“Barack Obama should easily win in Washington state,” said one CNN commentator ahead of the Washington caucuses Saturday, “because he tends to do well among young and well-educated populations.” The assumption being, of course, that Washington state is full of young, well-educated voters. They would often go on to say that Washington’s vote would likely predict the outcome of Oregon’s later primary, as the states share demographics and political preferences.
But the interesting thing about this assumption, repeated over and over by commentators discussing the fate of Washington’s primary, is that it’s not actually that true. Washington ranks 11th on a list of state percentages of people holding at least bachelor’s degrees, behind Massachusetts (second) and New York (10th) by census, which were won by Hillary Clinton, the non-favorite of the “well-educated” poll demographic. Washington State is not also particularly young, ranking only 20th in lowest median age, behind at least three states where Hillary also prevailed, California (fifth), Arizona (sixth) and Nevada (11th).
The commentators are right about the poll numbers, but wrong about the state statistics. While it is possible that somehow Washington’s Democrats are younger or more educated than California’s Democrats, or more of the younger ones vote, I might suggest that the statistics’ inaccuracy has very little to do with demographic interpretation, and everything to do with cultural reputation.
While Washington state – and the Pacific Northwest in general – does rank in the upper half of both youth population and education level lists, it seems as if it is perceived nationally to be predominately young and well-educated in a way it is actually not. What accounts for this?
As a Pacific Northwesterner, “Pacific Northwest Culture” is not something that is easy to recognize. We simply assume what goes for us goes for the rest of the country, and are shocked to find out some parts of the United States actually don’t have recycling programs or an abundance of coffee shops.
The United States clearly has dominant cultural regions, which while individually complex help account for perceptional stereotypes and voting trends across them. The South is clearly pigeonholed into a perception about its regional culture, and one could easily say the same thing about the New England states. And while these perceptions are not often very accurate – Washington’s so-called predominance in terms of well-educated youth is clearly not the case – they can sometimes help us understand the politics, cultural experiences and social organizations of various areas.
In 1981, Joel Garreau divided these up into nine “nations of North America,” or nine separate cultures of North Americans that he believed transcended normal political boundaries of states and countries. For Garreau, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver and San Francisco shared a regional identity of culture called “Ecotopia,” a rain-swept, “urban-jaded,” secular civilization of environmentalist libertarians, walled off into the forest by high snow-capped mountains. “In the urban parks of Berkeley, signs warn residents not to drink from the creek because it may be polluted. It’s not Berkeley’s fault that almost everywhere else in North America it would never occur to city dwellers that pollution control may be so well advanced that the water in their parks could be clean,” Garreau writes, poking fun at Berkeley’s na’ve assumptions about humans and the environment. “Oregonians are an outdoor people, and are willing to follow their love of nature to its political conclusions,” he writes further. What emerges is a probably over-emphasized, but nonetheless realistically grounded, portrait of a specific kind of regional identity.
Unlike the Evangelical South, or the Puritanical New England, the Pacific Northwest is distinguished by its unusual lack of organized religion, as “the Northwest is statistically the most secular of American regions, its people cherish ‘quality of life’ over material success,” or so writes William Robbins, another scholar of Pacific Northwest culture.
Growing up here, this is largely something we all know, or can at least recognize.
What makes it interesting is that, just like the so-called Bible Belt and New England elite, we Pacific Northwesterners too have a national image that is reflected in our opinions and apparently our voting trends. It is broad, slightly biased and statistically ambiguous, but it is interesting at least to think about. If Obama didn’t win Washington’s caucuses because it is actually “young and well-educated,” it’s likely he won because our regional culture does have an impact on our vote, much as the socially conservative Evangelism of the South might paint its electoral map red.
And it’s not limited to Democratic tickets. Although Democrats have often dominated in the Pacific Northwest, libertarian Republican Ron Paul, mostly considered a no-chance candidate by the mainstream pundits, was even predicted by some major news outlets to win Washington state, where he had his biggest showing yet. So Ecotopia, if by chance it actually exists, might explain some of these regional trends in politics, the economy and the future of America – or at least our small corner of it.
[email protected]