Take this from Billig’s account, published in The Seattle Times. He argues that because every Democratic incumbent was reelected in November, voters were saying they heartily approve of the party’s stewardship of Washington.
“Voters sent a clear message on a range of issues,” he writes. He lists a few, and one in particular jumped out at me: “They appreciate sending their kids to the nation’s best public schools.”
Say what?
The worst part about this sentence isn’t that it’s off-base. By no objective measure do we have the nation’s best public schools. The worst part is that it suggests state lawmakers think our schools are the best, and so won’t feel any urgency about improving them.
It was once sort of true. Washington’s public K-12 schools ranked in the top 10 a decade ago for both math and reading performance on the gold standard of national tests, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That’s not “the best,” but it’s pretty darn good.
But now we rank 27th in fourth-grade math, 19th in fourth-grade reading and 17th in eighth-grade math. We are tied for 10th with five other states for eighth-grade reading. Overall, Washington’s schools have slid to about average. As one state Senate staffer put it in a memo, we are “exceptional no more.”
There are other ways to judge school quality than test scores. My point here is only that I doubt voters flocked to Democrats in the last election due to huge satisfaction with the party’s recent track record on schools.
Or maybe, satisfaction about anything.
Exit polls and other surveys suggest the vote in November instead was a “negative partisanship” event — meaning voters were mostly riled against the other side. The liberal Nation magazine dubbed it “The Power of Negative Thinking.”
I ran into this firsthand when I wrote how the suburbs had adopted voting patterns nearly as liberal and blue as Seattle’s. I got an avalanche back from suburbanites protesting: What choice did we have?
“I live on the Sammamish/Issaquah border, and I normally would never vote on party lines, but this year there is no way I was going to vote for any Republican,” wrote one. “They are off their rocker.”
A fresh Exhibit A of that came last week, with the GOP melting down in Congress and failing to pick a speaker of the House.
All of this means the Democrats were shrewd to hammer away on GOP extremism, from abortion to election denialism. It worked, because it was true. It doesn’t mean, though, that voters were also giving local Democrats gold stars for their own governing performance.
I’ve got no quibble with the issues Democrats say they’re going to focus on this year in Olympia, such as affordable housing. Not mentioned though, that I’ve heard, is the big lingering one: pandemic recovery. Just as with the schools issue above, politicians appear to be acting as if that’s done already.
But so many aspects of society haven’t yet clawed back. Not the schools. Not mass transit ridership. Not downtowns or small businesses. Not creaking understaffed institutions, from the courts to the nonprofits to the air travel industry.
Some child care centers say they are still reeling as if it’s 2020. Said one mom whose son missed 47 days of day care this past year: “The rest of the world has moved on from the crisis that I’m still in.”
That’s the thing: We haven’t really moved on. This year could be the start of a post-pandemic era, but first we need to be clear-eyed about where we sit. Are voters really pleased with the state of the state? Isn’t there a ton of basic repair still needed just to build us back to where we were at the close of 2019, three looong years ago?
My suggested theme for 2023, while not the snappiest, is “let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” There are miles to go before starting any victory laps.
