Portland is Bernie Sanders country. No surprise there. You don't have to walk past many parked cars downtown before you'll come upon one sporting a "People's Republic of Portland" bumper sticker.

In fact, the West Coast's cities in general -- and especially the Northwest's, with their working-class roots -- love the Vermont senator.

Seattle ranks number one per capita among the country's biggest cities in donations to the Sanders cause, according to the Seattle Times' Gene Balk, who crunched Federal Election Commission data. San Francisco and Portland come in right behind the Emerald City at number two and three, respectively.

Liberal denizens of Seattle, Portland and San Francisco are hardly alone in their Sanders love, of course. Sanders' ability to inspire tens of thousands of Democrats across the country -- he's won primaries or caucuses in Colorado, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Oklahoma, as well as his home state of Vermont -- shows that his self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" agenda has appeal well beyond the radical left fringe. The reasons for this are obvious enough. For starters, beginning in the 1990s, the Democratic Party pivoted away from policies directed specifically at the working class. More recently, income inequality has skyrocketed, as the high-tech revolution has left behind industrial workers and many middle-class professionals.

But there's also another piece of the puzzle that makes the Northwest an even better fit for Sanders than many states the senator has already won: religion -- or more specifically, lack of religion. Non-religious Americans are 10 percent "more socialist," on average, than religious Americans, the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com reported this week.

"[T]he individualist, evangelical style of American religion is a strong antidote to socialism," FiveThirtyEight writes. "If faith alone can lead you to salvation, then efforts to reshape society are beside the point. But the animosity between [evangelical Christianity and socialism] has been more pointed, especially regarding so called 'Godless communists' who portrayed religion as the 'opiate of the masses.'"

There is little such animosity in the Northwest. Seattle is the seventh most "churchless city" in the U.S., the city-data company The Barna Group reported last year. Portland is the 13th. (San Francisco is number one on the list.)

All of which suggests Oregon and Washington would be untouchable strongholds for Sanders if he were the Democratic presidential nominee. The party's front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is also expected to do very well in the Northwest if she's the Democrats' candidate, but not as well as Sanders. After all, the Republicans' presidential front-runner, businessman Donald Trump, appeals to many of the same working-class anxieties about the New Economy that Sanders does.

But at least Clinton, if she overcomes Sanders and secures the nomination, won't have to worry about former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The socially liberal Republican announced this week that he will not launch an independent campaign for the White House, ending months of speculation. FiveThirtyEight concluded that if Bloomberg had gone ahead with a campaign, and Clinton and Trump were the major-party nominees, Bloomberg would have had a very good shot at winning Oregon.

-- Douglas Perry