence a potential opponent? Later in the campaign, Montgomery would deny Edwards leave to allow him to campaign, which ended up causing the sitting sheriff more PR headaches than it was worth.

When the sheriff’s deputy association took a confidence vote on Montgomery that year, he received a majority by just a whisper, 51 to 49.

From the Olympian:

Some deputies were upset at Montgomery, saying he maintains an aloof posture in the department and isolates himself from the rank and file members. Morale was described as being low.

Edwards would end up beating Montgomery in the Republican side of the then not-Top Two primary and then dispatching a Democrat in the November general. He would serve until 2006 when he was replaced by Dan Kimball (who he endorsed) and then John Snaza (who Kimball had endorsed).

Now come Deputy (and now Sheriff-Elect) Derek Sanders in 2022, who was more than ten years younger than Edwards when he entered the race for sheriff. He represents a similar kind of inside the house phenomena. He was endorsed by two former top administrators that served under incumbent John Snaza.

Look at this Edwards ’86 endorsement from then Deputy Paul Ingram:

“(Montgomery) has been one of the best sheriffs we’ve had. But the last two years, he hasn’t taken advice from anyone. He has lost two key administrators because of that. He’s taken by the power of the office.”

And this endorsement for Sanders in 2022 from former Thurston Sheriff Chief Dave Pearsall:

“In the beginning (Snaza) had good ideas, intent, and vision. Unfortunately, it no longer appears this is the case. The Sheriff has lost any forward-thinking and vision as of late, which is likely why his Deputies considered a ‘vote of no confidence’ against him.”

This hand-off endorsement framing is interesting for people inside the institution to do, apparently. The sheriff’s office in any given county in Washington is huge, institutionally speaking. Criminal justice spending makes up a big part of the county budget. And the sheriff’s office is a big part of that piece of the pie, and is arguably the most public. So, people “inside the house” can protect the institution itself by saying “he used to be good, but now he’s bad, and I want this next person who is also one of us.”

The call is coming from outside (but also inside) the house

That being said, it is also important for the rebels inside the house to connect with the mainstream of politics in the community. And, for a non-incumbent campaigner, this is not a small accomplishment. Because the sheriff sits at the top of such a huge public institution, it isn’t that easy for other elected officials to stand up and endorse a challenger.

In 1986, Edwards was able to round up institutional support across the county, including two mayors of Olympia. Sanders was able to match that this year, rounding up dozens of mayors, city council members and former and current state legislators from around the county.

When Edwards faced an inside the house challenge in 2002 from Deputy Glen Quantz, he diffused the institutional support from lining up with the support that the deputy had gotten from the rank and file. The key was Quantz’s personal life (a bankruptcy and juvenile larceny conviction). Then Attorney General Chris Gregoire pulled her endorsement after Quantz’ past came out.

Edwards would end up not running again in 2006, heading off any potential inside challenge that was able to unify the rank and file with the political mainstream of the county.

Why this is an important discussion

For Troyer, his opponents in 2020 seemed to have reached the level of “inside the house” challenges. Even though he wasn’t an incumbent in 2020, his profile as the department’s communications director gave him a profile that was much higher than any other non-incumbent. The deputy union endorsed an unsuccessful primary candidate and Troyer’s official general challenger (who was also a sheriff’s office lieutenant). But, where they felt short, it seems, was uniting an inside challenge with the mainstream of Pierce County politics.

Lt. Cynthia Fajardo raised more than twice what Troyer raised, but the vast majority of her funds were donations from herself. Running a self-financed campaign doesn’t signal trying to reach out and gain endorsements from a broad vein of the mainstream institutional politics in Pierce County. It was Troyer that received the endorsements from the 30th District Democrats and the Puyallup Tribe of Indians.

Michael Zoorob explored the sticking power of incumbent sheriffs, pointing out that they are able to hold off challenges the vast majority of the time. They even have longer tenure than appointed police chiefs, and self admittedly, are more secure in their jobs from political fall-out.

Specifically zooming into Pierce County, there seem to be some institutional advantages for Troyer coming into 2024 according to Zoorob:

1. Incumbent sheriffs tend to do well in the crowded attention years of Presidential elections. In fact, sheriff elections on Presidential cycles are the most likely to be uncontested (compared to most contested in odd-year elections). When incumbent sheriffs are challenged during Presidential years though, according to Zoorob, the incumbent advantage disappears. It is basically the same as during any other kind of cycle.

2. The sheriff position in Pierce County is non-partisan, which also favors a sheriff with good name identification. The theory is the partisan marker is valuable information for the voter, and without that, they will lean on what they do know which may end up being the candidate they’ve even heard of.

A deeper look into Sheriff Sanders’ Thurston County

December 3, 2022 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

In my original post about the results from the 2022 general election, I vaguely pointed to results comparing how well successful candidates Sheriff Sanders and Senator Murray did against each other. Basically, both won by doing well in the dense, urban part of Thurston County. But, when you take their precinct results and compare them, you see Sanders lagging behind Murray in those dense neighborhoods and holding on tighter in the rural areas.

Here is the map (with legend!) that compares Murray (doing better in red) vs. Sanders (better in blue).

Because Murray did better overall in Thurston County, (58 to 55 percent) it is interesting to look at the places that Sanders not only won overall, but beat Murray. Here is the map with those precincts outlined in red.

The smallest pockets are places like Kinwood East (on the edge of Lacey) and Simmons 3 (on the edge of Tumwater):

Kinwood West

Simmons 3

Both of these are annexation candidates that have very few votes (about 90 in Kinwood West and fewer than 20 in Simmons 3). So, dense precincts that, if mixed with a larger city district, would likely have voted for a Democratic Senator.

The next collection are Lacey 28 and Lakeside. Both of these are (aptly described) are lake shore precincts.

Lacey 28

Lakeside

What is at play here? Higher property values? The general lake shore politics that gives someone a unique perspective on county government?

Lacey 28 is also the only incorporated precinct that falls into this collection, other than the entire city of Tenino, which is the third collection of precincts in this map. Why Tenino didn’t go vote for Murray makes sense, but why it voted for Sanders is worth discussing.

The last collection are the larger precincts around the edge of the urban growth area. I might have added Johnson Point (off the map) into the lake shore collection, but I’ll put it here with places like Delphi, Sunwood Lakes and Eaton Creek North.

These mostly wooded or rural precincts are pock marked with surban-esque neighborhoods carved out of the woods. But at least one looks like it could be plopped down directly into Hawks Prairie or Southeast Olympia:

Riverwood neighborhood off of Rich Road.

So my guess? These neighborhoods are far enough out of town that their politics would at least be marginally conservative. Or, at least conservative enough for Tiffany Smiley to edge out a win over Murray. All of these precincts were 45/55 precincts for Murray. But, they are also all neighborhoods that depend on the Sheriff’s office for police services. And, if they are generally unhappy with the service they receive (because of response times, they are likely to vote for the challenger over the incumbent.

Some maps to help you understand the November 2022 General Election in Thurston County

November 20, 2022 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

1. Sanders won the Sheriff’s race leaning on urban voters, but…

Here are Sanders’ results in raw numbers. Blue he did better, and red worse. This is the prototypical Thurston County partisan map. Democratic candidates tend to do better and run up the score in the urban areas, and try to tamp down their losses in the rural precincts.

This is the map of taking Sanders’ percentages and taking away partisan ballot headliner Senator Patty Murray. What this map shows is though Sanders used the core of Olympia, Tumwater and Lacey to beat Snaza, he underperformed the top-of-the ticket Democrat to do it. Importantly to his win, he outpaced her in the rural areas.

Most importantly (and I think key to his win), there is a band of precincts close to the urban growth boundary where not only did he win the majority of the votes, but he outpaced Senator Murray.

2. The proposals to expand the county and port commissions passed, but exposed differences in opinion between the two bodies.

First, the results from the county proposition:

And then the thinner, but also successful map, for the port. Same pattern, same broad victory. Just, thinner.

Both of the maps show the same general pattern we usually see, urban Thurston County voting one way, and then the further out of town you get, people vote another. What I was always curious about in this race is where the county did better than the port and vice versa.

In the map above, green areas saw more Port support vs. the County. But because the port was underwater vs. the county in all but half a dozen precincts, most of the green precincts are places where the county actually pulled more votes. I just did it this way to show variation. Doing it plus/minus 50 percent for each just showed a lot of pro-county areas.

It is an open question whether these results are more about the county’s reputation or the ports. But it is worth pointing out the cluster of green precincts (pro-port or anti-county) around Hawks Prairie and the Yelm area.

The semi-rural breakwater in Thurston County politics

November 9, 2020 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

I’ve oftentimes described the geographic nature of (mostly) partisan politics in Thurston County.

If you are a Democrat or left of center, you try to drive up your margins in the areas close to downtown Olympia. Then you drive outwards in all directions and try to win as many other precincts as possible until you run out of time and money.

If you are a Republican or right of center, you start in South county and push in towards Olympia.

There are exceptions to this rule. But these are usually non-partisan races where the typical left/right politics get subverted. Sue Gunn when she ran for port commission springs to mind.

In this simpler out from Olympia, in towards Olympia model, I have always wondered where the meeting point actually is. Where are the places where a normal liberal and Olympia-centered candidate could hope to win before they run out of steam?

It turns out, it is the corner of College and Yelm Highway in Lacey that acts as the lynch-pin to a series of dozens of precincts that are our true battleground. I came up with this by looking at how the two county commission races are finishing with such disparate results. Carolina Mejia is leading C Davis by a much larger lead than the difference in the Michael Steadman and Gary Edwards race. So, there are precincts that both Mejia (on the left and Olympia-centered) that Edwards (on the right and south county centered) are winning.

Below are the places they both won:

I also did a map showing the precincts that were both won by Republican Dusty Pierpoint and won by the two other Democratic legislative candidates, Sam Hunt and Laurie Dolan. There was about an eight-point difference between Pierpoint’s loss and how the Republicans running against Hunt and Dolan.

So, starting from the Yelm Highway and College Street intersection, there is a wide band of precincts heading north all the way to Puget Sound. Then, along the south side of Yelm Highway, there is another line of precincts that stretch all the way to the Black Hills.

On first blush, these are largely incorporated precincts but are either close to or are in the cities’ urban growth boundaries. They’re also within the school district boundaries of the three large north county school districts. So culturally, these are not true rural “South County” areas. There are a couple (South Scott Lake and South Union) that probably qualify as South County.

How crossover votes doomed Bud Blake (and more maps from the election weeks ago)

November 29, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Something I started noticing the last few months is how the geography of Independent and Democratic crossover voters seemed to follow a certain logic.

For example, if you took the precincts in Thurston County that voted for both Hilary Franz for lands commissioner and Gary Edwards for county commissioner, they seemed to generally fall into the geography that I’ve described as a general suburban belt between downtown Olympia and the rural south county.

Now for a second, I want to remind you how weird it is that there are places that voted for a guy who literally does not believe in land use regulation and also Hilary Franz.

In the same way that these neighborhoods combined their votes to support a liberal statewide candidate and an independent conservative candidate in 2016, a lot of the same places combined to support both conservative Independent Bud Blake and Democrat Maria Cantwell this year. But, they weren’t the same places. And because these crossover precincts shifted, Bud Blake wasn’t able to pull out a victory.

Just looking at the raw numbers, Bud Blake did worse. There were 21 precincts that voted for the Independent/Democratic combination in both years and 42 that only went for Edwards and Franz in 2016. Blake was only able to pick up 34 Maria Cantwell precincts to replace those Edwards/Franz districts he lost.

When you look at the geography, it gets clearer why Bud’s crossover precincts weren’t able to pull him over the finish line. They represent a shift in how voters arranged themselves on the map. In this map of crossover precincts orange is both 2016/18, red is only 2016 and blue is only 2018.

So, while it seems there is a lot of flipping (neighboring precincts going one way in 2016 and another in 2018) when you get down into the blue precincts that Bud Blake won alongside Maria Cantwell this fall, they have a slightly more rural flavor than Gary Edwards’ exclusive crossovers in 2016. While it could mean that Democratic voters were more enthusiastic this year, making places that had been Independent/Republican in 2016 Independent/Democratic this year, I don’t think that happened.

I think the action was more on the Democratic side of the commissioner race. And, while it seems close geographically, I think Bud’s Democratic opponent Tye Mesner moved the battle lines ever slow slightly further out towards the rural part of the county. While only being a few blocks here and there, by moving the crossover precincts that Bud Blake was able to win further away from the center of the county, he gained more votes in liberal precincts.

And yes, I know its been almost a month since election day and I’m usually much better about getting these maps out. I apologize.

In recent episodes of the Olympia Standard and OlyTalks, I talk about a few of these maps. Both these episodes are worth a listen if you want to hear me break these down. Or, if you have a question, just drop me a line.

Thurston County Commissioner
Thurston County Prosecutor
Thurston County PUD
Intercity Transit Prop 1

Is the Independent era in Thurston County (and Washington) over?

October 15, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Buried deep inside the results of the recent Crosscut/Elway poll was a surprising result, something that hasn’t happened in over four years, and not with any consistency since the Bush administration.

For the first time since January 2014, more respondents in a state wide poll said that they were Democrats and not Independents. In the last 12 of 15 polls taken since the beginning of 2008 that I’ve been able to track down, self identified Independents have been the plurality in Washington State.

Here is the data I’m working with.

The results in the Crosscut/Elway poll are not unexpected. Since 2015, the strength of Independent identification has been slackening. This narrow plurality of Democrats (37 percent to 35 percent Independents) falls into an ongoing trend.

On the surface, it seems like the strong hand of national politics is having a lot of influence in Washington State. While we saw a “normal” order of political identification in Washington during the Bush years, Independents started cropping up after President Obama was elected. And then, given the choice of another unpopular Republican president, Washington voters have begun to flock back to the Democratic label. It seems like the Democratic label in Washington is strongest when in resistance against an unpopular Republican administration. But, that support relaxes when a Democrat is in office.

I was able to track down some partisan identification data from the late 1990s, and it seems like you can see this trend is now repeating itself between the Clinton and Bush years. In 1996, 35 percent said they were Independents in Washington, but after Bush was elected Democrats were the plurality consistently through 2008.

So, bringing it home to Thurston County, what does this mean for our all Independent county commission? At the very least, not anything good. We’ve already seen that in the primary election, Independent Bud Blake has a much harder task to gather votes this time around. It seems clear to me that in our local elections, using the Independent label has allowed candidates like Blake (and Gary Edwards and John Hutchings two years ago) to obscure where they sit on the ideological spectrum.

How else can you explain Edwards, who literally does not believe in land use regulation, winning alongside Hillary Franz, a Democratic candidate for lands commissioner. There is literally no policy overlap between the two candidates, yet enough people made a contradictory choice of both Franz and Edwards to push him over the top.

It will be interesting to see with the power of the Independent label waning, what will happen with Bud Blake.