OLYMPIA — As Washington gets bluer, backers of a slate of voter initiatives framed the ballot battle as an opportunity for voters to exercise a check on a Democratic Legislature run amok.
But in the end, Washington voters — mostly — didn’t get on board.
By Thursday evening, only one out of the four initiatives on the ballot stood a chance of passing: I-2066, which would roll back certain state regulations on natural gas, was narrowly leading 51% to 49%. Supporters declared victory Thursday night, but The Associated Press had not called the race.
The others failed by significant margins.
Washington’s capital gains tax will stay in place, meaning that money will still flow to education from the state’s richest residents. So will the state’s carbon market, an attempt to tamp down emissions from Washington’s biggest polluters. And its public long-term care insurance program will remain intact.
It was an anticlimactic end after a year in state politics dominated by the initiatives, which opponents argued would deal a blow to state coffers and roll back progress on environmental protections, education and elder care.
Brian Heywood, the Redmond hedge fund manager and financial backer of the initiatives, poured about $7 million into the sweeping effort to reshape state policies.
His political action committee, Let’s Go Washington, mounted a large signature gathering campaign to get six total initiatives before legislators during the 2024 session.
Lawmakers passed three of them, barring an income tax, instituting a “bill of rights” for parents of public school kids, and loosening prior strictures on police chases. They sent the rest to the ballot.
On Wednesday, Heywood said he felt good about the early results on the natural gas measure, supported by the state’s building and hospitality industries, which Let’s Go Washington threw its weight behind. And he pointed to legislators adopting the three earlier initiatives as a success.
Heywood said the ballot titles were written in a biased way and confused voters, and said he was outmatched by the mountain of cash opponents of the initiatives poured into the campaign.
No on 2117, the campaign against the measure, spent $16 million on the fight to keep the carbon market, including about $8.7 million on TV ads, according to campaign finance records. By contrast, Let’s Go Washington spent $850,000 on TV ads.
He said he knew Let’s Go Washington was going to be “outgunned” — but not by that much.
“I learned the machine is powerful,” he said.
Initiative opponents were eager to celebrate the measures’ downfall.
In a Wednesday news conference in Seattle, Gov. Jay Inslee called the results an “avalanche,” a “tectonic plate movement” and “a tidal wave.”
“They rejected the siren song of millionaires who attempted to subvert our basic values,” he said. “And they did so in a real thumping.”
Backers have cast blame on the way voters’ ballots were written.
In 2022, Democratic majorities passed legislation requiring an up to 10-15 word disclosure of the impact of a ballot measure on the state budget. This year’s election was the first time those statements were on ballots.
State Republican Party Chair Jim Walsh, a state representative from Aberdeen who filed the three initiatives that failed, had mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit challenging those disclosures.
“They have been weaponized in a way that is dark, that is cynical and misleading and exploitive of the voters in Washington,” he said.
Sandeep Kaushik, a consultant for Defend Washington, the coalition of groups opposing the initiatives, rejected the idea that there was “some kind of partisan manipulation here of the ballot language or anything else.”
“I don’t understand why Brian Heywood and Jim Walsh think providing neutral, factually correct information about the impacts of ballot measures is in any way out of bounds,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we be providing voters with the information they need to make informed decisions about what they’re voting on?”
Kaushik said the initiatives succeeded because Washington’s a blue state where the majority of voters valued the programs at stake and were willing to fund them.
And he says voters didn’t like the idea of one wealthy person changing the state’s laws.
“Voters in Washington state did not respond well to the idea that one rich guy could come in here and throw his money around and rewrite the laws to his own advantage,” he said.
Yet Washington’s wealthy threw their resources behind both sides of the fight: the pro-carbon market side got big donations from deep-pocketed Washingtonians, too, including Bill Gates, and Steve and Connie Ballmer.
Inslee said Wednesday that a repeal of the carbon market could have dampened enthusiasm for climate policy nationally, and framed its survival as “doubly important” now that Donald Trump has been elected president again.
“This win is doubly important now that the White House is in control of the person who denies the existence of climate change, calls it a hoax, and says that wind turbines cause cancer,” Inslee said. “The message from Washington state now to all the other states, that we can work together with, is a very strong one, that we can win on climate change.”
As for Heywood, what’s next?
While he was disappointed by Tuesday’s results, he was “fired up” to fight what he described as a “big and brutal” Democratic machine.
“If someone doesn’t fight it, it’ll just get more corrupt,” he said.
He’s not in a hurry to seek elected office. He says he “can read the numbers and see where that is.” But he says Let’s Go Washington figured out how to “break the code” on the initiative petition process, getting hundreds of thousands of signatures for less cost.
Next, he wants to develop new ideas to get his message through to voters.Traditional ways of gathering signatures were expensive — and so are traditional ways of communicating in campaigns.
“I’ve got to figure out how to communicate with enough people, with limited resources, that I can have an impact against whatever the machine might throw at me,” he said.
