Just how conservative is Spokane?

Ever wonder just how conservative Spokane is? One research group says it’s the 95th most conservative city in the nation. Or looking at it from the other wing of the bird, it’s the 143rd most liberal city.

At least, that’s the assessment of the Bay Area Center for Voting Research, which spent eight months comparing results from the 2004 elections for 237 U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more.

Provo, Utah, is the most conservative and Detroit the most liberal, in their study. The latter ranking will probably leave the neighbors of the Berkeley, Calif.,- based center wearing black armbands because they only rated the third most liberal, joked center director Jason Alderman.

More of a shock to Pacific Northwest residents, however, might be the relative rankings of their cities. Sure Seattle is the most liberal, coming in 16 slots from the top of the left list, ahead of Portland at No. 29 and Eugene No. 54.

Boise is the farthest right, at No. 54 on the conservative list. And the next most conservative Northwest city is … Vancouver, Wash.? Well, OK, the city did send Linda Smith to Congress for a couple of terms, back in the 1990s. But more conservative than Bellevue, a place that served as base camp for the 2004 Bush-Cheney and Nethercutt for Senate campaigns?

Turns out Bellevue is below Vancouver, below Spokane, below Salem, Ore., way down at 139 on the conservative list – just three notches from Tacoma.

All due respect to the center, but do people in Berkeley really know conservatives when they see them? This sounds like one of those assessments of how Spokane matches up to some 1950s television standard of moms who wear pearls to vacuum and dads who read the newspaper in ties and cardigans.

Alderman said the rankings were based on the most objective, nationwide criteria they could find, the 2004 presidential election results.

Researchers compared more than just votes for Bush vs. Kerry, but total votes for all candidates who got more than one-tenth of a percent in each city.

That means votes for independent candidate Ralph Nader and the Green Party’s David Cobb weighed on the liberal side of the scale, while Libertarian Michael Badnarik and constitutionalist Michael Peroutka’s votes were added to the conservative side.

“No raging moderates were putting their hats into the ring,” he said. Bush was a conservative, and while Kerry may have tried to project himself as a moderate “by most people’s definition, he was liberal.”

Only the votes in the precincts within the city limits were counted, Alderman said. No suburbs, no Metropolitan Statistical Areas.

The system is open to debate, Alderman acknowledged. But he argues it’s better than polling, which always leads to people picking apart the wording of your question, or looking at ballot measures or an issue like abortion, which might be about late-term procedures in one state, parental notification in another and state funding in a third.

But based on that methodology, Bellevue is more liberal than Spokane. Kerry and other liberals got 58.5 percent of the votes in that city, while Bush and other conservatives got 41.4 percent. Libs got 51.9 percent of the vote in Spokane’s city limits; Cons got 48.1 percent.

Must be that Seattle influence creeping across the lake.

Rising to the top

Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed has a new title. When he’s among his brother and sister secretaries of state, at least, Reed is “Mr. President,” having been elected to the top post of their national association.

This probably sounds better than the label one of Washington’s conservative activist groups hung on the two-term Republican and Spokane native. Upset with his actions in representing Washington in the gubernatorial revote case, the Building Industry Association of Washington is calling him “Democrat.”

Now that’s nasty.

Catch the candidates

Here’s a chance to see the candidates for Spokane City Council. Several chances, actually, although it’s the same event, playing on reruns.

The League of Women Voters of the Spokane Area will host candidate forums starting at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Spokane City Council Chambers. Candidates start by district, starting with the two-way race in the Northeast District, the three-way race in the South starting at 7:15 p.m., and the seven-way free-for-all in the Northwest starting at 7:45 p.m.

Those who don’t want to come down for the live show can catch them on Cable Channel 5 at 1 p.m. Aug. 27, noon Aug. 28, and some times to be named later in September.