Forty-seven years ago, this returning trekker sat reading of happenings back home. The major news: Seattle voters had resoundingly rejected a bid to roll back the city’s recently enacted anti-discrimination ordinance.
And yet, almost a half-century later, city and state Republicans continue to believe the path to power is to demonize minorities. Dan Evans ran for governor and was elected in a Democratic year on the slogan “A Blueprint for Progress” and would deliver on same. Pollster Stewart Elway, in a lecture last week, projected a chart showing that merely 21 percent of Washington voters consider themselves Republicans.
The state’s political colors have morphed from purple to deep blue. This revelation has come as conservative Brian Heywood and supporting cast celebrate collecting enough signatures to place on the ballot a centerpiece of today’s party agenda — the state would bar young people undergoing gender-affirming treatment from participating on its playing fields.
These Republicans seem to believe the state’s place is is in the bedrooms and on the playing fields of our Evergreen State, even though voters disagree. We’ve witnessed a march of folly by the GOP on multiple fronts, including:
Anti-Taxes: The Washington Legislature has enacted a modest income tax on the richest of the rich. Lawmakers aren’t soaking the rich, only requesting that they rinse regularly.
Seattle as a hell hole: Tiffany Smiley demonized Seattle as a hell hole in her 2022 GOP Senate bid, by filming a TV spot outside a shut-down Starbucks outlet. Today, she’s dispensing propaganda on Fox News while Sen. Patty Murray works on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Demonizing Seattle doesn’t work. It’s kind of tough to paint a picture of doom and gloom when the town has gained more than 100,000 new residents in the past decade.
Drugs: Ex-journalist Jonathan Choe incessantly films down-and-out lifers on the streets of Little Saigon, while Seattle voters have installed a pot entrepreneur as head of the City Council. Republicans rail against marijuana, but Hempfest has eclipsed Seafair, a nostalgia trip back into the 1950s.
Newbies: Independence Day features an annual Seattle Center ceremony at which some 500 new U.S. citizens are sworn in. Some of these citizens head corporations, while others do our grunt work. Faith and family make Latinos a natural new Republican constituency, but hard-shell Republicans are rounding up and locking them up at the Tacoma Detention Center. All this hostility adds up to a permanent minority shut out in the Puget Sound Basin, aging and grumpy. Senators Murray and Cantwell pile up half-million vote margins in populous King County, while the declining GOP holds not a single statewide office.
Gender: Brandi Kruse, in podcasts, rants at transgender teens as a threat to the Republic. Gov. Ferguson defends them, at no political cost whatsoever. The state has an age-old respect for privacy.
In short, the Grand Old Party, in Washington, is far from grand these days.
This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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Joel, Let us celebrate the forthcoming day when our purification is complete and the last State Republican packs up and departs for Idaho or Texas, leaving us to the Worker’s Paradise that we have all so richly earned.
Find better candidates, you might get some votes!
This is why so many from afar choose Seattle as a new home. It’s also why people, like me, choose to remain residents of this area. Thanks for the article.
Also, the Democrats have secured, what was, the one of the most reliable GOP seats, the 8th CD
The last decent active Republican politician in the Evergreen State was probably Chris Vance, whose career was unfortunately eclipsed by the simultaneous rise of his less talented King County Council colleague, the Boy Scout from Bellevue. Vance never quite regained his balance, ending up running unsuccessfully for such improbable posts as Superintendent of Public Instruction. That was never going to work. So he eventually left the GOP and I believe wandered off into the idealistic thicket of nascent minuscule third parties. Has anybody seen him lately?
I don’t know if he was decent, but he wasn’t from the Dan Evans wing of the state party. Basic Reagan Republican. An environmentally and socially responsible Republican candidate for state office, would have a tough time convincing voters he or she was for real, but that’s what it will take.