5 things to watch in Washington heading into Election Day

By Jerry Cornfield / Washington State Standard

Election Day is, thankfully, almost here.

As the nation picks a president, Washington voters will be choosing a new governor, filling a seat on the state Supreme Court and deciding the fate of a quartet of ballot measures.

There are also contests for Congress, statewide executive posts, roughly three-fourths of seats in the state Legislature, a myriad of city and county offices and a barge of local propositions.

To say it’s a big one in Washington is an understatement.

Ballot counting will begin at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Some outcomes will be known Tuesday night, others won’t be determined for a few days.

Here are five things we’re watching.

Can Jaime Herrera Beutler give Republicans a much-needed win?

It’s not been a good election cycle for the Republican Party in Washington. A messy state convention in April revealed the divide between pragmatic moderates and MAGA activists, a split that went largely unmended.

This is how bad it got. When former U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler addressed delegates on her bid for public lands commissioner, several stood and turned their backs on her. They had not forgiven her for voting in the U.S. House to impeach Donald Trump in 2021, a decision for which Herrera Beutler paid a political price when she lost re-election in 2022.

If she beats Democrat Dave Upthegrove of the King County Council on Tuesday, Republicans will have their first statewide office-holder since Kim Wyman served as secretary of state, a post she left in November 2021. It’s a political win the Grand Old Party is in desperate need of.

Herrera Beutler is the underdog. She’ll need a solid performance in King County — she won’t win the county but not getting wiped out there is key — and strong support from Republicans, including those whose backs she faced seven months ago.

Will two members of Congress overcome Trump-backed challengers?

Republican Dan Newhouse and Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez are dealing with a similar dilemma as they seek to keep their seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s Donald Trump.

Each has an opponent backed by Trump and both are running in districts the Republican presidential candidate is expected to win. The extent to which the former president carries sway in races down ballot will impact the fates of Newhouse and Gluesenkamp Perez.

And in the case of Gluesenkamp Perez, it could be a factor in which party controls the U.S. House.

The dynamics of the two contests are vastly different.

Newhouse, like Herrera Beutler, voted to impeach Trump but is still around. His opponent is Jerrod Sessler, a hard-charging MAGA Republican, who is keeping a spotlight on that vote and swearing allegiance to helping carry out Trump’s agenda. A Republican will win in the deep red 4th Congressional District, but Democratic and independent votes may be what tips the race.

Gluesenkamp Perez, meanwhile, is in a rematch with Republican Joe Kent, whom she beat by 2,629 votes in 2022, flipping the seat (held by Herrera Beutler) from Republican to Democrat. Kent had Trump’s backing then too but it wasn’t enough.

This race is a toss-up. Both parties see a win as necessary to help them reach a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

While Gluesenkamp Perez campaigned against Kent in much the same way she did the first time, he is trying to get voters to focus on her record in Congress and has dialed back some of his controversial rhetoric from two years ago on issues like abortion and the 2020 election.

They’ve debated foreign and domestic policies a lot but the replacement of the Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia River — Gluesenkamp Perez has fought for federal funding, Kent is adamantly opposed to tolling and light rail — is a hot local issue that could decide this one.

How many people will vote?

Presidential elections draw the largest turnout. If history is any indication, Washington should see 80% of its nearly 5 million registered voters participate. It’s broken that mark in every presidential election this century except 2016 when it was 78.8%.

But a ton of would-be voters aren’t rushing to cast ballots.

Stats compiled by the secretary of state’s office showed that five days before the election, 2,362,291 ballots had been returned statewide. That’s roughly 813,000 fewer than at the same point in 2020. Turnout in that election was 84.1%.

Reckoning day arrives for initiatives

After months of debate, it’s time to see what voters think of four ballot measures aimed at erasing or revising significant climate and tax policies enacted by the Democratic majorities in the Legislature and Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee.

By mid-October, polling consistently showed only Initiative 2066, which aims to tamp down natural gas regulations, enjoying more than 50% support.

Surveys found slight or near majorities that didn’t like the others, which would repeal the capital gains tax and the state’s cap-and-invest climate program, and make a long-term care services program and its tax optional. But a lot of folks were still undecided

Regardless of the outcome, millionaire hedge fund manager Brian Heywood and Let’s Go Washington, the political operation behind most of the measures, can claim success.

In the past 15 months, from gathering signatures and a 60-day legislative session where three of the group’s other measures won approval, to the nearly finished campaign, initiative backers managed to inject conservative voices into the conversation in Olympia in ways they had not been heard for the better part of a decade.

There’s certain to be a new round of efforts like this in 2025.

Will Election Day go off without a hitch?

Used to be one of the greatest concerns on Election Day was a power outage. Another was if a truck delivering ballots from a polling place (remember those?) broke down.

Not anymore.

Everything associated with the 2020 election — false claims of fraud, fake electors and the riot at the U.S. Capitol — has put election officials and law enforcement on full alert.

The Department of Homeland Security has warned states of threats to election infrastructure.

And the destruction of hundreds of ballots at a drop box in Vancouver heightened concern of provocateurs attempting to disrupt the conduct of Washington’s election, and tallying of votes.

On Friday, Gov. Jay Inslee activated the Washington National Guard to assist local police and the state patrol as needed to quell civil unrest.

Plus, a whole bunch of lawyers from the federal government and the two political parties are ready to go if they see or sense wrongdoing.

County auditors and the secretary of state are confident things will run smoothly. We’ll all know shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday.

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