The tallies keep coming in for the elections in my new home county of Whatcom, and it looks as though Republicans are poised to take all three seats up for grabs in Washington's 42nd legislative district, the one I call home.
Local voters got to choose who would fill the 42nd district's state senate seat and both of its state house seats. According to the most recently updated information from the Washington secretary of state's website, Republican Doug Ericksen, currently a state representative from Ferndale, has taken the state senate seat in his battle against Democratic local businessman Pat Jerns. The margin here was pretty wide with a 23-percentage-point difference between them.
Blaine city councilman and Seattle firefighter Jason Overstreet has taken position 1 of the 42nd's state representative seat for the Republican side with 54.6 percent of the vote. His opponent, Bellingham police detective Al Jensen, garnered 45.3 percent of the vote. The biggest surprise of the election cycle, for the 42nd district at least, has been Republican Vincent Buys' steady lead over 17-year state representative position 2 incumbent Kelli Linville. Buys leads Linville by 5 percentage points after collecting 52.1 percent of the vote so far.
Washington seems to be following the national trend of Republican candidates, pushed on by fervent Tea Party activism, gaining a great deal of ground from the Democrats. Democrat Senator Patty Murray is practically neck-and-neck with her Republican challenger Dino Rossi. Additional vote tallying from Washington counties other than King, which houses Seattle, may indeed decide the race in Rossi's favor.
Reading a blog post from the Bellingham Herald's political reporter Sam Taylor made another interesting trend evident to me: more than a few Washington races have been handily decided for the conservative side, but the wave of Republican support only seemed to mildly dampen the six state-wide initiatives on the ballot.
Three of the initiatives that fell in line with conservative ideology passed with a fairly wide margin. Initiative 1053, passing with 65.6 percent of the vote, will force Washington's legislature to pass any measures increasing taxes by a two-thirds majority, something that has historically been difficult to do without one party's control of both houses.
Initiative 1098, which failed by a hefty 31 percentage points, would have created Washington's first state income tax for those earning $200,000 per year or more. It also would have lowered certain taxes for small businesses. The money made from this tax would have been used to fund education. For some reason, Washington's voting public did not want to touch this one with a 10-foot poll.
Washington voters also chose to repeal temporary taxes placed on soda, candy and bottled water. These taxes took effect just this year in July. Falling in line with the previous two initiatives, I-1107 passed with 62.9 percent of the vote.
With Washington's government being told to stop taxing the state residents, you'd think they would also want the state out of the workers' compensation insurance and hard liquor business.
Nope.
Washington's workers' comp program currently gives employ's two options: sign up for state insurance or become a registered self-insured business. Initiative 1082 would have added private insurance as a third option, thereby breaking the so-called "monopoly" that I-1082's proponents say the state has on industrial insurance. Voters defeated this free-market solution by a 7-percent margin.
Initiatives 1100 and 1105 would have privatized hard liquor sales, something which is currently solely the state's purview. Costco and Safeway spent a great deal of money to get these passed, about $1.36 million on I-1100, but to no avail. Voters rejected these initiatives. However, I-1100's defeat is less than certain because, with tallies still coming in, voters are rejecting it by a slim 51 percent margin.
As Seattle political blog Publicola noted, "Washington voters love their government, they just don't want to pay for it." This sentiment seems to sum up the 2010 election cycle in my adoptive home state.
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