I posted the following on another thread, but reposting here for my WA friends as the figures may be of interest to you:
You're right about the unfriendly biz environment here - and we have only the Dem stronghold on the Govenor's office for about 20 years and the state legislature to blame (the Seattle City Council and King County Council haven't helped).
Based on figures I've pulled from the WA Sect'y of State's Web site, there are 6,686 precincts in the state of WA and 2,616 of them are in King County (the Seattle Metro area)(which is a little over 39% of the precincts in the State).
If we further look at the counties & precincts that have a negative Bush/Kerry number it breaks down to 12 counties (out of 38 for the state) and 4,581 precincts (out of 6,686) - -996864 votes for K and 700408 for Bush (out of 1,305,868 for K and 1,130,537 for B statewide). Rossi is only about 4K votes behind Gregoire and there are still about 332K votes to be counted (only about 119K are in King County) so we can keep our fingers crossed for him. I was also thrilled about McKenna.
Here is some additional info from my spreadsheet:
County Kerry/Edwards Bush / Cheney
Cowlitz 18856 17470
Grays Harbor 15707 14029
Jefferson 10427 6055
King 498782 264757
Kitsap 53548 48995
Mason 11331 10484
Pacific 5538 4614
Pierce 138119 131548
San Juan 5784 2904
Snohomish 145434 125380
Thurston 57551 44190
Whatcom 35787 29982
Total-above
counties 996864 700408
State Totals 1305868 1130537
-52.81% -45.72%
Diff above/state 309004 430129
The urban areas are liberal, and they have enough population to carry the rest of the state.
I can remember back in the 1980's when much of east king county and south king county were conservative. But urban sprawl has changed the demographics.