(Illustration by Diana Ejaita/The Marshall Project)
Washington’s state prison population isn’t allowed to vote — but if they were, about half would vote for Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump in 2024.
That’s according to a sweeping national survey from The Marshall Project on the political opinions of incarcerated people, which found that 48% of the 954 respondents from Washington said they preferred Trump and 29% said they preferred Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat’s nominee.
Nationally, 46% of the respondents preferred Trump and 33% preferred Harris. The top party affiliation in both Washington and nationwide was “Independent.”
The Marshall Project also conducted a survey when President Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, in which 54% of 2,166 Washington prisoners said they preferred Trump, compared to 12% supporting Biden.
“There’s been this narrative that most people behind bars are going to be Democrats because they think Democrats are soft on crime,” said Kelly Olson of Free The Vote Washington, a coalition promoting voting rights for people involved in the criminal justice system.
“It’s not a monolith,” Olson said.
Rep. Tarra Simmons, D-Kitsap, the state’s first formerly incarcerated representative, introduced a bill early this year to give voting rights to people in prison — but the legislation came up against staunch opposition from Republicans, who invoked serial killer Gary Ridgway as a reason not to pass the bill. It’s also not supported by Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, who has “strong objections to restoring the ability to vote until a person has paid their debt to society,” his office said. Simmons told the Standard she’ll be re-introducing the legislation during the next legislative session in January.
Those who support giving prisoners the right to vote argue that voting is an inalienable right. They also say civic engagement could help reduce recidivism, as studies show prisoners are less likely to reoffend if they feel invested in their communities. Preventing prisoners from voting also disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous communities in Washington, who have higher rates of incarceration.
“It’s important to remember too that they are still citizens that are counted in the census that adds revenue to our cities and counties and states based on population,” said Olson. “They’re a part of that population and they’re underrepresented.”
Washington enacted a law granting voting rights to formerly incarcerated people in 2021 and a 2022 bill gave people on parole or probation the right to vote. The state is still trying to get the word out; Hobbs’ office is running a program that conducts outreach to formerly incarcerated people and registers them to vote.
A 2024 analysis by Free the Vote Washington of party preference of voters who were formerly incarcerated found similar results to The Marshall Project’s survey: In 2024, 59% preferred the Republican Party and 41% preferred Democrats. However, formerly incarcerated voters in 2020 preferred the Democratic Party, which indicates that they may be swing or independent voters.
The support for Republicans, though, baffles Olson, who was formerly incarcerated: “It’s hard for me to understand, when most of the progress that has happened as far as sentencing reform — efforts to reform and to improve conditions, efforts to access education inside — all of these things have been Democrat-led,” she said.
But Nicole Lewis, the engagement editor at The Marshall Project who organized the publication’s survey, said she could think of a few reasons why prisoners prefer Republicans.
“People forget 30% of the prison population is white,” Lewis said. “Look at our electorate on the outside — there’s racial breakdowns among party lines, and in prison, the segregation is even more stark and even more intense.”
Lewis also pointed out that people who follow politics less closely — so-called “low-information” voters — tend to support Trump, and that people in prison, often “through no fault of their own,” don’t have as much access to information on the outside world.
Lewis questioned whether GOP lawmakers opposed to re-enfranchisement of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people would take different positions if “they understood that some of their constituents were locked up too.”
Meanwhile, many prisoners don’t like the Democratic Party’s framing of this election as being a prosecutor versus a felon. “I think it is horrible political framing that does not allow for us to get to the heart of our nation’s issues,” said one survey respondent incarcerated at Washington Corrections Center.
Criminal justice advocates have criticized the prosecutor versus felon rhetoric, arguing that it contributes to stigma against those who have a criminal record.
However, beliefs on whether Trump should have been convicted of a felony differ inside prison, just as they do on the outside.
One Washington respondent said he related to Trump, believing he was a “victim of being overcharged like me” and he should have only been found guilty of a misdemeanor. Another said he should have faced greater consequences: “I was convicted for one felony. I was sentenced to life. He was convicted of 34 felonies. He should be in prison.”
Those who supported Harris often said they resonated with her middle-class background and thought it might be time for a woman to be in office.
“Putting a woman in office would be great because, to be honest, she probably had to work twice as hard just because she was a woman to get to where she is now, so she’ll probably work twice as hard in office,” a respondent at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla said.
Issues that mattered to respondents included comprehensive criminal justice reform and economic issues — poverty, wages and other issues that “affect everyday Americans,” like the prisoners’ families outside, Lewis said.
Lewis said she hopes the survey helps provide a clearer picture of the “spectrum of politics behind bars” and how people’s experiences in prison shape their politics.
She and Olson pointed out that the majority of incarcerated people will leave prison — and that because they can’t vote while behind bars, lawmakers often don’t think of the incarcerated population as a group of voters to engage.
“That’s a bit shortsighted, because every year, around 600,000 people are cycling out and back into their home communities,” Lewis said. “This is a group that’s waiting to be engaged. They’re waiting to be invited in.”