My favorite weekend unwinding is to hop on my bike and pedal somewhere I haven’t. I’m not a distance rider, I favor cotton to lycra, and my pedals have strapless toe cages rather than clip-ins. I don’t go for speed, but I also try not to shy away from a hill. I prefer small side streets to wide avenues, and my general strategy is that when I come to a cross-roads I’ve been to recently, I try to take whichever turn I didn’t the last time.
This approach has taken given me a good picture of the neighborhoods north of the canal and cut: which ones favor eclectic yard art and little free libraries, and which ones manicure their lawns and square their hedges.
So it was interesting to overlay that picture of Seattle with these maps of Democratic primary voting produced by Jason Weill using Tableau’s visualization tools. This first set contrasts precincts that favored Biden in the Washington primary compared with those that favored Bernie Sanders. The second focused on Wallingford specifically.
For Seattle in general, the voting maps seem like a pretty straightforward proxy for wealth: more affluent areas favored Biden, whereas the reverse is true for Sanders.
For the Wallingford areas, I can make sense of that same split for Wallingford in general versus the Green Lake / Tangletown area, but the slice of Biden support in southeastern Wallingford doesn’t fit any clear socioeconomic model that I can see from the street. Anyone else have a theory?
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I live on Thackeray. We are a street divided.
I’ll take a completely uneducated guess. Our house is just on the edge of a SEW (Southeast W’ford) ‘Biden’ precinct – the same precinct that, according to neighborhood lore, was one of only two in the State that cast *zero* votes for Trump in 2016! – and I would say that the overall pattern fits your initial rule: more wealthy goes Biden. The blocks more interior to the ‘hood, rather on the periphery, tend to be a bit more upscale, and a bit less likely to contain rentals. I say this as a (very) slightly envious edge-of-Walingforder myself.
I could be wrong.
A closer look at the data reveals a different picture. In the few precincts I looked at, Sanders and Biden were actually quite close, one edging out the other. Warren also took a substantial number of votes in these precincts, though significantly fewer than Sanders and Biden. Other candidates drew far fewer votes. Suggesting neighboring precinct blocks are ideologically different islands seems unproductive. Shades of grey?
It’s interesting as a fuzzy edged level – likely the numbers were more decisive in the precincts that belong to the obvious trend – along the waterfront, Laurelhurst etc.? But from your account of the details, Wallingford looks more like a transitional zone, than a divided neighborhood.
In general, wealth has not been a strong indicator for Democrat primary votes, and honestly Seattle is just generally rich, especially in these neighborhoods. The most likely poor people around Wallingford are students with low income but not truly poor. A much more relevant predictor that’s strong everywhere is age. I think that’s the factor here, with all those Biden areas effectively old money with no condo, therefore no youth votes.
Another predictor that’s strong but not relevant for Seattle is race. Blacks are much more likely to vote Biden, but they’ve been disappearing in Seattle, other than new African immigrants. There are more African-born Africans in Seattle than there is American-born ones, so it’s not a factor for Seattle.
Hm it’s as if economic segregation through exclusionary zoning has entirely predictable results…
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1200fb1fa501c28768bba472e426d2d649f3f85e1012641160e438076d915f2.jpg
You wouldn’t be a good Bernie voter or YIMBY if you didn’t play the race card. Perhaps you could edit your maps to show us who black voters went for?
What’s disgusting about it? Its the truth. Far more black voters went for Biden than Bernie.
1. I’m not a Bernie voter
2. There’s no mention of race in my post
1. Really? That surprises me. I called that one wrong an I apologize for that.
2. Don’t pretend that you’re not alluding to race when you say “exclusionary zoning.” You have said so plenty of times over the years.
Don’t pretend after all these years that you don’t mean race when you say “exclusionary zoning.” You have said so plenty of times.
Here’s the Wallingford voting results from the Scott/Pedersen race in November. It overlays pretty well with the Biden/Sanders map, with the one obvious outlier being the Dick’s/Kate’s Pub precinct.
Also, I plucked the map from the Seattle Times, who (like Alex Pedersen) apparently think Gasworks Park is in Fremont.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6ed93d550a1c6786f546bd6cb1382211b3833703a76d416d0e9ebe8e1da0e6ce.jpg
Wallingford should’ve never been split into two districts, much of it thrown in with the same district as Laurelhurst. The whole neighborhood should be District 6.
Also including the University District, full of younger people and renters, and wouldn’t Eastlake be mostly like that as well? Good old Rob Johnson, how you guys must miss him.
The object of Seattle council districts is not, as I understand it, a better factional balance of political representation. While there may be noticeable political differences from one district to another, in the most prominent cases that’s more of a failure of the system. I’m particularly talking about Sawant. I hope her constituents feel good about her role in the council, because it sure seems unlikely that she’s going to be much help with Capitol Hill specific issues. In Wallingford, our representation is a good deal more likely to be there when we need it, than in the bad old days under Johnson. That isn’t about left/right or pro-Amazon or whatever – the council member who really hauls that freight is West Seattle’s Herbold, who is probably number 2 on Amazon’s hit list.
Rob Johnson’s policies were way more in line with those of Wallingford’s population than Pedersen’s are. So, yeah, I do miss him.
Our neighborhood is the forgotten portion of both District 4 and District 6, where the focus is primarily east of I-5 and west of 99 respectively.
Being split between two council seats reminds me of the old football adage, “If you have two quarterbacks you have none.”
Johnson was working for the sponsors of Transportation Choices Coalition, not District 4, and he particularly didn’t seem to see his relationship with Wallingford in the same light as you.
There are potential advantages to having two council representatives. What’s Wallingford’s northern boundary?
Not going to be a concern for much longer. Pedersen’s days are numbered, since he already only gotten barely half of the votes. The influx of condo dwellers around light rail stations will tip the scale. The type of district change needed for Pedersen’s supporters is to remix district 4 and 3 to have one for lake side another for the I5/lightrail side.
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Sorry, but I call BS on the “proxy for wealth” theory, Jordan. If you do the math and look at the vote totals for Wallingford for all candidates, (depending how you draw “Wallingford”. I chose 50th to the water, Aurora to I-5) Sanders only took Wallingford by 13%. So a vast blue map resulted from only 1200 more votes than Biden, out of 8900ish
Sorry, but I call BS on the “proxy for wealth” theory, Jordan. If you do the math and look at the vote totals for Wallingford for all candidates, (depending how you draw “Wallingford”. I chose 50th to the water, Aurora to I-5) Sanders only took Wallingford by 13%. So a vast blue map resulted from only 1200 more votes than Biden, out of 8900ish
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ea5bdfff10748852f1744914e6e41974888ccc3219432d39023454b3e1bd0134.jpg
Sure, it was close, but it seems indisputable to me that if you overlay the maps of wealth and majority voting, there is a strong correlation (even if the effect size is weak). It’s also notable that the exact same area within Wallingford that preferred Biden to Sanders also preferred Pedersen to Scott, suggesting that this isn’t just an artifact of randomness.
So what’s the point of all this? Democratic purity test? Biden bad, Sanders good? Pedersen bad, Scott good? My God…call me when we’re talking about Trump taking precincts. Then we’ll have a reason to freak out.
So that’s 163 bozos. But he didn’t carry any precincts. That would be news.
Good point. I was projecting to a general. But my point about this article stands — it seems like a muck-rake to inflame intra-Dem anxieties. Time to put the post-mortems and antagonism behind and focus on the prime objective.
Interesting and anecdotal. That’s also not the wealthiest area of Wallingford so ties in with his attraction to non-college/disenfranchised whites. I wonder if the write-ins were concentrated in any area? If they were, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them in higher education/income precinct(s).