Corps Couldn't Buy WA Governorship
We’re Not Going Back
What Worked in Seattle Flopped in WA
As you may recall, big money spent big buying Seattle’s election last year–forking out almost $1.3 million of PAC money.
In fact, it was Bruce Harrell’s publicly paid consultant, Tim Ceis, who corralled a bunch of corporate money to pay for messaging meant to scare citizens on public safety so that the conservative candidates could distract everyone from their main agenda–keeping corporate taxes low.
Something similar just happened at the state level. Some of the same kooky folks that funded this whole bizarre conservative takeover in Seattle, including George Petrie–who started giving monthly to Trump following the January 6th insurrection–dumped a bunch of money into Washington’s gubernatorial primary.
They were joined, of course, by Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson, who is clearly no fan of a mainstream Democratic politician like Bob Ferguson.
The conservatives made a similar calculation statewide to the one they made in Seattle in 2023. Knowing full well that an anti-choice Republican was never going to win, they went in search of a “Democrat” who opposes pretty much every taxing, spending, and labor priority of the Democratic party–Mark Mullet.
Fortunately, the people of Washington weren’t about to be bamboozled by this, and of course, Bob Ferguson’s strong record helped him. Nevertheless, this PAC and Mullet’s campaign dropped $2M bucks on the primary. And it appears to have done basically nothing for his standing in the race–he came in fourth.
WA Voted More Progressive Than Seattle
This was refreshing after what happened in Seattle last year. When things weren’t going well for conservative candidates, the bigwigs rightly figured they could make up for any candidate deficiencies.
In my own race, for instance, Tim Ceis, the that bundled the corporate funding, openly complained about Rivera’s ineffectiveness and lackluster campaigning and at one event even publicly praised the strength of our campaign. But he also said this meant he was going to have to raise more money to fight me. Maybe I should have found this flattering, but given that team corporate had what felt like an unlimited amount of money available–it wasn’t worth it. The corporate PAC spent nineteen times as much money fighting me as did the progressive PAC supporting me. Nineteen times!
This is part of why we now have had such a weirdly illiberal council that is so opposed to basic Democratic party policy related to labor, minimum wages, and progressive taxes. It worked so well, in fact, that Tim Ceis let the big money know they their money meant they should let the council know how to vote.
Anyway, it gave me a bit of joy today to see that George Petrie and John Goodman each lit $100,000 on fire.
Although it would have been much better if that money had been paid in progressive taxes.
Something to aspire to, I guess!