Washington state is normally a lock for Democrats. The Democratic Party has held the governor’s mansion since 1985, including one agonizingly close election that is widely regarded by local Republicans to have been stolen.

Washington Democrats now control statewide elected offices after the lone Republican, then-Secretary of State Kim Wyman, got sideways with the GOP faction favorable to President Donald Trump as he rose to the White House for his first, nonconsecutive term. Wyman jumped ship for the administration of Trump’s successor (and predecessor), former President Joe Biden.

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Democrats enjoy comfortable majorities in both houses of the state legislature. Both U.S. senators are Democrats, and the U.S. House congressional delegation is 8-2 in their favor.

So why is it, in the current struggle among several red and blue states to gerrymander more favorable House districts with an eye on next year’s midterm congressional elections, that Washington isn’t one of the places Democrats appear to be looking to corral votes?

“It’s a non-story for Washington State,” Luanne Van Werven, former chairwoman of the Washington State GOP, told the Washington Examiner. “We have a redistricting commission made up of two Republicans and two Democrats,” and the commissioners, by all accounts, are “not willing to reopen redistricting.”

State Democratic leadership appears to agree.

“We have already done our share to get Democrats in the House,” state Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle) told the local publication The Washington Standard. “There’s no juice to squeeze in the lemon here.”

State House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon (D-West Seattle) agreed with his legislative counterpart from the other side of the Capitol, in Washington’s state capital, Olympia. Fitzgibbon pointed out that the Democrats already hold 80% of Washington’s House seats. In a state where the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris beat Trump 57% to 39%.

Fitzgibbon said that it would “take some very creative map drawing to get to 9-1” and that there was “no chance Republicans would be interested in helping us.”

It would take a two-thirds vote of the legislature, a majority that Democrats don’t enjoy, to do anything with the current district structure. Washington Republicans have threatened lawsuits if local Democrats even think about it.

Politics of commission

Washington legislative voices insist that it is out of their hands because voters took it out of their hands, and that is mostly true. Washington voters passed Amendment 74 in 1983 by 61%, creating the Washington State Redistricting Commission.

The commission is somewhat independent of the legislature and strictly bipartisan. It consists of two Republicans, two Democrats, and a non-voting chair whom both sides decide they can work with. It is convened every 10 years following the census. Its work started in 1991.

If the idea was to remove politics from redistricting, the commission has been only partly successful. In the last round of redistricting, one Democratic commissioner, Seattle politician Brady Walkinshaw, played the role of an obstructionist.

That obstruction managed to push the final vote on the commission’s proposed map past midnight, and thus just past a statutory deadline in late 2021. That sent the results to the state Supreme Court for review. The justices, mercifully, declined to meddle with the map.

Also, while the commission proposes the overall framework to the legislature, this order of operations still allows for some amount of political back-and-forth on implementation. That back-and-forth often leads to lawsuits and charges of bias, for example, politics.

Still, the Washington State Redistricting Commission appears to have made the process a little bit less of a naked power play by the party in power.

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Van Werven charged that “national Democrats … have led the way on gerrymandering in blue states such as Illinois and New York,” where they have “done everything possible to eliminate Republican congressional districts.”

Note the “national.” The former GOP chairwoman’s criticisms of state-level Democrats were real but muted. Facing an institutional barrier created by the voters, Washington Democrats may be seen cheering from the sidelines in the larger gerrymander tug-of-war, pitting the nation’s two most populous states against each other, red Texas vs. even larger, and blue, California. But Washington state political leaders have wisely decided to sit this one out.

Jeremy Lott is the author of several books, most recently The Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf.