Call it an intervention.
Or maybe call it the last laments of the old Democratic Party.
Either way, the eldest two of Washington’s living former governors, Christine Gregoire and Gary Locke, have now called out their own party for “out of control” spending and taxes in Olympia.
“Christine and I had a good conversation a couple of months ago, and we came to an agreement that we needed to speak out,” Locke, who was Washington governor from 1997 through 2004, told me.
Gregoire, 79, went first. She was governor for eight years right after Locke. Speaking at an Association of Washington Business conference in May, she lacerated what she described as the current party’s bloated spending.
“I would suggest to you, we don’t really have an income problem, we have a spending problem,” she said.
She noted the state budget was around $33 billion when she left office in 2013 and has ballooned to more than $80 billion today. When adjusted for inflation and population growth, that $33 billion is more like $60 billion in today’s dollars. But the $20 billion difference still reflects how dramatically Democrats have added to spending and new programs in the past dozen years.
Gregoire, who now heads a business alliance called Challenge Seattle, said she scarcely recognizes her own party. She compared it to how moderate Republicans must feel about MAGA.
“I became a Democrat with John F. Kennedy, if you can believe that far back,” she said. “I don’t know that he could get a nomination today.”
Locke, 76, went next, appearing at another business-sponsored event last week. He elaborated to me on the critique he delivered there.
“They don’t have any budget discipline in Olympia, the spending has gotten out of control,” Locke said. “They’re spending way beyond the revenues.”
He decried how Democrats have used one-time money to start programs that they now can’t sustain. “Even with all the new taxes they’ve passed, they continue to have deficits as far as the eye can see.”
Locke cited subsidized preschool. Democrats started early learning programs in 2021, using federal COVID-19 money. Since that money went away, funding for preschool has become an annual political crisis, with parents and educators decrying any cutbacks while business leaders and others fume over higher taxes.
The estimated costs have also quadrupled.
Locke said he supports the idea of universal preschool. But it needs to work.
“My concern is that the promises are not being kept,” he said. “It leads to distrust. I think there could be a rude awakening.”
What’s fascinating about this intervention is where it’s coming from.
Gregoire and Locke are the old Democratic Party — both in age and political temperament. I would characterize them as 1990s Democrats. That’s when both were first elected to statewide office, and also when Democrats were reeling from being walloped by Republicans and had responded by shifting the party toward the center.
Consider that in 1995, just as Locke was beginning his first run for governor, Republicans occupied nine out of the 11 U.S. House and Senate seats in this state. It seems unimaginable today, but Washington had an almost totally red Congressional delegation.
As a result, there was scant support back then for taxes. Gregoire was governor during the big 2010 recession and was essentially forced to pass all-cuts budgets after voters rejected even a temporary 2-cents-per-can soda tax. That was also the last time we’ve voted on a state income tax on the wealthy — which got slaughtered by 28 points.
Are these scions of that past Democratic Party in touch with what animates Washington voters today?
Current Democratic officeholders defend themselves by pointing to the people.
In 2024, for example, three of their major new spending programs went up for statewide votes. There was the new climate change program for roughly $1.5 billion per year, a tax for long-term care that raises another $1.5 billion annually, and a capital gains tax to help pay for education, about $1 billion per year.
That’s $4 billion in yearly taxing and spending — the most ever up for vote at one time. And voters backed every penny of it.
So is the spending a “problem” if voters want more of it?
“It’s not a problem, it’s democracy, right?” said state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle. “The voters are just in a different place right now. You’ve got this dramatic cutting of taxes on millionaires and billionaires at the federal level, combined with slashing Medicaid for poor people — it’s just got voters reflecting on what are we doing here?”
As much as anything I’ve seen in local politics, those 2024 votes emboldened Democrats to go bigger. It explains the passage of this year’s millionaires income tax, sponsored by Pedersen. The progressive base isn’t saying “ok, that’s enough,” it’s demanding still more on top of that.
“Big corporations, billionaires, and Republicans, as well as Christine Gregoire, want to convince WA that we don’t need a millionaires tax because the problem instead is somehow that we spend too much,” local Democratic organizer Robert Cruickshank said last month on Bluesky social media. “We have to fight back, hard.”
What we’ve got here is a bit of a war for the soul of the Democratic Party. Old or new? 1996 or 2026? Middle way or all the way.
Who’s right depends on where you sit. But thanks to this public intervention, it’s all out in the open now.
That statewide vote on the millionaires tax this fall? It sure looks like it’s now going to double as a referendum on “which way” for the future of Democratic Party politics.
Danny Westneat, a metro news columnist at The Seattle Times since 2004, takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.
