DISTRICT DEM TOTAL GOP TOTAL WA-03 49.55 50.45 WA-05 46.82 50.83 WA-08 50.49 46.62

But there were two other races in Washington that weren’t on the Beltway media’s radar, which turned out nearly as close as in the 8th. The 5th district, centered on Spokane and represented by Republican leadership member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, is considered to be a pretty solidly red district, one where Hillary Clinton lost 52 to 39.

However, there’s a strong Democratic recruit here, former state Senate majority leader Lisa Brown (and there’s also apparently a lot of building resentment here toward McMorris Rodgers, who may have been neglecting her district, Eric Cantor-style, as she climbs the GOP ladder), and Brown finished within one point of McMorris Rodgers, 47.8-46.8. There were two other very minor GOP candidates here, so the totals for the two parties ended up 50.83 percent Republican and 46.82 Democratic.

And few House watchers have taken much interest in Washington’s 3rd district, centered on Vancouver. On paper, it’s an easier district than the 5th, with Clinton losing only 50 to 43 in 2016 (and with Obama winning 51-47 here in 2008), but one where no previously well-known Democratic candidates emerged and where Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler has been an uncontroversial, if unremarkable, incumbent. Washington State Univ.-Vancouver professor Carolyn Long, however, seems to have done a solid job of local organizing. When totaling up the two parties’ shares, it was nearly a 50-50 race: 49.55 percent for all Democrats (with Long advancing, at 36 percent of the vote) to 50.45 percent for all Republicans.

Some readers might be thinking, “well, so what? That’s the primary. The candidates start over now, and it’ll be a different pool of voters in November.” The thing is, that’s not the case at all. Washington’s primaries have been an uncanny barometer for the general election for many years, including in the period before the current version of the Top Two primary. (The current system dates back to 2004, though Washington had a similar “blanket primary” prior to that.) Take a look at these scatterplots by political science graduate student Carlos Algara, showing the near-total correlation between primary results and general election results in Washington:

x Yep, first stage elex outcomes very predictive of second stage November outcomes across offices in WA. pic.twitter.com/b1rCPLUOPC — Carlos Algara (@algaraca) August 8, 2018

Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende was an early observer of, and has written several times about, this phenomenon. When you add the total Democratic votes and GOP votes in a race, that provides a pretty clear indication of where the race will end up in November (in other words, the people who, for instance, voted for Democratic candidates other than the one who advanced to November tend to keep voting Democratic, rather than switching parties or staying home). If anything, the Democratic vote share tends to improve a few points better from the primary to the general thanks to higher turnout, according to Trende:

Overall, I tested to see how the result in November correlates with the result from the primary and the number of candidates running in that primary. The resulting model works awfully well. The r-square is 0.93 and the variables point the way that we would expect them to point. In general, Democrats in Washington state perform better in the fall than they do in the summer -- this makes sense, given what we know about general election turnout vs. primary turnout. In 2012 they performed, overall, 3.5 percent better in the fall. In 2010 they performed 5.5 percent better in the fall. The only exception is 1996, where they performed about three-tenths of a point worse in the fall.

This isn’t the case at all in California, where there’s often a big gain in Democratic vote share from the primary to the general, and where Democratic turnout in the primary is often abysmal, especially in mostly-Latino areas like the Central Valley. (In fact, that’s why, combined with the problem of a high number of Democratic challengers splitting the vote multiple ways, the party was sweating the primaries so hard in California earlier this year, to avoid getting shutout of the Top Two completely like they did in California’s 31st district in 2012.)

Trende doesn’t venture an explanation for why Washington diverges so much from California in this tendency, but two possible reasons I can come up with are that a) Washington, unlike California, is entirely vote-by-mail, so there’s an extremely low bar for effort for people who are unenthusiastic about voting, and b) Washington is a considerably whiter state than California, so with less of a language barrier and other cultural barriers, it tends toward higher turnout, especially in primaries, which come across as somewhat more arcane than general elections.

The size and scope of the potential Democratic wave in Washington isn’t merely limited to the U.S. House, however. Despite its blue state status, you might be surprised to hear that Washington’s two legislative chambers are Democratic-controlled but by as small a margin as possible. (Maybe it’s not that surprising, actually, since Washington’s Democratic voters are a majority but aren’t distributed very efficiently around the state, being heavily concentrated into Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham, Olympia, and a few other larger cities.) The 49-member Senate is currently 25 Democrats and 23 Republicans (plus one elected Democrat who caucuses with the Republicans); you probably remember the special election in 2017 where Democrat Manka Dhingra picked up a seat, shifting control back to the Democrats. And the 98-member House is currently 50 Democrats and 48 Republicans.

On Earth 2 where Hillary Clinton is president, this would likely be a year where the Democrats lost control of both chambers, thanks to the wonders of “thermostatic public opinion.” Instead, that phenomenon cuts entirely the other way; based on Tuesday’s results, if the Democratic totals and GOP totals in all the legislative races hold, the Democrats are on track to pick up four Senate seats and 16 House seats. That would take the Senate margin up to 29 Democrats and 20 Republicans (and “Democrats”); it would take the House margin up to 66 Democrats and 32 Republicans. In other words, the state legislature would go in one fell swoop from being on a knife’s edge to Democratic near-supermajorities. Here’s the list of the GOP-held legislative seats where the Democratic total is over 50 percent:

DISTRICT DEM TOTAL GOP TOTAL SD-06 (open) 50.49 49.51 SD-26 (OPEN) 50.72 45.40 SD-30 51.82 48.18 SD-42 54.01 45.99 HD-05-1 (OPEN) 53.70 46.30 HD-05-2 53.2 45.58 HD-06-1 52.61 47.39 HD-06-2 (OPEN) 53.49 46.51 HD-10-1 51.35 48.65 HD-10-2 53.59 46.41 HD-17-1 51.26 48.74 HD-18-2 (OPEN) 52.76 47.24 HD-19-1 50.63 49.37 HD-25-1 (OPEN) 52.64 47.37 HD-26-1 50.10 49.91 HD-28-1 53.50 46.50 HD-35-2 51.23 48.77 HD-42-1 50.63 49.37 HD-42-2 52.26 47.74 HD-44-2 54.72 45.28

(The 35th Senate district, which elects Tim Sheldon, the lone Democrat who caucuses with the Republicans, is a special case. Sheldon is actually trailing his Democratic opponent, Irene Bowling, by a 39 to 35 margin. The remaining 26 percent goes to three minor Republicans. However, in a November election between Bowling and Sheldon, those Republican votes will in all likelihood go to Sheldon, meaning he’ll be back again for yet another four years of DINOing it up.

There’s also one other oddball race in the 48th Senate district, which used to elect Rodney Tom, the other turncoat Democrat who, along, with Sheldon, gave control to the GOP in 2012 but then retired in 2014. Tom’s attempting a comeback against the Democratic incumbent, Patty Kuderer; he’s running as a “Democrat” again but promising to caucus with no party at all this time. Unsurprisingly, Tom’s comeback is going over like a lead balloon; with no Republican at all on the ballot in this blue district, he’s advancing to November, but he’s trailing Kuderer 59 to 30.)

On top of that, there are two other seats (HD-25-2 and HD-47-1) where the Republican total exceeds the Democratic total, but where it’s under 50 (thanks to an independent on the primary ballot) and only a point or two higher than the Democratic total. So, given the fudge factor that Trende describes, that number could go even higher than 16.

While many of these seats are in Seattle’s outer suburbs and exurbs, which are traditonally the most politically swingy terrain in the state, they’re widely distributed throughout Washington: the 6th district is in part of Spokane and its suburbs; the 17th and 18th are near Vancouver; the 42nd is around Bellingham; and the 19th is rural timber-industry terrain on the state’s coast, which was the part of the state that trended away from the Democrats the hardest in 2016.

Now think of that number multiplied by 49 other states (in fact, we already saw a very similar-sized shift in Virginia’s House of Delegates in the 2017 election, where 15 out of 100 seats flipped to the Democrats). If that same dynamic applies in other states, think about how many state legislative seats total could end up flipping back to Team Blue. Unsurprisingly, Republicans active in the state legislature realm have started publicly fretting over their likely steep losses.