Eight years ago, local liberals were hoping a big blue wave would be enough to send an Eastern Washington Democrat to Congress, only to have the resulting wave merely lap gently at Spokane County’s toes.
But this time, the wave was anything but gentle.
This time we got a real tidal wave, bigger than a Perfect Storm wave, bigger than the 4,000 foot high waves from that one planet in Interstellar. We’re talking a Deep Impact-sized, kill-all-the-dinosaurs extinction-event wave. Better hope you built an ark, Republicans. Because the flood is going to be here for a long time.
All the old rules, the rules of political gravity and euclidean political geometry, seemed to have been suspended. Trump’s floor collapsed. Longtime Republican constituencies swung toward the Democrats. Texas, South Carolina, Kansas — maybe even Mississippi — went Blue.
For a long time, a lot of the country had cut Trump plenty of slack, because, for all his wacky hijinks and shenanigans, they felt the economy was pretty good and the world was pretty peaceful, and, hey, COVID wasn’t Trump’s fault.
Because here’s the thing about Americans: A lot of us really don’t mind a con artist or an asshole or a maverick, per se. We don’t mind if the proverbial loose cannon cop curses out the mayor or destroys half the town in a wild car chase, so long as he gets results. But what if he does all that, but instead of taking down a drug kingpin at the end of it, he just poops in the town fountain? That, America doesn’t like.
So when the gas prices are high, inflation keeps climbing, when we’re stuck in another war that nobody wanted, when masked agents of the states are shooting protesters and arresting citizens, then America starts to get real sick of Trump’s shit. Suddenly, all the Trump schtick didn’t seem so fun to a lot of Republicans anymore.
In his first term, it seemed only #Resistance-core Democrats really cared about Trump’s corruption. But this election, voters named it as their number one issue.
Trump spent a decade sowing seeds. Last night, finally came the reaping: one hell of a blue harvest. ~ DW
Comeback Conroy - Congressional District 5
The last time Carmela Conroy ran against Michael Baumgartner, she got absolutely destroyed — losing by 21 percentage points. After taking that kind of licking, it seemed absurd to run again. That was a big question we had for her: How on earth did she think she could actually win?
It became a subject of an ongoing debate in the RANGE offices: Grizzled world-weary cynic Daniel Walters thought there was no possible way that Conroy had a shot, while sweet summer child Erin Sellers believed there was still magic to be found in this dying world.
Walters, so crusty he can feel neither joy nor sorrow, had seen the hype before. He’d seen the reaction to Lisa Brown in 2018 — where a confluence of hefty fundraising, promising polling and encouraging primary results had Democrats hoping they had a genuine shot at the congressional seat. Yet she came 10 percentage points shy in what was supposed to be a wave year.
But Sellers, who’s young and heart is an open book, pointed to the fact that Baumgartner had only won with 47% of the vote in the primary this year.
Right now, Baumgartner is barely leading at all. The New York Times still estimates that Baumgartner will likely still win, possibly as many as 4.3 percentage points. We’re still waiting on the final ballot drops, but even if she loses, there’s no question that this race was close enough that Conroy certainly could have won. So Walters is man enough to admit that he was wr-... wr-.. he was wr-wr-wrong.
But we all made mistakes. Maybe Baumgartner made the mistake of assuming he didn’t need the votes of RANGE readers — at least not enough to have sat down for an interview with us.
In one sense, Conroy may have benefited from being underestimated. In 2018, the Republican establishment rose up to defend Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers against the threat of Brown, amping up GOP turnout. But for a race like this? With the polished Baumgartner against little ol’ Conroy? Why bother?
If Conroy ends up winning, she’ll have a decision to make: will she take down the giant portrait of Michael Baumgartner that Baumgartner hung — every so slightly askew — outside his DC office? ~ DW
A portrait of Rep. Michael Baumgartner hangs, slightly crookedly, outside of Rep. Michael Baumgartner’s DC Congressional office. (Photo courtesy of anonymous RANGE source)
Millionaires Hardest Hit - Initiative 645
When a wave is this big, it’s no surprise that Washington’s millionaires are going to get soaked. For now, the attempt by multimillionaire-hedgefund-manager Brian Heywood’s Let’s Go Washington to topple the Millionaires Tax — and ban state and local income taxes forevermore — is losing by over 16 percentage points.
It may have been a major tactical error by Let’s Go Washington. The group argues that the income tax will eventually be expanded to include those who make a lot less than $1 million a year. But instead of waiting until that happened, the group decided to take a stand now, amid a historically large Democratic wave, to ride to the defense of millionaires.
And so now, the argument that Washington state voters have always opposed an income tax is off the table. Now, previously wary legislators can look at the result and say, well, it looks like Washington state voters don’t hate income taxes that much after all, at least not against millionaires. And if 58% support income taxes on millionaires, how low could legislators go before they start getting real backlash? ~ DW
‘Woke 3.0’ failing trans people - Initiatives IL26-638 and IL26-001
Amid a flurry of memes proclaiming things like “It’s Woke 3.0, Cisgender people are now banned from participating in sports,” and “Marco Rubio realizing he has to update his pronouns to survive the next 2 years,” the reality looks much darker for transgender people in Washington.
The initiative backed by Let’s Go Washington that would require all girls who want to participate in sports to have their sex assigned at birth certified by a doctor — by genital inspection, chromosome tests or natural testosterone level checks — is currently passing statewide by a 14-point margin. In Spokane County specifically, the gap is even wider, with the initiative currently holding 65.55% of the vote.
If it passes, it would become the most restrictive ban on transgender girls’ in sports in the country. Similar voter initiatives succeeded in Nebraska and Arizona last night, while one in Colorado is undecided, but looks likely to pass.
The Parents Bill of Rights initiative, however, which opponents argued could force teachers and school counselors to out queer students to their parents, is failing statewide by just over 5 points. It’s winning Spokane County, however, by a margin of roughly 11,500 votes.
Spending to support these initiatives (and the above Millionaire’s Tax measure) topped $4 million, including paying the family of a girl who spoke against trans girls’ sports participation over $22,000.
Still, there was one robust victory for transgender Washingtonians: South Seattle voted to send Jaelynn Scott to the state legislature with a whopping 87% of the vote, making her the first Black trans legislator to hold office in the entire country, and the second out-and-proud socialist in Washington’s legislature.
One more silver lining for the optimists among us: Let’s Go Washington has a very low success rate when it comes to actually implementing the policies they push. The voter initiatives so far have failed at the ballot box, or failed in the court system; the trans sports ban could be their next failure. ~ ES
Auditor-y Learnings - Spokane County Auditor
The nasty primary was supposed to be where the real action was. Republican Michael Cathcart faced off against the tag team of Republican Dale Whitaker and the Spokane County Republican Central Committee. The Democratic candidate, recently-out-of-college accountant Callie Gee, faded into the background.
And yet, in the first vote dump, she was only behind by 155 votes, a .11 percentage point difference from Cathcart.
“We should be so proud of ourselves, every single person that knocked doors this season, every single person who volunteered for a campaign, worked for a campaign, decided to run for office,” Gee said at her election party at Whistle Punk Brewing last night.
Speaking to RANGE, Gee noted that there were still 44,000 ballots left to count, but felt hopeful after the first round of results.
“I believe that all of those votes that haven’t been counted are valid and we need to respect those people’s voices,” she said. “I’m really excited about the hope that people are putting in and the trust that people are putting in these young professional candidates that are stepping up to try to make our county a better place.”
If Republicans had nominated Whitaker — and they came very, very close to doing so — Gee would almost certainly have won.
She still might anyway. ~ DW + DZM
Tattoos and Teletubbies - Spokane County Prosecutor
When we walked into the Danny Tarkenton election party at 7:35 pm, the bass was thumping (though the dance floor was empty), aerial flow artists twisted their bodies through hoops and a local tattoo artist was preparing to ink Tarkenton’s bicep as the Teletubbies played behind them on a tiny TV.
At 8:15 pm when the Spokane County results dropped, Tarkenton was still getting tattooed. Twenty minutes later, she walked over to a table of her supporters to confer about the results and just how bad they were — she’s about 8,000 votes behind Republican Preston McCollam.
If we’re talking about bizarre election dynamics, it doesn’t make sense that a left-leaning independent even registered on the dial in the prosecutor race. Tarkenton did – though she’s performing worse than she did in the primary.
It’s particularly interesting given that this year is the first time since Larry Haskell took that office in 2015 that voters will be able to weigh in on a new person. (McCollam was appointed by the county commission last year.) Haskell — who is married to a person who had proudly called herself a white nationalist and used the N-word on social media and never charged a police officer for killing someone in the home of the one of the deadliest law enforcement agencies in the country — retired mid-term and handed the office to McCollam, who was his mentee.
It’s an office that litigates some of the most important aspects of law enforcement in Washington state. Where Tarkenton wishes to refer controversial police killings to state-level officials, McCollam sees that as circumventing voters’ will.
McCollam, who says Tarkenton is not experienced enough to lead the office, had fired Tarkenton from the prosecutors office last year accusing her of “insubordinate behavior;” she maintained she was trying to keep her oath to the US Constitution. ~ AH + ES
A county-elected Democrat??? - Spokane County Clerk
As conventional wisdom goes, Spokane City votes blue, Spokane County votes red. For years (decades?), the only countywide elected Democrat has been auditor Vicky Dalton. When she announced her retirement and endorsed Republican auditor candidate Michael Cathcart, a single county-elected Democrat looked like a long shot.
Early in the evening at the Young Democrats election night watchparty, 30-year-old county clerk candidate Elliot Robison was cautious. “Trying not to feel one way or another,” he told RANGE.
Young Dems co-chair Jackson Deese was more optimistic, waving not one but two tiny American flags (“Made in the USA,” he said, flashing the stamp.)
“We’re patriotic,” Deese added. “Feeling patriotic about these Dem numbers!”
When the first round of Spokane County ballot data dropped, the score was Deese - 1, conventional wisdom - 0, with Robison leading GOP candidate Dave Lucas by just under 1,000 votes.
“This is our night, as we’ve seen throughout the whole night... nationwide,” Robison told RANGE. “I know that not a lot of people had the clerk on their radar but after this cycle they do now and that’s been very rewarding.”
He’s currently the only non-Republican leading a county race, which means he had some kind of special sauce other Dems or Independents did not. One theory: door-knocking.
At nearly every election party we attended, we kept overhearing one nugget — Elliot Robison knocked a LOT of doors. It’s a small sample size, but we know he came to the homes of every RANGE staffer who doesn’t live in an apartment building.
This race is one to keep an eye on as the votes continue to roll in. ~ ES + DZM
Data center polemics - Spokane County Commission District 4
It would be a massive shakeup if the Spokane County Commission seat long held by Republican Mary Brooks — which she’ll vacate this coming January — went to a Democrat. The thing that makes that possible, but not probable, is the debate over data centers in the county. It’s a battle that’s being waged across the country, as people awaken to the potential harms the energy- and water-intensive facilities can cause in local communities. The New Republic wrote about anti-data-center resolutions across the country, revealing that most states that had them on the ballot wanted to ban them outright.
The two people vying for the seat are Republican Suzanne Schmidt, who’s leaving her seat in the Washington state House of Representatives, and Rachelle Miller, a clinical social worker and political newcomer who’s running on an anti-data-center platform.
Miller threw her hat into the ring around the same time that Spokane County voters learned Avista Corp., the local energy utility, was being courted by a large data center developer. The conversation soon intensified when a Spokanite revealed County Commissioner Al French had fielded a proposal by a developer to build a data center on the West Plains that would be twice as large as the Avista proposal.
In the primary, she won more than four times the number of write-in votes as necessary and, though she will probably lose, is only about 2,000 votes behind Schmidt.
Schmidt told RANGE this year that she would not allow a data center to come into Spokane County that would harm the environment or hike energy prices. Miller said that though there may be productive uses for AI, which is powered by data centers, we don’t know enough about them to build them here — or even whether AI is a beneficial technology at all.
“We have to be ethical about the things that we're putting out, and we don't even know the impact of AI on developmental or mental health,” she said. ~ AH
Gunman, Gun Vote - Idaho Advisory Question
Voters in our neighbor to the east were faced with a particularly difficult electoral choice: which gun should be crowned the one true state gun of Idaho. And no, the humble potato gun was, sadly, not an option. The winner, as you may have guessed, was the "Winchester Model 1873," touted on the ballot as the 'Gun that Won the West', beating out the Winchester Model 1894, presumably the "Gun That Didn't Win Shit." ~DW
Initiative aborted - Idaho Proposition 1
In some red states, like Nebraska and Missouri, measures to reverse strict abortion laws have passed. Not so, in Idaho: as of Wednesday morning, 56% of Idaho voters had opposed a law that would have legalized abortions before fetal viability. But it’s notable it wasn’t higher: more than two-thirds of Idahoans supported Trump in 2024. It suggests a considerable contingent of Idaho voters who are both pro-Trump and pro-choice. ~ DW
Food fight
Our photographer Sandra had a long night and a lot of snacks at the various watch parties she hit. Here’s her ranking of election night fare:
1st – Luc Jasmin III and Natasha Hill
- “Lots of candy and variety. I had a full plate. Also had nonalcoholic options.”
2nd – Danny Tarkenton
- “Potluck style. Real food that the community made.”
3rd – Carmela Conroy + Millionaire’s Tax + a host of other Dems.
- “$2 for water! Little do people know that there are water fountains all over the building. Only those snack cones and cookies. More expensive snacks yes – but some of the cheese was really gross and everything is the same.” ~ SR
