 Between 1944 and 1988 the county was never won by a Democrat except in Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide.As late as 1976 Washington was the second-most Republican county in the state behind remote Malheur, and Gerald Ford's nineteen thousand-vote victory in the county was decisive in carrying the state for him during that year's Presidential election.Since the 1990s, the increasing drift of the Republican Party towards the South and evangelicalism, along with urbanization, has resulted in a strong shift of Washington County towards the Democratic Party.