About 51% of poll respondents said they were paying more attention to politics than they used to; 31% said their attention to politics hadn’t changed. Only 8% reported paying less attention, and 9% said they were avoiding political news.
The Cascade PBS/Elway poll surveyed 403 registered voters across the state between March 27 and 31 using a mix of landline, cell phone and online interviews. It has a 95% confidence level, meaning that if the survey was conducted 100 times, the results would be within five percentage points of these results at least 95 times.
The poll considered how engaged Washington voters were and what sentiments they were feeling with Trump’s second term underway.
The findings were not what pollster Stuart Elway expected.
“We were going in kind of looking to see if people were tuned out and flattened by all of this,” Elway said. “What we found was not what the conventional wisdom would’ve expected.”
About 67% of respondents said they look at political news daily, and 94% look at least once a week, higher than the findings of a December 2023 poll. Only 57% of that poll’s respondents said they consumed political news daily.
Before the poll in March, Elway said he had anticipated Democrats would be “disheartened and “unmotivated” and Republicans would feel more energized, but if this is the case, it isn’t reflected in how much voters are engaging with the news, which didn’t vary significantly by demographic.
About 55% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans said they were paying more attention to political news, as did about 43% of Independents.
Randy McGlenn, a 49-year-old Democrat from Spokane, said it’s important to stay informed right now, with all the news that the second Trump administration is generating, but he said he dreads checking in on the news every day.
“I would say I’m painfully more engaged, maybe even a little bit more than the first term,” he said.
On average, respondents use about three-and-a-half news sources to stay informed.
Online news sites, talking with friends and family, social media and national television networks were among the top sources people cited. Other popular options included local television news, cable news, podcasts, and public television or radio.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they’d had a conversation about government and current events within the 24 hours before they were called. About 87% said they’d discussed these topics in the last week.
Those conversations were dominated by the Trump administration and national politics more broadly. Many respondents said Trump or Elon Musk were the topic of discussion. Others mentioned specific actions related to immigration, cuts to government programs or proposed tariffs. Some brought up foreign affairs, and others gave vague, more impressionistic responses, like “chaos” or “lawlessness.”
Only about 9% said they discussed Washington state politics.
Overall, Elway said this sample of voters is “highly engaged.” To capture this metric, he put together a political engagement scale by combining voter responses about recent conversations and news consumption.
About 50% of respondents were “active,” meaning they’d had a political conversation within the last 24 hours and looked at news daily. Another 22% were “engaged,” having had a political conversation and looked at news in the past two to three days. Nineteen percent are in the “observe” category, meaning they’ve had a political conversation or consulted the news within the past week. Voters identified as “not engaged” had had no political discussions in the past week and engaged with the news once a week at most. They made up just 8% of respondents.
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