The Progressive Paradox: How the Democratic Party Won Rural Western Washington, 1976 - 2024

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Electoral Politics 1

Abstract

As political realignment in the United States has seen white working-class voters shift their support from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, rural Western Washington presents a progressive paradox - despite being a rural white working-class region that has experienced substantial union decline since the 1990s, the region has supported the Democratic Party since the 1970s. Limited scholarship exists examining negative cases in which political realignment has failed to occur among this demographic of voters. My research intervenes in this puzzle by examining the case of rural Western Washington from 1976 to 2024.

I employ a historical institutionalist approach to explore organizational network theories to understand the political development of rural Western Washington, utilizing original data and a mixed-methods approach, particularly archival, ethnographic, interview, and quantitative methods. While organized labor historically played an important role in socializing residents of the region into possessing liberal sympathies, a case of path divergence emerged in which organized labor collapsed on the Olympic Peninsula during the 1990s while organized labor survived on the neighboring Kitsap Peninsula, leaving a vacuum in the social capital in the former part of the region which offered liberals and conservatives the opportunity to reshape the structural conditions of rural Western Washington. The liberal organizational network of rural Western Washington has found greater success in filling this vacuum on the Olympic Peninsula while further strengthening liberal loyalties on the Kitsap Peninsula because of greater intra-network collaboration, operating on longer temporal horizons, and maintaining a robust local presence throughout the region. Contrastingly, the conservative organizational network of rural Western Washington has failed to project similar success in the region. Despite possessing greater funding than liberal organizations, conservative organizations have been weakened by intra-network conflict, operating on shorter temporal horizons, and a lack of robust presence in all corners of the region.

Author

• Conner Huey, Harvard University