Long before any voters will be casting ballots to determine whether Washington state is rewarded with new leadership, it’s time for pollster Stuart Elway to release his annual survey about legislative issues (which Shift highlighted last week) and the standing of various political types. What was most surprising about his “new Crosscut/Elway poll” was that only “37% of voters would or could choose Democrat Bob Ferguson” for governor, leaving nearly two-thirds of the electorate looking elsewhere.

That elsewhere starts with Republican Dave Reichert, who pulls down the GOP base share of votes, “with 31% saying they would or could vote for the former congressman and King County sheriff.” You can read on to see how unsettling it is to Democrats “because it shows how fluid the race is at this moment and how far the candidates have to go before November” despite the publicity-hound Attorney General having been in training for Gov. Inslee’s 4^th term for the last 12 years… Shift, Crosscut.

We are only in the first week of the legislative session, but former House Speaker Frank Chopp is wasting no time in doing what he has done best for over two decades – propose new taxes that full-time government employees like him will never pay. The latest is his “very progressive” bill, reported on in The Columbian, that would “add a tax to the sale of real estate over about $3 million. Revenue from that tax, estimated at just under $300 million every two years”, would give the state more money to funnel to non-governmentnon-profits populated by people connected to legislators like family members of Rep. Chopp (as Shift has covered in the past).

Rep. Chopp claims that because of previous government waste despite state budget revenues nearing a a record-breaking $70 billion that we “need an ongoing revenue stream to help pay for affordable housing.” That must be because the Democrats in the legislature won’t make housing a priority when they can be giving money directly to their campaign donors, as they have really enjoyed doing during the Inslee years.  You can read on to see how Rep. Chopp’s bill would actually make housing more expensive here… The Columbian, Shift. 

For those anxiously awaiting the Washington state presidential primary, which rolls around every four years before fading back into obscurity, the field has been set. That’s because, as reported by KUOW, “Democrats have now submitted their list of candidates for Washington’s March 12 presidential primary” following up on Republicans doing so last week.

You may be surprised to learn that Marianne Williamson is still running for the Democrat nod, after outpacing Governor Jay Inslee during her 2020 campaign, along with Congressman Dean Phillips and the incumbent, President Joe Biden. You can see the entire field here… KUOW.

The team at Shift was so stunned by a Seattle Times editorial which almost called for some common sense at Sound Transit that, after re-reading it, we could not let it go without highlighting it. Readers know that Shift would prefer that train riders pay in advance, so we would have preferred a more hard-hitting conclusion than “leaders should explore how fare-access gates would work”, at least the state’s largest paper is now considering that transit riders should be required actually pay a fare to ride.

The epiphany at the Times may have come after the paper considered that from “2019 to 2020, Sound Transit’s fare revenue dropped from $96 million to just $30 million as ridership dropped in sync with restrictions created by the pandemic.” While transit boosters want to think that the pandemic was all to blame for the revenue drop, you can read on to find the reality that a refusal by Sound Transit bureaucrats to expect people to pay fares ensured that fare money would dry up… Seattle Times, Shift.

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