Divided Washington state to choose Biden or Trump: ‘Everything seems a mess right now’
Had he heard it, Joe Biden would surely have been delighted by Bianca Siegl’s comment – and the fact she barely paused before making it.
“Of course I will be voting on Tuesday,” says the 47-year-old, speaking at a farmers’ market in Seattle’s University district. “If Trump were to get elected, it would be incredibly dangerous for the world and for my family.”
Related: ‘Like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine’: US braces for presidential election no one wants
After Nikki Haley suspended her campaign following disappointing results on Super Tuesday and the US president made an unusually partisan and pugnacious State of the Union address, America is in general election campaign mode. While polls show up to 70% of people do not want to see a rematch between Biden and Donald Trump it appears that is set to happen. As the campaigns step up their efforts, Washington state holds its presidential primary on Tuesday. Selections for local legislators and federal lawmakers get made in the summer, so Tuesday is solely a choice for voters to show their preference between the 77-year-old former president and the 81-year-old incumbent.
Tina Sutter is also backing Biden. The 46-year-old registered nurse says she tends not to get involved in politics as it does not make a “lot of difference”. Things are complicated by the fact her parents support Trump, and she “cannot speak to them about politics”. She is not voting on Tuesday, but will definitely do so in November.
“Trump is terrifying and everybody needs to make sure we don’t go through that again,” she says. Her policy priorities are reproductive rights, social justice and the environment, all areas in which she believes Trump would move the nation backwards.
Washington state’s heartland is famous for its fruit farms and being the nation’s largest producer of apples, so cities such as Seattle and Tacoma are known for markets where city residents are hours away selecting from apples such as Cosmic Crisp, Fuji and other less common varieties. Eastern and central Washington are more conservative than the west – the state’s two GOP-held congressional districts, the fifth and the fourth are in the east – and the markets can be a rare coming together of people who live on either side of the Cascade Mountains. At the same time, politics per se tends to be avoided.
In 2020, exit polls showed more than 90% of Black women voted for Biden. But a 63-year-old stall holder who asks to be identified as Marylynn P says she is not prepared to say who she is voting for.
“Everything seems a mess right now,” she says. “But there seemed to be [less undocumented immigration and] people pouring into our cities under Trump.”
Trump certainly has his supporters, and they tend to be very committed indeed.
Loren Culp, a former police chief, was backed by him in 2022 to oust the Republican congressman Dan Newhouse, one of 10 GOP “traitors” in the House who voted to impeach Trump over January 6. (While Newhouse held his seat, another Washington member of Congress who voted against Trump, Jaime Herrera Beutler, lost hers albeit to a Democrat, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who saw off a Trump-backed military veteran, Joe Kent.)
Speaking from Goldendale in the south of the state, Culp says he is convinced Trump will win a second term.
Biden rarely campaigns in Washington; the last Republican president to win the state was Ronald Reagan, but he comes for private fundraising events and to tap into the wealth of liberal-leaning tech-rich millionaires.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump here 58 to 39, and a poll posted recently by the website FiveThirtyEight puts Biden leading Trump 54 to 38.
Related: Next stop for Democratic ‘uncommitted’ vote campaign for Gaza: Washington
Yet Biden may not have things entirely without a bump. As in Michigan and Minnesota, where 100,000 and 45,000 people respectively voted as “uncommitted”, activists in Washington are looking to send a similar protest message over the administration’s support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians.
Most Washington voters cast ballots by mail once they are sent out in late February. The first release of results in the state typically skews more conservative than the electorate as a whole, then moves farther to the left over time as more results from later mail returns and same-day voting comes in.
Rami Al-Kabra, the deputy mayor of the city of Bothell and an organizer for the uncommitted group, says “enough is enough”.
“We need to do more than just calling and protesting in the streets. As Americans, the most precious tool we have is our right to vote.”
Al-Kabra, who believes he is the only elected Palestinian American official in the state, added: “And in Washington, we have this uncommitted delegates option to leverage this.”
Professor James Long, a political scientist at the University of Washington, says he will be watching how many vote “uncommitted”. Though he suspects some of those “uncommitted voters” will “return home” in November, there could be a number on Tuesday who want to express dissatisfaction.
“We don’t have as large a pro-Gaza, or pro-Palestinian, cause as in Michigan, but we have a lot of people on the left,” he adds.
While the Guardian spoke to several Democrats who said they would prefer a younger candidate than Biden, nobody said they had thought about picking “uncommitted”.
Many said they felt the election of 2024 was too important to do anything that might weaken Biden’s chances.
Roger Tucker, 68, a retired architect who was browsing the stands with his wife, Becky, 65, a former university administrator, said: “If Trump is in office for another four years, he’s going to be more powerful than before and less worried that people are going to push back on him.”