With the results of the 2024 presidential election now certified, elected leaders and activists across Washington are turning their attention to the upcoming legislative session, which begins January 13th. As they have since late 2017, Democrats will have trifecta control over state government, with the governorship and majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. But they’ll also have something new: extremely powerful evidence of voter support for levying progressive revenue and dedicating that revenue to meet the state’s essential needs, from education to clean energy to long-term care.
That evidence comes courtesy of the Washington State Republican Party, and more specifically, State Party Chair Jim Walsh and his multimillionaire funder Brian Heywood, who sunk millions into a slate of initiatives designed to defund Governor Jay Inslee’s signature legislative accomplishments, namely the Education Legacy Trust, the Climate Commitment Act, and the WA Cares Fund. Each of those initiatives was a flop. All failed by big enough margins that they were “landslide” victories; the margin of defeat for each not coincidentally corresponded to their weakness in our preelection polling.
Republicans were well aware of both our preelection polling and other credible preelection polling showing that their measures were on a failing trajectory. At least publicly, they shrugged off that information and tried to project confidence that all of their measures would pass. But they couldn’t will or manipulate a victory into being.
It was obvious on Election Night that voters were repudiating their schemes to defund the people’s treasury. We would have lost billions and billions of dollars had their measures passed. Bluffing and bombast almost instantly gave way to sullenness and resentment, as reporters asked Republicans to comment on their losses.
A month has now elapsed since the initial election returns rolled in on November 5th, and judging by recent online postings, Republicans have learned absolutely nothing from the collective failure of their revenue-slashing initiatives.
For example, on Thursday, House Republican caucus staff tweeted:
Here we go again: state Democratic leaders want to bridge the budget gap, caused by their reckless spending, with more new taxes.
State Representative Travis Couture tweeted:
We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. Raising taxes right now will substantially harm WA families.
State Representative Chris Corry tweeted:
We don’t have a revenue problem. We spent a ton of one time money on on going projects including four billion taken out of our state reserves. Our spending has outpaced our revenue growth. The state should live within its means.
This is the same stuff Republicans have been saying for years.
Pull up press releases from 2017, 2011, 2003, you’ll find the same anti-tax talking points in Republicans’ materials from every decade, many written by Tim Eyman.
It doesn’t matter how well the economy is doing and it doesn’t matter what the state’s financial circumstances are. Republicans drone on: We have a spending problem… we should live within our means… raising taxes right now would be bad.
They said the same things before the Education Legacy Trust got a big funding boost with the enactment of the capital gains tax on the wealthy, before the Climate Commitment Act was adopted, and before the WA Cares Fund was created.
Then Republicans told majority Democrats: You’ll be sorry you passed these laws!
Here we are at the end of 2024 and voters have upheld every single one of those accomplishments. The work of Democratic legislators and progressive coalitions has been vindicated. And rather than saying Oops, our bad… turns out we were the ones who were out of touch, Republicans are now acting as if the election never happened.
That’s not surprising, but it’s still disappointing.
I believe Washington would benefit from having two major political parties supportive of progressive tax reform and enthusiastic about investing in the state’s future.
We can get by for now with only Democrats committed to fiscal responsibility.
But in the long term, I don’t think it’s healthy for our state to have only one major political party defending the values that Washington was founded upon.
The Washington State Republicans are presently on a Trump-assisted trajectory of ever-increasing irrelevance, and they seem fully locked in to that trajectory. By the end of this decade, Republicans might have so few seats in the Legislature that Democrats will be able to propose constitutional amendments without any Republican votes.
It has been ten years since we’ve had a cycle where Republicans have gained legislative seats, and fourteen years since we’ve had a cycle where Republicans gained congressional seats. Democrats in Washington now do well regardless of what kind of year it is: presidential, midterm, or local. We saw Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Steve Hobbs elected in 2022, for example. Lisa Brown and Susanna Johnson were elected in 2023. This year, Democrats gained one seat each in the House and Senate.
Why? Our research indicates that voters don’t trust Republicans to govern. They don’t like what the Republican Party has become. They don’t like its unyielding economic and social stances, and its hostility to the values that past generations of Republicans enshrined in the Washington State Constitution. (Washington was very Republican at statehood, and the progressives of that era were mostly active in the Republican Party.)
The Office of Financial Management (OFM) estimates that Washington now faces an operating budget deficit between $10 and $12 billion over the four-year outlook period.
“This deficit is due to the recent revenue forecasts that were adjusted down and the increase in caseloads and the cost to maintain existing programs,” OFM Director Pat Sullivan explained in a November 8th memo to the executive branch.
Republicans are predictably responding by calling for forced austerity… the very thing voters just rejected when they said NO to Initiatives 2109, 2117, and I‑2124.
Democratic legislative leaders, meanwhile, are listening to voters, saying they’re interested in pursuing new revenue to keep the state whole, especially at a time when federal money may dry up, as the incoming Trump regime seeks to impose its agenda of vengeance and retribution — an agenda local Republicans seem totally okay with.
Republicans are fond of whipping out revenue collection charts that show revenue collections going up from year to year as proof that Washington already has all of the funding that it needs, and just isn’t spending it wisely.
This is an example of using statistics dishonestly to support a bad-faith argument.
The truth is, Washington is a growing state experiencing population growth, inflation, and new development. We aren’t the same size we were two years ago, five years ago, or ten years ago. So yes, revenue collections have gone up in absolute terms… but when you compare this era to past eras using a proper metric, like state and local revenue per $1,000 of personal income (the kind economists use), it becomes apparent that Washington is not keeping pace with the growing demand for services.
And we definitely can’t keep relying on federal money as a crutch to punt on fixing our structural fiscal problems, as we have at key junctures throughout the last few years.
Here’s a table from OFM showing our financial reality:
| Fiscal Year | Revenues per $1,000 personal income |
|---|---|
| 2021 | $136.87 |
| 2020 | $145.25 |
| 2019 | $146.57 |
| 2018 | $148.29 |
| 2017 | $145.53 |
| 2016 | $142.08 |
| 2015 | $142.91 |
| 2014 | $144.11 |
| 2013 | $142.68 |
| 2012 | $143.47 |
| 2011 | $148.90 |
| 2010 | $148.68 |
| 2009 | $145.45 |
| 2008 | $149.77 |
| 2007 | $154.45 |
| 2006 | $150.86 |
| 2005 | $145.33 |
| 2004 | $148.46 |
In 2004, state and local revenues per $1,000 in personal income were $148.46. In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, they were $136.87.
That’s a decline.
Clearly, there is a need for more revenue in Washington.
We aren’t amply providing for the education of our youth as our Constitution requires.
We aren’t investing enough in behavorial health.
We aren’t investing enough in mass transit, walking, and biking, which we should be so that people can enjoy true freedom of mobility.
And we aren’t investing enough in housing and getting rid of barriers to fish passage so that our indigenous peoples’ treaty rights are respected.
Republicans are uninterested in requiring the wealthy and powerful to pay more to meet our essential needs. They see the new budget shortfall as an opportunity to campaign for forced austerity. Interestingly, when Republicans have previously been asked what cuts should be made to make the books balance, they have been unwilling to say.
They dodge the question, or stonewall.
They speak of going through the budget “line by line” — an old canard.
Well, anyone can do that. The last biennial operating budget is here. You can read it yourself, and see how much was appropriated, and for what.
You might also enjoy checking out this really cool “budget universe” poster that visualizes where the money goes. It uses the metaphor of a solar system. So nifty! You can see that K‑12 is far and away the biggest part of the operating budget. Higher education and corrections are two other large components of the operating budget.
A PDF version, if you have a high resolution monitor, is here.
There’s also this fiscal dashboard conceived by NPI and Senator Patty Kuderer.
Some honest Republicans have admitted they’d like to end selected public services in their entirety. But Republican legislators don’t want to come out and take that position, because they know they’d look bad — the optics would be terrible. What they would like instead is to convince majority Democrats to join their forced austerity bandwagon and then make Democrats responsible for coming up with across the board budget cuts and perhaps also accounting tricks they could condemn down the road as irresponsible.
Democratic legislators, to their credit, seem to have zero interest in being suckered and have signaled that they aren’t going to play Republicans’ game.
That’s good, because Washington needs wise and sober leadership in the years ahead — leadership that tells the truth and looks after the state’s people and their needs.
Republicans unfortunately aren’t interested in learning from their failed efforts to make Washington’s finances an unprecedented mess, and so are consigning themselves to a fate of increasing irrelevance. They remain more interested in performative politics than solving people’s problems. And so Democrats will have to move forward in writing a responsible budget largely without their cooperation or involvement.
Washington Republicans are demonstrating that they’ve learned nothing from the failure of their 2024 revenue-slashing initiatives is a post from NPI's Cascadia Advocate, the journal of the Northwest Progressive Institute. Published continuously since March of 2004, NPI's Cascadia Advocate provides thoughtful commentary and analysis on regional, national, and world politics. Keep The Cascadia Advocate going by making a contribution to sustain NPI's research and advocacy here.