The national Democratic shellacking of Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm is getting called a blue wave, or even a tsunami.
For Republicans in Washington, though, it looked more like a mudslide — another crushing defeat heaping debris atop a state GOP already buried by years of political losses.
Republicans here have been on a downward trajectory ever since Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator and ascended as undisputed leader of the party.
The state has long trended blue, with Democrats holding the governor’s office for four decades and both U.S. Senate seats for more than 25 years.
But before Trump, Republicans were competitive in suburban legislative districts and even had a slim majority in the state Senate. They also held four of the state’s 10 U.S. House seats in 2016.
Trump’s ascent, though, hardened the GOP brand and fueled successive, pummeling Republican setbacks in Washington state. Now, after Tuesday’s coast-to-coast repudiation for the president’s policies and most things GOP, the state party faces the challenge of rebuilding after a steady erosion of its political strength.
Republicans here now hold just two U.S. House seats. Their decline has been especially stark in districts that once gave Republicans a suburban foothold.
The 8th Congressional District, which includes swaths of King County and Central Washington, was once a fiercely competitive swing district. But it flipped to Democrats during Trump’s first term. And this year, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Sammamish, sailed to reelection with scant opposition.
Republicans also lost the conservative-leaning 3rd Congressional District in Southwest Washington for a third consecutive election as Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez easily won reelection. They may only narrowly escape losing another congressional seat, as Rep. Michael Baumgartner, the Spokane Republican, is fending off a challenge from Democrat Carmela Conroy. Democrats also control every statewide elected office.
Meanwhile, Democrats believed they secured a state House supermajority Friday for the first time in decades, leaving Republicans even more outnumbered in Olympia when the Legislature convenes in January.
It was an “old school ass kicking,” Metropolitan King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn, a rare local Republican officeholder, said in a text message.
“The bottom line is it is very hard to run locally or for state office with Trump in the White House. You are seeing that all the way down ballot,” Dunn added in an interview.
State Sen. Drew MacEwen, R-Shelton, who was in danger of losing his own seat to a Democratic challenger, said the backlash against Trump came as no surprise.
“I don’t blame voters. This is a largely unpopular president who got elected on the premise of lowering costs and getting Americans out of foreign wars,” MacEwen said Friday.
Trump broke those promises, MacEwen said, calling the betrayal worse than when President George H.W. Bush infamously signed tax increases after pledging in his 1988 campaign: “Read my lips, no new taxes.”
There’s not much Washington Republicans could have done to escape national political headwinds. Democrats reclaimed majorities in the U.S. House and Senate and pulled off upsets in Republican strongholds like Texas. Nationally, Democrats flipped more than 500 legislative seats.
Still, Republicans in Washington have done little to distance themselves publicly from Trump. And with the end of the Trump era in sight, the party has offered few signs of a strategy to reverse their fortunes.
The state GOP has cheered for Trump and his policies even as polls showed his extreme unpopularity in the state, largely brushing aside the political crater the president was digging beneath the party. In the run-up to Election Day, it sneered on social media at polls and predictions of a Democratic landslide.
The party unflaggingly backed Trump’s aggressive deportation crackdown and adopted some of his combative and racist rhetoric against immigrants. In a post on X, the GOP even told Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, who is a U.S. citizen, that she should “self-deport” after she criticized ICE tactics.
The GOP also played up unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud and backed Trump’s efforts to end or restrict mail voting — a system polls show is overwhelmingly popular.
Even after vote results showed Republicans set for additional defeats, state GOP Chair Jim Walsh downplayed the severity of the losses.
“The rest of the country may have seen a ‘blue wave.’ In Washington, it was a blue trickle,” he said in a statement.
The GOP started the year outnumbered in the state House with 39 seats to Democrats’ 59. Democrats are poised to enter the next legislative session with a supermajority in that chamber of 66 or more seats, giving them the power to pass proposed constitutional amendments and override gubernatorial vetoes.
Walsh himself is part of that shrinking GOP House caucus as a representative from Aberdeen. He easily won reelection Tuesday.
In the state Senate, Republicans held 19 seats this year to 30 for Democrats, and may be down a couple more based on the midterm results. Among those in danger is MacEwen, who served five terms in the state House and was seeking a second Senate term. Democratic challenger Carolina Mejia, a Thurston County commissioner, led MacEwen by several hundred votes as of Friday afternoon.
While the state GOP has not broken with Trump, some Republicans have been more direct about the reason for the party’s woes.
“MAGA isn’t smart enough to know they’re in trouble,” said former state GOP Chair Kirby Wilbur, who criticized the president and his ultraloyal base for continually trying to shift blame. “If they lose, it’s always because of mail-in voting, bad polls, or RINOs stabbing them in the back.”
Wilbur pointed to another vexing problem facing Washington Republicans: Many of their reliable voters have pulled up stakes and headed for other states. Wilbur is one of them. He moved to Texas several years ago, fed up with Washington’s liberal politics. (He still appears regularly on local radio talk shows and follows the state’s news and political scene.)
State Rep. Drew Stokesbary, R-Auburn, the Republican leader in the state House, said in an interview the GOP had a national messaging problem that overwhelmed anything the state party could do.
On affordability, Republicans failed to give voters what they needed, he said, without directly naming Trump. “It’s clear that national Republicans didn’t take those concerns seriously enough to try to fix that.”
While races like Gluesenkamp Perez’s defeat of Republican state Sen. John Braun in the 3rd Congressional District got more attention, the GOP’s fading prospects under Trump were also laid bare — more quietly — in places like the 8th Congressional District.
The district, which runs from the East King and Pierce County suburbs across the Cascade Mountains to Chelan County, was long held by Republicans. But since Schrier flipped it for Democrats in a fiercely contested 2018 race that saw a record-setting flood of outside money, it has largely fallen off the competitive political map.
This year, Schrier defeated little-known Republican challenger Spencer Meline, a small-business owner, taking 56% of the vote.
In an interview before the election, Schrier said voters in her district are not rabidly partisan, but are looking for politicians who care about healthcare costs and support for apple growers and other important local industries hit by Trump’s tariffs.
Schrier said she’s been puzzled by the GOP’s obedience to Trump on those economic policies and refusal to call out his corruption and ethics scandals.
“It’s really weird, and I reflect on this a lot. I would hope that if we had such a candidate in my party, I would hold my principles and my love of democracy and my decency and ethics dear,” she said. “The Republican Party has had so many opportunities to jump off the sinking Titanic and they have not taken up those opportunities.”
Despite the historic drubbing, some Republicans say the Democratic sweep could eventually open the door for the pendulum to swing back and open up an opportunity for the GOP.
“There is a huge risk that Democrats are going to take the wrong lesson from these election results and overextend themselves,” Stokesbary said.
Republicans have long criticized tax increases and climate policies passed by Democrats in the Legislature, arguing they have driven up costs for many businesses and residents.
An increasingly left-wing majority in the state Legislature could lead to further tax and spending pushes, including an expansion of the state’s new “millionaires tax” to more households — which some Democrats have already openly discussed.
Those concerns were clearly overshadowed in the midterm election by the Iran war and other Trump policies that drove higher prices and discontent nationally.
But with Democrats in charge, they’ll share blame if inflation keeps biting voters. And Republicans can capitalize on that, some said, if the party gets past its focus on doing whatever Trump says.
Both MacEwen and Dunn argue the GOP should return to its classic Ronald Reagan-era emphasis on limited government and fiscal restraint, leaving Trump’s divisive style behind.
“My hope is that this pummeling we took gets the party back to its roots. Let’s end the crazy nonsense and get back to being a serious party,” MacEwen said.
If that happens, maybe a red wave could eventually reverse the GOP’s losing tide.
“If Texas can turn blue,” Stokesbary said, “Washington can turn red.”
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