More than 60% of Washington voters 18-35 favor Harris over Trump

Graeme Huntley, 29, moved from St. Louis to Seattle two years ago to work for the federal government, but now works at the Tacoma Art Museum.   

“When Biden dropped out, I think it was a breath of fresh air for a lot of people, not just for me, but for people my age,” said Huntley, a poll participant. “Even if we don’t love Harris, I think it’s a nice change of pace.”

Huntley said they try to stay independent, but this year they will be voting mostly Democratic. In partisan races, the poll found, 68% of younger voters intend to vote for the Democrats, while 19% will vote Republican.

“I think if Trump doesn’t win, it’s going to be a lot more downhill like it’s already been for the last four years,” said Spencer Stoner, 30, a truck driver from Castle Rock. “I just really hope that this is actually what the people want, and not a stolen election.”

More than half (57%) of younger voters who took the Cascade PBS/Elway poll said they felt better about their country, with 30% saying things are worse and 13% answering they don’t know.

John Lee, 30, from Seattle, the CEO and founder of Loopie, a Seattle-based mobile laundry service, said he is worried about the potential public reaction after the election.

“At this point, it’s not just a matter of if Kamala Harris will win the election, it’s a matter of if and when she does win, what’s the other party’s response going to elicit?” Lee said, referring to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., by supporters of the former president.

Lee, who considers himself a Democrat, said a childhood memory of Trump pushed him to vote against him. Lee’s mother was a reporter at The New York Times in the early 2000s, and at the vacation home of one of her colleagues, columnist Gail Collins, he saw a framed article about Trump and his real estate practices.

“I just saw in Sharpie this gentleman’s writing on this piece of paper, directed at a woman, one of my mom’s co-workers, something to the extent of ‘You have the face of a pig.’ I remembered asking my parents, or Gail, who wrote that, and they said the gentleman named Donald Trump,” Lee said. From that moment on, he viewed Trump’s name as a synonym for disrespect.

Grant Bradley, 33, a project engineer who has lived in Bellingham for more than a decade, said he feels nervous, in part because the presidential election is closer than he would like it to be.

A little more than a third, 37%, of all poll respondents said they felt positive about the election, while 27% said they felt worried. The numbers for the 18-35 crowd were similar: 38% felt positive, 32% were worried.

“I knew I wasn’t going to vote for Trump, period, and that in this election, I want to vote for the candidate who’s most likely going to defeat Trump. If we had ranked-choice voting, Kamala wouldn’t be my first choice, but I do think she’s a very strong candidate and I do really approve of her running mate, Tim Walz,” said Bradley.

Centered Elguezabal, 34, is from Northport in Stevens County but works in New York as an assistant project manager at a performance engineering company. He feels very optimistic about the election, is a Washington voter, and loves Harris.

“In 2020, I was not voting for Joe Biden, I was voting against Donald Trump. Now I actually feel like I am solidly voting, enthusiastically and happily, for somebody who is, I think, as a person, a really good person as a politician,” Elguezabal said.

His hobby is to keep up with elections all over the U.S. He follows political maps, precinct data, voter turnout, primaries, Senate races and other state races.

“I think that the upcoming generations are really energized to fix a lot of problems that we’ve watched for decades just persist and linger,” he said. “I think that as millennials start to take office and boomers are phasing out of office, that the mind-set around a lot of policy decision is changing to be a little bit more optimistic, more progressive, more pragmatic, moving forward.”

In partisan races, 26% of younger voters said they plan to vote all Democratic, 11% all Republican, 20% will split their vote and 19% didn’t say.  

Elguezabal said he is confident that Democrats will hold out in both state chambers in the Washington Legislature, especially considering Trump is on the ballot.

“We saw that in 2016, we saw that in 2020 when Trump was on the ballot, Washingtonians show up and they’re not showing up for him,” Elguezabal said. In 2020 in Washington, Biden defeated Trump 58% to 39% to capture the state’s 12 electoral votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Trump here 53% to 37%.

Although an estimated 80% of poll respondents appear likely to be voting this election cycle, that number drops to about 68% for voters aged 18-35.