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.
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.
The incumbent, Steve Hobbs, is not beloved by the progressive wing of the Democratic party and hasn’t shown much firepower as a statewide candidate, finishing fourth in the 2016 primary for lieutenant governor.
The departing Russ Hauge, who spent 20 years as Kitsap County Prosecutor, was a chief gripe for the association and its allies in Olympia for an approach they found, well, too prosecutorial toward the now-legal weed business.
While a handful of progressive rich folks will embrace paying the new state capital-gains tax as a civic duty, or even as atonement for many years of benefit under a tax system that falls lightly on them and heavily on the poor, most will make a clear-eyed decision with an eye on the bottom line.
So what will the Supremes do with this task, which they never asked for and likely don’t really want? Well, they might go looking for a map that checks the boxes in the law.
