It is not quite true, but true enough, that there are two Washington states: the metropolitan area you can see from atop this city’s Space Needle, and everywhere else, which extends about 250 miles east to the Idaho border. Tiffany Smiley is from everywhere else.

In this, her first political campaign, the 39-year-old Smiley is running for the Senate against a five-term incumbent, Patty Murray, 72. Politics, says Smiley, found her.

After 2005, when her husband Scotty, an Army officer and West Point graduate, was blinded by a suicide bomber in Iraq, she was doubly politicized, by dissatisfaction with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and by the Army’s insistence that Scotty could no longer serve. Smiley 1, Army 0: Scotty became the Army’s first blind active-duty officer. And Smiley, a former triage nurse (good training for being a mother of three boys), is not the only mother driven into politics partly in reaction to having her children miss a year and a half of school because of excessive pandemic measures.

Murray’s campaign is focused largely on abortion, which is odd, given that the Supreme Court has restored abortion policy to the states, and this state will never have a less-than-permissive policy. Democratic elder James Carville could have had Murray in mind when he warned recently against Democratic candidates “yelling abortion every other word.” When Smiley and Murray were interviewed consecutively in September, CNN would not take Smiley’s repeated “Yes” for an answer concerning whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected, but did not pursue Murray’s gaseous evasion, amounting to “no,” concerning whether she supports any limits on abortion. Smiley opposes federal legislation setting abortion policy and respects her state’s current decision to have abortion legal until viability.

The Evergreen State is not blue, it is indigo. It has voted Democratic in nine consecutive presidential elections, by an average of 11.8 percentage points. It favored Biden by 19 points in 2020. It votes almost entirely by mailed ballots, which boosts Democratic turnout by requiring little effort from low-propensity voters, e.g., young ones. Another difficulty for Smiley is that ticket-splitting has declined as polarization has increased. Only seven states have a senator from each party. And Washington last elected a Republican senator 28 years ago. Still, surprises happen.

In 1980, Washington’s Warren Magnuson, a Democrat, was the longest-serving senator of the majority party, hence was Senate president pro tempore. As chairman of the Commerce Committee and second-ranking Democrat on Appropriations, he could bring home the bacon. Nevertheless, he lost his bid for a seventh term. Today, next door in Oregon, which last elected a Republican governor in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s first term, 40 years ago, polls show the Republican candidate with a narrow lead. Smiley is probably helped by Portland’s recurring descents into disorder.

Similar fraying of Seattle’s social fabric resulted last November in the election, for the first time in three decades, of a Republican city attorney. The position is technically nonpartisan, but the winner is a Republican-affiliated former Democrat who defeated someone who advocated abolishing the police.

Citing crime, Amazon has moved some offices out of Seattle, and another company headquartered here, Starbucks, has closed some stores. For a while in the summer of 2020, the city ceded control of the Capitol Hill neighborhood to leftists who, promising a “loose form of governance,” turned it into a “no-cop co-op.” Seattle’s progressive mayor was tickled pink about the “block-party atmosphere” and the “community garden,” saying chirpily: “We could have the Summer of Love.” Seattle’s police chief was less serene, saying she was “stunned by the amount of graffiti, garbage, and property destruction.” If the feces did not dampen the block party, two murders, other shootings, and a slew of injuries did.

When Murray visited the neighborhood recently to dispute Smiley’s depiction of it as still crime-ridden, Smiley responded that in the previous week the neighborhood had experienced 43 assaults, 17 thefts, eight burglaries and one arson, and since the beginning of the year, there have been four homicides, 21 rapes, 89 robberies and more than 190 aggravated assaults.

Smiley’s closing argument to Washingtonians will be: If you like the country’s current trajectory, vote for the other woman. If not . . . Smiley’s campaign says its internal polling resembles the September Trafalgar poll: Murray 48.7, Smiley 46.5.

Not invariably, but more than rarely, one senatorial election in a cycle produces a “who-saw-(BEG ITAL)that(END ITAL) coming?” reaction from people who forgot to look far and wide. This year, it could be here.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.