Washington Republicans, the night is not as dark as it feels!

King David wrote in Psalm 30, "weeping only lasts for the night, joy comes in the morning!"

As Washington Republicans watch their friends and family sell homes and businesses and move to Texas or Idaho or Arizona...as they sink deeper into melancholy wondering if they will be the next to flee...the Sweet Singer of Israel might as well have been whispering those words into their depressed and weary ears.

Then King David would show them the data.

The night is dark. But it's not as dark as it feels, gentle reader.

Competitive legislative races in Washington state are usually decided by very small margins. Many races are decided by only a few hundred votes.

Because of these narrow margins, small annual decreases in Republican turnout in recent years have had an outsized effect on electoral outcomes.

When you see how narrow the many Republican defeats in the Trump Era have been, it's clear the dramatic decline in the number of legislative seats Republicans control is not as desperate as if feels.

There are over a million people of voting age in Washington state who are not registered to vote. There are an additional hundreds of thousands of conservative voters who have simply disappeared from voting. Like the Homer Simpson meme, they are just backing into the hedge of life and just not voting.

Some are frustrated with the national Republican brand, and others think their vote does not matter. Whatever the reason, enough of them have disappeared that Republicans have lost the majority in the state Senate they had as recently as 2017 and dropped from a 50-48 minority in the state House to a mere 39 House Republicans. This has allowed the most extreme elements of the Seattle socialist establishment to push through their agenda in Olympia.

If common-sense is to return to Washington, common-sense voters need to return their ballots.

Adding or turning out an additional 40,500 (3.81% of total voters) Republican voters in 10 legislative districts out of a population of over 1 million voters would result in a net gain of 17 House seats and 9 Senate seats.

Here is how I get those numbers:

• Not every race in these districts has been competitive. Many are just an “also-ran” candidate with little or no funding or support.
  

• Assuming Republicans actually compete in each of these races, perhaps one at a time over the course of a few years, they don't need very many additional Republican votes to flip the seats.
  

• The chart below outlines the margin of defeat of the latest competitive legislative race Republicans ran and lost in each district.

District	Total Voters	Margin of defeat*	% of voters	Democrat Senators	Democrat Reps
LD 5	111,075	5,502	4.95%	1	2
LD10	117,908	5,895	5.00%	0	2
LD18	112,958	172	0.15%	1	0
LD24	123,185	8,708	7.07%	1	2
LD26	117,334	3,330	2.84%	1	1
LD28	85,050	4,589	5.40%	1	2
LD30	84,604	4,449	5.26%	1	2
LD42	117,782	905	0.77%	1	2
LD44	99,818	4,241	4.25%	1	2
LD47	94,223	2,749	2.92%	1	2
Total	1,063,937	40,540	3.81%	9	17

*Based on the latest COMPETITIVE legislative race in the district

I'll conclude this post with more AI-generated imagery since you liked the first one so much, gentle reader.

If conservatives abandon the field because they are either frustrated or discouraged, then bad things happen.

Really bad, and very real things, happen. We have all seen it the past few legislative sessions.

The good news is there are enough Republican voters sitting on their ballots or simply not registered to vote that could flip the entire ship right side up.

Will Republicans in Washington focus on re-engaging those disengaged Republican voters so this...

becomes this...