After such a harrowing election, everyone's got questions. Some spring from anguish, such as one I keep hearing here in the blue bubble:
"What country am I living in?"
Others are more practical, such as Democrats asking: "Where did we go wrong?"
Or this one from the former head of the Washington GOP, Caleb Heimlich, who's wondering what his party might glean from the local elections: "Why is Washington the only state in the country that moved left?"
I've got answers! Maybe more like observations, which I hope are backed with enough facts and data to give them some heft.
We start down in Southwest Washington, in Washougal. This is home to U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat who won her rematch against MAGA challenger Joe Kent, despite her district voting, once again, for Donald Trump.
This is where Democrats can maybe start to understand how things went off track.
Gluesenkamp Perez burst on the scene two years ago by flipping a red district to blue. An auto shop owner, she did it with a sort of rural whisperer approach. She talks about restoring shop class to high schools, for example. She wasn't shy about calling out her own side for catering to elites.
"How [bleeped] is it that we don't respect or listen to people until they have a college degree?" she said last year.
But Gluesenkamp Perez caught heat from progressives who felt she wasn't pure enough. She crossed over and voted with Republicans sometimes. When she voted against student loan forgiveness, on the grounds it wasn't fair to tradespeople, her auto shop got bombarded with negative reviews.
"This place is horrible. They charge interest that compounds daily. Ohh wait that's student loans," one typical review said.
Summed up the lefty news site Slate: "With Democrats Like Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, Who Needs Republicans?"
One Democratic congressman said he'd even gotten emails from fellow Democrats around the country to shun her: "'You've got to get rid of Marie Pérez,' " he reported the requests said.
But the election results show she's on to a kind of modern working-class politics that her party desperately needs to understand.
An analysis of voting returns shows Gluesenkamp Perez ran more than 5 percentage points ahead of her own party's presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. She amassed about 14,000 more votes in the 3rd District than Harris did — meaning a lot of people voted for Trump and then crossed over and backed her.
The redder the county, the more voters crossed over. Those 14,000 crossover votes were more than her total lead.
She's now beaten a Trump-endorsed candidate twice in a Trump-friendly district. The question "where did Democrats go wrong" might be reframed as "where did Democrats get it right?" With one answer being here in Southwest Washington.
Rather than try to purge her, national Democrats and progressives could pilgrimage to Washougal to learn a thing or two. About how to make tents bigger, not shrink them with purity tests.
On to the nagging question for the local GOP: Why did Washington tilt further left, when all else seemed to shift right?
The short answer, the data shows, is but five letters long: T-R-U-M-P.
In most presidential elections, a party's national candidate is expected to run ahead of the candidates down the ballot, lifting them in a "coattail" effect. Harris, for example, won about 75,000 more votes statewide than the Democratic candidate for governor, Bob Ferguson.
But Trump incredibly underperformed all eight GOP candidates running statewide in Washington — all of whom lost. Trump pulled in 150,000 fewer votes than the GOP's pick for governor, Dave Reichert. Trump got fewer votes even than no-name Republicans who had never run for public office before, for down-ballot positions, including secretary of state.
GOP lands commissioner candidate Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump when she was in Congress, outpolled Trump by a whopping 200,000 votes. Yet she still lost to Democrat Dave Upthegrove.
What an anvil Trump was for Republicans here. This is proof he's dead weight for the party locally, even on a night he won the presidency.
Why this phenomenon is more pronounced in Washington than in other states isn't known. I suspect it's because Washington is relatively well-off, while the demographics that shifted to Trump the most tended to be lower-income and Hispanic voters.
But if Gluesenkamp Perez can whisper across a divide to Trump voters, state Republicans might likewise try harder speaking to the rest of the state in which they live. Dropping the MAGA extremism would be a start.
Finally, to those wondering what country you're living in: It is startling that the nation just reelected someone who tried to overturn the last election. His win means he got away with it. Also, as soon as it became apparent that Trump was ahead, all talk of election fraud miraculously ceased. It was a big lie all along, yet here we are.
It's important to put what just happened in context, though.
Much of the media has been acting like Trump won a historically sweeping triumph. Trump himself boasted that "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate." Though that isn't true, some publications came undone with superlatives.
"A stunning victory has crowned Donald Trump the most consequential American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt," hyperventilated The Economist magazine. "In what was supposed to be a knife-edge election, he has won a mandate ... The world lies at Trump's feet."
Please. At least wait to see whether he can pass a bill. (Remember Obamacare repeal?)
The reality is this was a knife-edge election. Trump's going to win far fewer total votes as well as a lower vote percentage than Joe Biden did against him in 2020. Nobody gushed about that being a landslide. Trump pretended it didn't even count.
Take the Midwest battleground states. Biden won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a combined total of just 256,000 votes — a squeaker. Through midday Friday, Trump was winning them by slightly less, 250,000 — about 1.5 percentage points.
After the pokey West Coast states count all their ballots, Trump will have lodged roughly a 2 percentage point national win. That's equal to 1 out of every 50 voters changing their minds. It's half the margin Biden won.
In politics, close doesn't count with respect to who gets power, so all this is symbolic. But it matters, because we didn't just crown a king. The 49% still gets a say in whatever direction the country takes. It needn't be cowed or silent, just as the losing side wasn't after it swung slightly the other way the last time.
So if you're out there angsting about what kind of country you're living in, the nonhyperbolic answer is: One still divided. One unsettled, one still in the middle of a pitched democratic debate.
And one not at anybody's feet.
