Spokane County shifts into red zone

This year’s election results confirm what politicians and political observers have suspected for years: Spokane County is shifting to solid Republican territory.

From Deer Park to Spangle, from Liberty Lake to the West Plains, Republican candidates for national, state or local office had a clear edge in most precincts outside the city of Spokane.

A computer analysis of key races using the red vs. blue color scheme made famous by network news shows a pattern in the Spokane area that mirrors the nation. The urban core is Democrat blue, while the outlying neighborhoods, suburbs and rural areas are Republican red.

“Spokane County’s kind of a microcosm of America,” said Spokane Mayor Jim West, who has been active in local politics for more than 25 years, including 20 as a Republican legislator.

“It’s no surprise,” agreed Dean Lynch, a former Spokane City Council member and Democratic activist. “I think Spokane County in many ways reflects the rest of the country.”

Except that while the map of the United States shows heavy concentration of Democrats on the East and West coasts and along the Great Lakes, but strong Republican majorities in the middle states, the Spokane County map shows an island of Democratic precincts in a sea of Republican red.

Although partisans describe the reasons for the split somewhat differently, they agree that the more densely populated, urban areas are more likely to have a majority of voters who support Democrats who push government solutions to problems like poverty and health care. Rural and suburban areas tend to have a majority of voters who back Republicans more sensitive to tax increases and economic growth.

“As people’s incomes go up, they tend to want newer houses, bigger lots and newer schools,” West said. “It’s a lifestyle thing, a difference in expectations of government.”

To analyze this year’s voting patterns, The Spokesman-Review looked at vote totals from four races in each precinct: George W. Bush vs. John Kerry for president, Patty Murray vs. George Nethercutt for U.S. Senate, Christine Gregoire vs. Dino Rossi for governor, and the most competitive legislative race in each of the five legislative districts within Spokane County.

The legislative races were the Senate contests between incumbent Lisa Brown and challenger Mike Casey in central Spokane’s 3rd District; between incumbent Bob McCaslin and Tim Hattenburg in the 4th District centered in the Valley; between Brad Benson and Laurie Dolan in urban and suburban Spokane’s 6th District; and between Mark Schoesler and Gail Rowland in the 9th District, which covers the southern third of the county. For the 7th District, the newspaper used the race for an open House seat between Republican Joel Kretz and Democrat Yvette Joseph.

The winning margins for each candidate in each precinct were averaged to minimize the impact of one candidate or one race on the precinct vote.

According to that yardstick, the most heavily Republican precinct – that is, the one with the highest average margin of victory for GOP candidates – is in Liberty Lake, where Republican candidates averaged 445 votes more than their opponents.

The most heavily Democratic precinct is in Spokane’s Browne’s Addition, where Democrats averaged 342 votes better than their opponents.

The population growth in Spokane County, as in most of the country, tends to favor Republicans, said Blaine Garvin, a political science professor at Gonzaga University. The growth has been in the suburbs outside Spokane.

Republicans in Spokane and across the country do better among voters who have higher incomes, are white and have more education, Garvin said. Democrats do better among voters who are poorer, are minorities or have less education.

“The growth in the suburbs – particularly the kind we have, where the population isn’t cosmopolitan, is not ethnically diverse … Republicans have got an edge,” Garvin said.

The issues that Bush stressed – from support for the war on terrorism and Iraq to opposition of gay marriage – played well here, he said. But Garvin added that it’s too soon to say whether the results of Nov. 2 mark a long-term trend.

After all, the presidential election was settled nationally by a few percentage points, and the split in the Congress is still close.

“I think the Republicans have been gaining strength nationally,” he said. “But it would be wrong to arrive at great generalizations too quickly.”

Spokane County’s shift started in the Spokane Valley in 1980, West said, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter for the presidency and novice Republican candidate Bob McCaslin ousted a longtime Democratic powerhouse, William Day.

The shift has become more apparent in recent years, said Rich Kuhling, a former county GOP chairman and campaign official.

When Kuhling was a party chairman in the 1980s, he could sense a trend toward conservatism, although neither side had the sophisticated polling that could define the electorate. Now there are better tools for divining the voters’ mood, but he thinks analysts can simplify things to the point of inaccuracy.

“The Republican Party, just like the Democrat Party, is a conglomeration of some pretty divergent groups, from evangelicals to fiscal conservatives to defense-minded voters to the rural-independent minded folks,” he said.

No one agrees with either party on 100 percent of the issues, Kuhling believes. The question is which issues are most important, and which party addresses the majority of those issues best.

“It’s a complex constellation of different issues for different people that collectively, the Republicans are doing a better job of appealing to, at this time,” he said.

They’ve been successful at building their majorities with a call for smaller government, lower taxes, less government regulation, serious education reform and “values that resonate” – which some years means an opposition to abortion, but in 2004 also included opposition to same-sex marriage.

Frank Malone, a Spokane attorney and longtime Democratic activist, wonders about the postelection emphasis this year on voters making choices on “moral values” because the term can mean so many different things. “It’s hard for anybody to say (to a pollster), ‘I don’t care about moral values,’ ” he said. “The question is, what moral values influence your vote?”

For some it might mean the ability to be a “rugged individualist” rather than opposition to gay marriage, he said.

Beyond issues, elections can always turn on questions of which candidates do the better job of articulating issues and which party does a better job of getting out its voters, political observers said. This year, however, both parties had sophisticated and energetic efforts to identify their voters, deliver information on their candidates’ strengths and their opponent’s shortcomings, and get those voters to the polls for what may be a record turnout.

Ron Dotzauer, a political consultant who has worked in Democratic campaigns for some 32 years, said it may be time for statewide candidates to recognize that Spokane County is just GOP territory.

“At the end of the day, the Republican trumps the Democrat, period,” Dotzauer said. “I don’t know how it’s gotten so red, but the fact is, it is red.”

But local Democrats and Republicans said statewide candidates from one party can’t ignore the area, and those from the other can’t take it for granted.

“Even a Republican has to get a certain number of votes in a Democratic area, just as a Democrat has to get a certain number of votes in a Republican area,” West said.

Malone said his late law partner, Joe Cooney, had a theory about Spokane that probably still holds true. A Republican running statewide can offset losses in the Puget Sound-area counties with a big margin in Spokane, while a Democrat can seal a victory by keeping Spokane losses to a minimum.

“He used to say, ‘You can’t win an election over here, but you sure can lose it over here,’ ” Malone recalled.