Westneat: Quake warning for politics?

The other challengers to Smith are Mia Paz, an attorney from Kent, and Krystal Marx, the director of Seattle Pride and a tenants’ rights activist who currently serves on the Burien City Council.

The days of “pecking-order politics,” in which party people weren’t supposed to attack fellow party members, let alone try to oust them in a primary election, are definitely long gone.

The right is, of course, having its own uprising. Already three Republicans have filed against incumbent GOP Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, accusing him of being a traitor for voting in January to impeach Donald Trump. And four Republicans have massed against incumbent GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Battle Ground, for much the same reason.

“She stabbed us in the back!” declared Joe Kent of Yacolt, speaking recently at an “America First” rally in Florida. Kent may be the Trumpiest of the four Herrera Beutler challengers, as he appeared at the rally with the newest Trump channeler herself, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

I don’t know that I’ve seen this much rumble inside the two clubs before, this early in the two-year congressional election cycle. When the dark Pole Star of American politics, Trump, shifted at least temporarily from the center of the sky in January, he left a vacuum in his wake.

“I think we are in a political crisis that is pretty analogous to America in the 1840s and ’50s, where slavery created a crisis that the Whigs couldn’t deal with and the Whigs broke up,” said Chris Vance, a former Washington state GOP chairman, who believes the two dominant parties have begun to splinter.

“I think Trump and his neo-fascist new movement is maybe not as salient as slavery, but it is a huge issue in this country. And it’s going to eventually reorder our political system.”

He’s not the only one wondering where all this is headed.

Now, before we get too epic-historical, the chance of incumbents actually losing their jobs in a primary is infinitesimal — especially in our state. Typically, 98 percent of incumbent members of Congress get renominated; here it’s even easier because they just have to finish in the primary’s top two to reach the general election.

The modern record for incumbents getting primaried is 19 — that was in 1992, the famous “Year of the Woman.” That year, a little-known state legislator named Patty Murray from Shoreline took on an incumbent U.S. senator from her own Democratic Party (though he dropped out in a scandal). Politics today has some of that same feel as the Year of the Woman, in that it’s questioning not just policy or values but the makeup of the entire system.

So far, it seems to me the Democrats are keeping it together better as a traditional “big tent.” It’s true the mojo is on the more socialist left, but they did also just rally around the most old school Democrat possible, Joe Biden. Meanwhile the Republicans are acting like a singular cult of personality, which never ends well. Especially given the obvious flaws and unsteadiness of this particular personality.

The main animating force for both parties is usually quite simple — it’s beating the other one. But with Trump on the sidelines for now, the parties aren’t fighting with one another so much at the moment. They’re turning within.

Is this an earthquake warning? Not quite. But you can feel some tremors. Just look at Adam Smith.