New presidents often energize the opposition. It happened in 1994, following the election of President Bill Clinton, and again in 2010 when the Tea Party helped shift power in Congress two years after the election of President Barack Obama.

Mark A. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Washington, says that right from the start it was obvious Trump’s election would energize Democrats.

“The overall trend is the out party does well in midterm elections so that is part of what is going on here,” Smith said. “Whether the Democratic turnout is bigger than what you’d normally get, I mean, my sense is that it is.”

All this energy from the Democrats has made it difficult to gauge the impact of pre-paid postage — which is unfortunate, given the trouble it took for the state to adopt the new practice.

For years, Washington state Sen. Bob Hasegawa has introduced bills to provide prepaid postage for primary and general election ballots. But they’ve never passed.

After Julie Wise took over as King County Elections Director in 2016, she made a push for paid postage on the county level. After two pilots to see how it would work operationally, the elections office made the request for the budget to run the program and the county council passed the funding.

Soon after, concerns arose that it wouldn’t be fair to other voters in the state if only King County ballots didn't require postage, so Secretary of State Kim Wyman and Gov. Jay Inslee found emergency money for every other county to do the same — $1.2 million. As of Wednesday, King County Elections says it spent $186,700 on prepaid postage.

While the impact on voter turnout is yet to be fully understood, it’s clear there was a change in behavior. The number of ballots returned to ballot boxes this year decreased 15.5 percent despite there being more ballot boxes in King County than previous years.

In the 2017 primary election, about 35 percent of ballots were picked up from drop boxes, compared to just over 32 percent in this year's August primary. The county says it doesn’t have any plans to stop using ballot boxes. Instead, there are some gaps it’s planning to fill by adding more.

“I don’t think one is the replacement for the other,” says Kendall LeVan-Hodson, King County Elections chief of staff. “A number of people don’t trust the postal service and there are a lot of last-minute voters who use ballot boxes.”

She said in the two 2017 special elections where they tested using paid postage, turnout did increase 7 to 10 percent