Editorial
Island Seattle

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Nine percent for the president of the United States? If his support drops any further, Bush may be outpolled by Ralph Nader, and come in third. That's just one poll. Pollster Stuart Elway says his last survey of Seattle voters, in April, put Kerry at 69 percent and Bush at 26 percent. Even at those numbers, Seattle is distinct. The city that once elected Republicans Dan Evans, Slade Gorton and Joel Pritchard has no Republican represented in the Legislature, and hasn't for years.

Why? A high proportion of singles and extraordinarily low proportion of children are part of it. A high proportion of public-sector and nonprofit workers is part of it. But these are mere statistical markers. Seattle thinks differently.

Like attracts like. Writer David Brooks says "red America" and "blue America" are getting redder and bluer. It's not that we take a political test when we decide where to live.

"You choose a neighborhood that looks like you," says Elway, "and it's all Democrats."

Seattle is the bluest blue of any place in the Pacific Northwest. It is Seattle's choice to be that way. Still, it may be worth looking in the mirror occasionally and remind ourselves that what we see is not the country as a whole.

Remember the remark by the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who, after the landslide election of 1972, famously said of Richard Nixon, "I don't know anybody who voted for him."