I mean, it isn't? If DC voted Republican then they'd be totally in favour of making it a state. It's not a secret that is the reason why DC statehood has no tra

I mean, it isn't? If DC voted Republican then they'd be totally in favour of making it a state. It's not a secret that is the reason why DC statehood has no traction in Congress. You can make a case for retrocession, but the other arguments are understood by everyone to be a fig leaf. The same was true in the past: Alaska and Hawaii were admitted essentially as a two-for-one deal because Alaska was reliably Republican and Hawaii reliably Democrat. If both had been one or the other they might have had to wait a long time. And the arguments would have been facially plausible (but not real) here too: the importance of territorial contiguity, the low population of Alaska, the difficulties of establishing effective transportation links, whatever. The number of people who are for (small-d) democratic advances regardless of whether they benefit their own party is (in my view depressingly) low.