“I’m trying to make a statement with that,” Harman told me. “It’s a fair description of who I am. I’m also trying to distance myself from the wing nuts in the Republican Party.”
These are fractious times in politics in both parties, and especially on the right. Voters will literally see the divisions spelled out on election ballots this year. Various candidates have chosen to use Washington’s loose ballot rules, in which you can make up whatever party affiliation you wish, to make statements about where the local GOP is headed.
Several candidates are running either for the “MAGA Republican” party or the “Trump Republican” party. Harman noticed this, and decided someone needed to tilt the other way. “I don’t think we should be branding our party around one person, especially Trump,” he said.
In the 1st Congressional District of the Eastside suburbs, incumbent Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Medina, is facing off against one “Trump Republican,” three regular “Republicans,” and Derek Chartrand, who will be listed on the ballot as preferring the “Calm Rational GOP Party.”
“I know that ‘Calm and Rational’ is not a real political party,” Chartrand, a Redmond sales representative, told me. “I’m trying to say there’s another alternative for voters who have tired of the Democrats, and who are looking for the commonsense middle, one based on civility and respect.”
Sure, I said — but if you have to specify your own party has a calm and rational wing, aren’t you implying the rest of it has gone bonkers? “I think you’re smart enough to get it,” Chartrand said.
I don’t see the Democrats having quite this level of identity crisis. Cracks are also forming in that party, however. As one example, longtime Democratic Congressman Adam Smith of Bellevue is being challenged from the progressive left again, this time mostly for his support of Israel in the Middle East conflagration.
This same division was on display in Oregon, where progressive and more moderate Democrats squared off in races for Congress. The moderates all won, though — including one who defeated Seattle progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s older sister, Susheela Jayapal, in a Portland congressional primary.
“Republican moderates went extinct. But Democratic moderates keep winning,” was how political commentator Jonathan Chait summed up the Oregon results.
“The conservative movement took complete control of the Republican Party over the course of decades, turning moderation into an epithet among their voters,” Chait wrote. “There are progressives who would like to try something similar on the left. But their efforts keep running into a brick wall with the electorate.”
This has been true here, too. A number of Democratic Socialists took on mainline Democratic members of Congress in recent cycles in this state. All lost by wide margins. Now you don’t hear much about Democratic Socialists anymore.
As for GOP moderates, I’m not sure they’re completely extinct yet. But the party has definitely been eaten by MAGA.
That was evident when GOP delegates last month voted to endorse an inexperienced Trump-adjacent candidate for governor, Semi Bird, instead of the party’s most successful local politician of recent times, former Congressman Dave Reichert.
Strange times. Harman, the candidate who’s running under the “Liberal Republican” banner, admitted it may be a party of one. What it means to him is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. (He’s for abortion rights and gun control, two stances that would have gotten him booed at the GOP convention had he gone.)
He says he chose that obsolete phrase, and put it on the ballot for a filing fee of $1,241, as a shout into the wilderness against political polarization.
“The chances of me getting elected are not high,” Harman said. “But I’m trying to get people thinking that there’s got to be better alternatives in politics. There has to be space again among Republicans for independence, for ideas, for democratic principles.
“I’m 80 years old, and this is my attempt at a public service.”
In 2024, that is crazy talk, and he’s right — he’s not going to win. Nevertheless I approve this message.
