Paul Queary, a veteran AP reporter and editor, is founder of The Washington Observer, an independent newsletter on politics, government and the influence thereof in Washington State.
This is basically pure special-interest money, raised $1,000 at a time from willing donors eager to court influence with powerful committee chairs and leaders in the Legislature.
It's not easy to follow this last-minute money. The money behind Conservatives for a Stronger America is still anonymous, hidden behind the same Massachusetts-based consultant, Charles Gantt.
This is essentially an expensive live-fire test of whether this kind of moderate-on-progressive challenge can work, and of the premise that progressives.
Real estate developers frequently create a new LLC for each project for entirely solid business reasons. But in a political context, the practice has the effect of allowing them to become super-donors.
Note that the pollsters include the incumbents’ race in the description. The district is nearly 65 percent white and less than 3 percent black. They also included voting-record messaging designed to fire up tax-averse voters and folks on the rightward half of the broad argument over law enforcement policy.Â
The teachers' union and its PAC spent $3.75 million on campaigns in the 2020 cycle. With a haul of more than half a billion dollars from the Legislature this year alone, that looks like money well spent.
With no need to court Republican votes, Democratic transportation leaders wrote a spending plan much more focused on transit and non-driving forms of transportation than previous plans.
There was some talk that Carlyle might face a challenge from the Left in 2022, but given the progressive victories in the Legislature, which Carlyle voted for, it's not clear a challenger would have much to run on.
