Pacific Northwest - 2024 Election Compendium

Topic: 2024 Election Analysis

Pacific Northwest 2024 Presidential Election Review

Author’s Note: All other election reviews can be found here.

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This portion of the 2024 Election Compendium focuses on two states in a region I am referring to as the “Pacific Northwest” – Oregon and Washington.

Outcomes

Oregon Harris +14.4%

Washington Harris +18.3%

My Predictions

Oregon Harris by minimum of 12.0%

Washington Harris by minimum of 14.0%

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Preface

The Pacific Northwest is a hotbed of national corruption and bad ideas regarding election administration. Both states have substantial working-class populations, which work primarily in the fishing and timber industries, but are also heavily populated by urban white liberals, who until recently had begun to show an establishment-populist split that threatened to create strongholds further to the political left of nearly anything else in America.

Both states rate among the worst for election law in America and remind me of Colorado with the way elections are run. Oregon pioneered mass mail-in balloting in America starting in the 1990s and ran its first presidential election with the practice in 2000. Both are universal mail-in balloting states, with rampant ballot harvesting destroying the integrity of all races on the ballot, especially those down ballot that can be decided by tens of votes, or even fewer. To no one’s surprise, neither state has backed the GOP presidential nominee this millennium (Reagan was the last Republican presidential nominee to carry them in 1984), and in fact, neither have had a Republican governor since the 1980s. For these reasons, even though beneath all the cheating I can spot a large working-class shift rightward, I had no doubt Harris would carry these states handily. While the nation moved six points to the right, Oregon and Washington barely inched right from where they sat in 2020.

Of these two states, only one registers voters by party. It shifted as shown below from 2020 to 2024:

· Oregon from D+9.9% in 2020 to D+8.9% in 2024

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Analysis

OREGON

· 33 of Oregon’s 36 counties became more Republican (or less Democrat) by registration in the past four years. These numbers are diluted by Automatic Voter Registration, but the chart below makes it clear that Oregon is on a Republican trajectory overall:

· 27 of 36 counties (75.0%) became more Republican by percentage margin, or less Democrat. The party registration indicator went 26 for 36 (72.2%) in predicting the shifting of counties by percentage:

· Trump flipped Marion County, home to the state capital of Salem, which he also won in 2016.

· Oregon is dominated by the Portland metro, particularly by two counties with a margin over 100,000 for Harris – Multnomah and Washington Counties:

· As indicated by the chart above, the 34 counties outside Multnomah and Washington Counties collectively vote Republican, which includes Benton and Lane Counties, home to Oregon State University and the University of Oregon, respectively. The margin of the 34 outliers, and even inside Multnomah and Washington, was better for Trump in 2016 largely because of third-party losses for Clinton and because Automatic Voter Registration hadn’t kicked in with enough time to flood the voter rolls to create more harvestable ballots.

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WASHINGTON

· In Washington, where voters are not registered by party, 23 of 39 counties (59.0%) shifted more Republican in percentage margin, meaning Trump won them by more than he did in 2020, or lost them by less. See shifts by county below:

· Three giant counties on the I-5 corridor key to the huge Democrat margin in the Seattle metro shifted slightly Republican: Pierce County (0.5%), King County (1.4%), and Snohomish County (1.8%). These shifts were mostly offset by leftward movement on the Olympic Peninsula to the west and in Skagit and Whatcom Counties approaching the Canadian border.

· When I tell you that Oregon and Washington are carbon copies of one another, I mean it. Below is a chart outlining the margins produced for Democrat presidential nominees in King, Snohomish, and Pierce, contrasted with the toss-up margins of the outlying 39 counties. Note that Trump overperformed in 2016 for the same reasons – that Clinton was disparately damaged by the third-party share, and because Automatic Voter Registration hadn’t yet compounded the known issues with the state’s voter rolls and there were far fewer ballots to harvest up in the population dense areas of the state:

· In 2020, Trump won 18 of 19 bellwether counties that had accurately aligned with every presidential winner from 1980 through 2016. The only one he missed was Clallam County, situated on the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula, which he had won by 2.8% in 2016, although with a 10.0% third-party vote share present. Harris is now 7,763 ballots ahead of Hillary Clinton’s total, with Trump also substantially up from 2016 (although down from 2020), suggesting to me that Democrats have perfected the art of ballot harvesting even outside of the most significant urban areas. Clallam County, for a variety of reasons, is no longer a bellwether county. Notably, Trump won the remaining 18 bellwethers once again in 2024.

· Trump’s gains in most of eastern Washington matched the political shifting of neighboring Idaho. Trump moved Franklin County 8.1% to the right, Adams County 7.4%, and Yakima County 6.6%, suggesting ballot harvesting takes too much time and energy to export too far into the hinterlands of a state, and made minimal gains in Spokane County. One of the bigger disappointments out of Washington was Joe Kent’s loss of the WA-3 race in southwest Washington which centers on Clark County, which moved 1.9% to the left.

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REGION

· Harris lagged Biden’s ballot count in 67 of 75 counties in the two states. She missed his count in Oregon by a whopping 99,783 (7.4%), and in Washington by an impressive 123,763 (5.2%). Unfortunately for Trump, he lagged his own 2020 totals in both states, which prevented margins from closing more than they did. With both states being universal mail-in balloting states, it is clear Harris didn’t benefit to the same extent Biden did from the industrial ballot harvesting machine, but there are likely mixed reasons for Trump’s underperformance. Those may include the defections of GOP voters to other states, voter apathy, or disposal of mailed ballots, which isn’t evident in this analysis, but certainly possible.

· Most notably, Harris lagged Biden in King County, Washington, by 74,704 ballots, and in Multnomah County, Oregon, by 41,322.

· These two states produced the following Trump margins in all three of his races:

Trump improved his national popular vote standing by 130,850 ballots in these two states, although that progress was made possible by Harris falling 223,546 ballots short of Biden’s cumulative total from 2020. My assessment of these two states is that they clearly didn’t concentrate as much effort in collecting ballots as they did in 2020, but likely did in counties they were needed, like in WA-3’s Congressional race.

Trump flipped Columbia County, Oregon, and Grays Harbor County, Washington, in 2016, and held them in both subsequent races. Prior to Trump flipping them, they hadn’t been carried by a GOP presidential nominee since Hoover won them in 1928. There is a substantial working class shift present in the Pacific Northwest that is muted by the unfair laws of these two states which allow urban counties to overwhelm the remaining counties. My suspicion is that without the significant Democrat ballot gathering apparatus in play, both states would have races inside single digits consistently. Remember, George W. Bush had two single-digit races in Washington, and almost won Oregon in 2000 prior to the Obama-led left-wing realignment of the West Coast.

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Opportunities for Election Manipulation

Here is how these two states rank with regard to my most commonly assessed demerits.

· Voter ID – Neither of these states enforce identification for voting.

· Same Day Registration – Washington, but not Oregon, permits same day voter registration.

· Ballot Harvesting – Ballot harvesting is fully legal without restriction in both Oregon and Washington.

· Excessive Mail-In Balloting – Both of these states operate universal mail-in balloting, which dispenses a ballot to every entry listed on the voter roll.

· Prolonged Counting – A hallmark of states with excessive mail-in balloting that fosters distrust of elections.

· Automatic Voter Registration – Both of these states operate AVR and have voter rolls filled with ineligible entries that receive mail-in ballots per state law.

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The Pathway Ahead

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to trust close election outcomes in any state in which voters are reporting receiving more than a dozen ballots they shouldn’t be getting. While Joe Kent’s race wasn’t that close in WA-3 (16,123, or 3.8%), there is no telling how much baked-in mail fraud is present in any county of Washington or Oregon. In reading the opening lines of this section, you may feel I’m suggesting there is no electoral future for statewide Republican candidates in the Pacific Northwest. As it stands today, you are correct, and that has come to fruition thanks to the laws passed by the legislatures of both states.

To further complicate matters, Washington State is a tax haven for liberals seeking to leave California and not land in a red state, making the Evergreen State one of the only blue states that is attracting people rather than hemorrhaging them; in contrast, it is conservatives of both states leaving, and eroding any chance for a comeback even in some competitive Congressional districts, like WA-3.

Nevertheless, many great election integrity groups have stood their ground in the Pacific Northwest. I have worked very closely over the past year with Bill Bruch, an avid SubStacker and one of the strongest voices for fair elections in Washington, and Mike Terry, the founder of Patriots United Washington, and am encouraged that there are still those willing to take up the battle to bring truth and transparency to regional elections. People don’t read my journal to gain a sense of false hope. To save elections in Washington and Oregon, major judicial actions must be taken to vacate the state’s corrupt voter rolls and Automatic Voter Registration system and force controls over the distribution of mail-in ballots, using known examples of malfeasance. Both states would trend toward competitiveness if Democrat organizers didn’t have access to a bogus system of registrations that can be fed mail-in ballots and collected over a lengthy early voting period.

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Final Grades and Closing Commentary

Washington and Oregon Democrats have their states on cruise control when it comes to sheer strength in numbers and the integration of all law that comes with creating blue states. Manipulation is baked into their ballot counts, especially in population dense areas in which countless tens, or hundreds, of thousands of ballots are sent to no real recipient. Again, this is documented by the mainstream media outlets of various cities and is not conjecture on my part. No Republican running a statewide race in either state can expect a fair shake.

The Top 5 Election Integrity Targets in the Pacific Northwest are (in no order):

· King County, WA

· Pierce County, WA

· Snohomish County, WA

· Multnomah County, OR

· Washington County, OR

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Oregon receives a Grade of 3 – Elevated Concern – based on its reckless election laws, which are only slightly better than Washington’s simply because Oregon doesn’t permit same day voter registration. Oregon, like Washington, would rate at a Grade of 4 – Highest Concern – if I considered it to be a decisive battleground state.

Washington receives a Grade of 3 – Elevated Concern – based on its corrupt election laws, which include nearly every item, save for Ranked Choice Voting, used to produce manipulated election results. Washington, like Oregon, would rate at a Grade of 4 – Highest Concern – if I considered it to be a decisive battleground state.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.