By james art 
Prisoners in Washington state are not allowed to vote, but if they were, about half would vote for Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump in 2024.
This is according to a a broad national survey from the Marshall Project on the Political Views of People Deprived of their Liberty, which he found that 48 percent of 954 Washington respondents said they preferred Trump, and 29 percent said they preferred Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
Nationally, 46 percent of those polled favor Trump, and 33 percent favor Harris. The largest party affiliation both in Washington and nationwide was Independent.
The Marshall Project also conducted a survey when President Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee in which 54 percent of 2,166 inmates in Washington said they favored Trump, compared to 12 percent who supported Biden.
“There’s 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. Tara Simmons, D-Kitsap, the first state representative to be incarcerated, introduced a bill earlier this year to give people in prison the right to vote – but the legislation met stiff opposition from Republicans, who cited serial killer Gary Ridgway as a reason not to pass the bill. Nor is it supported by Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, who has “serious objections to restoring the ability to vote until one pays one’s debt to society,” his office said. Simmons told the Standard he will reintroduce 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 can help reduce recidivism, as studies show show that inmates are less likely to reoffend if they feel invested in their communities. Preventing inmate voting also disproportionately affects black and indigenous communities in Washington, D.C., which have higher rates of incarceration.
“It’s also important to remember that they are still citizens who are counted in the census, which adds revenue to our cities, counties and states based on population,” Olson said. “They’re part of that population and they’re underrepresented.”
In 2021, Washington passed a law giving people who were incarcerated the right to vote 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 runs a program that contacts ex-prisoners and registers them to vote.
Analysis from 2024 by Free the Vote Washington on the party preferences of ex-prison voters found similar results to The Marshall Project survey: in 2024, 59% favor the Republican Party and 41% favor the Democrats. However, voters who were incarcerated in 2020 preferred the Democratic Party, indicating that they may be partisan or independent voters.
But the support for Republicans baffles Olson, who has been in prison before: “It’s hard for me to understand when most of the progress that’s been made on sentencing reform—efforts to reform and improve conditions, efforts to access education inside — all of these things are run by the Democrats,” she said.
But Nicole Lewis, the engagement editor at The Marshall Project, which organized the paper’s survey, said she could think of several reasons why inmates favor Republicans.
“People forget that 30 percent of the prison population is white,” Lewis said. “Look at our electorate from the outside – there are racial differences across party lines, and in prison the segregation is even starker and even more intense.”
Lewis also pointed out that people who follow politics less – the so-calledlow-information voters—tend to support Trumpand that people in prison, often “through their own fault”, do not have as much access to information about the outside world.
Lewis questioned whether GOP lawmakers who oppose re-suffrage for inmates or ex-prisoners would take different positions if they “found out that some of their constituents were also incarcerated.”
Meanwhile, many inmates don’t like the Democratic Party’s portrayal of this election as prosecutor versus criminal. “I think it’s a terrible policy framework that doesn’t allow us to get to the heart of our nation’s problems,” said one respondent to the survey, which was held at the Washington Corrections Center.
Criminal justice advocates have criticized the prosecutor-versus-criminal rhetoric, saying it contributes to the stigma against those with criminal records.
However, beliefs about whether Trump should have been convicted of a crime differed inside and outside of prison.
One respondent in Washington said he related to Trump, believing that he was a “victim of overcharging like me” and should have been found guilty only of a misdemeanor. Another said he should have faced greater consequences: “I was convicted of one crime. I was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was convicted of 34 crimes. He should be in jail.”
Those who supported Harris often said they resonated with her middle-class background and thought it might be time for a woman to take office.
“Putting a woman in the position would be great because, frankly, she probably had to work twice as hard just because she was a woman to get to where she is now, so she’s probably going to work twice as hard in the position, ” said a respondent from the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Issues that mattered to respondents included comprehensive criminal justice reform and economic issues — poverty, wages and other issues that “affect ordinary Americans,” such as the families of inmates on the outside, Lewis said.
Lewis said he hopes the study will help 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 constituency to engage.
“It’s a little short-sighted because every year about 600,000 people cycle out and back into their home communities,” Lewis said. “This is a group waiting to be engaged. They are waiting to be invited.