By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
ANALYSIS: A stunning poll result in Washington State could rattle Seattle liberals and possibly foretell a flip in state politics come November, which would be good news for beleaguered Evergreen State gun owners .
According to veteran pollster Stuart Elway, his survey earlier this month revealed “The percentage of respondents who identified as Republican had jumped 10 points since last July to close the gap with Democrats, from 18 percentage points to 7.”
As Elway observed, “In the 30 years I have been measuring party identification in the state, it has been rare to see so large a shift.”
Add to that, a report in the MinnPost relating to a Gallup poll in early January showed Republicans and “Republican leaners” outnumbered Democrats and Democrat leaners 47-42 percent.
A Monday report at Conservative Firing Line revealed the latest Rasmussen survey showing 67 percent of the public believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. A new NBC News poll shows “72 percent of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction — essentially unchanged from the 71 percent who held this view in October’s NBC News poll.”
While the national survey spells bad news for Joe Biden and Democrats across the country, the Elway poll could mean a shift in Washington state politics is in the works, and for anti-gun Seattle liberals it would be shattering.
All it might take is for Republican-leaning voters in 30 of the state’s 39 counties to all vote in November, along with conservatives in the Puget Sound basin.
Writing at Crosscut, Elway observed, “Something is going on. Party identification, while generally relatively stable, is more of an attitude than an attribute, like age or ethnicity. Here in Washington, where we don’t register by party, the proportion of voters identifying with each party varies from month to month.”
A few lines later, Elway added, “Biden’s approval rating tanked and Democratic identification began to slip as Republican identification continued to climb, resulting in the flip to the 5-point GOP advantage at the end of the year — the first time since 1995 that Republicans have had as much as a 5-point lead in identification nationally.”
Seattle-area Democrats have been driving the party increasingly farther to the left. With that has come higher taxes, restrictions on law enforcement and increasingly restrictive gun control proposals. If even one side of the State Legislature were to flip to Republican control in November, that pattern would crash to a halt.
All of this is admittedly a long shot, with conservative voter apathy being the main speed bump. But voters in Virginia last fall took back their state from far-left Democrats. Their prime motivations were to halt the leftward rush of public education and to undo gun control laws pushed through by former Gov. Ralph Northam once he had a Democrat majority in the House of Delegates. That’s gone now, erased by fed-up voters.
If it could happen in Virginia, it can happen 3,000 miles away in Washington.
