Olympia Time

Somebody in the Daily Olympian newsroom set the type for a headline on election night in 1896 that would have sounded impossible two years earlier. 

Fusionists Get It All.

Every county office in Thurston County, captured by a coalition of Populists, Democrats, and Silver Republicans, three factions that had spent most of the decade distrusting each other more than they distrusted the Republicans. Two years before, the same county had gone the opposite direction entirely, a clean sweep from top to bottom, Sam Hyde to Sam Wiman, Republican the whole way down. Something had come loose in the space of one election cycle.

It’s coming loose again.

In Montana, an independent named Seth Bodnar is polling six points ahead of the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, in a race the sitting Republican senator chose not to run in at all. Steve Daines withdrew from his own primary at the last possible minute and handed the nomination to a hand-picked successor, U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme. He did it rather than face the same current that pushed Bodnar out of a university presidency and into the race.

In Idaho, the Democratic nominee for Senate dropped out of his own contest a few days ago, not because he lost, but because his own party’s county chairs decided he couldn’t win and independent Todd Achilles could.

In Nebraska, the same thing happened a few weeks earlier. Democrat Cindy Burbank withdrew and cleared a direct path for independent Dan Osborn, a Navy veteran and former union leader, to face Republican Pete Ricketts one-on-one. Osborn ran this same race in 2024 against a different Republican and lost by seven points, close enough in a state that red to get national Democratic strategists talking. They’re not being quiet about it either. Inside the party it already has a name, clearing the field, and there’s open pressure on Democratic nominees in Montana and South Dakota to do the same thing before November.

None of these three have heard of John R. Rogers. But, they’re running his play anyway.

Rogers is the reason 1896 looked the way it did, and getting to him means going back further, to the thing that put Thurston County farmers in a mood to blow up their own party in the first place. It wasn’t abstract. A farmer in 1894 who’d borrowed against next year’s wheat crop was paying that loan back in dollars that bought more than the dollars he’d borrowed. That’s what a gold standard does under deflation. Prices fall, so the debt doesn’t shrink, it grows, measured in the only thing that matters to a bank, which is what the dollar will buy. The Panic of 1893 had already wrecked the banks and dried up credit. Free Silver, the demand to coin silver without limit, was never really about metallurgy. It was a demand for enough new money in circulation that a farmer’s debt would shrink the way debts are supposed to, instead of getting heavier every harvest.

It is worth taking a small sidestep here to point out that the Populists (including Rogers) of this age were antisemitic and racists. This including the most famous Cascadian populist all the way down to the former Mayor of Tumwater, praising the former Confederacy.

In 1896, the trouble was that neither the Populists nor the Democrats could carry that demand alone in Washington State. The Democratic Party in the Pacific Northwest was still wearing the “party of rebellion” label left over from the Civil War, toxic to exactly the kind of voter it needed. The Populists had the energy but not the votes. So the two did something that looked, on paper, like a shotgun marriage. They fused their tickets, ran shared slates, and let the vessel do what neither party could do wearing its own name. It worked better than anyone expected. Rogers won the governorship with a 15,000 vote majority. James Hamilton Lewis and W.C. Jones took both congressional seats. The legislature flipped to a Fusionist majority so large it barely resembled the body that had convened two years earlier.

That’s the same math running in Montana, Idaho, and Nebraska right now, just without the word “fusion” attached to it. Bodnar only beats Alme in a poll if the Democrat, Alani Bankhead, isn’t also on the ballot splitting the anti-Alme vote. Run all four candidates and Alme wins with 41 percent. Take Bankhead out and Bodnar wins 50 to 44.

That’s the same toxic-brand arithmetic that pushed Populists and Democrats onto one ticket in 1896. In Idaho, that math wasn’t left to voters at all. Ada County Democrats gave their own nominee an ultimatum, raise real money or step aside, and when he couldn’t, he stepped aside, leaving Todd Achilles a clean shot at a three-term incumbent in a state that hasn’t elected a non-Republican senator since 1974. Nobody called it fusion. It’s the identical mechanism wearing a 2026 haircut, a party choosing to disappear from a ballot line because its own name was the obstacle.

Rogers’s win is where most tellings of 1896 stop, as if the story ends at the ballot box. It doesn’t. What happened to him after he took office is the part that should worry anyone rooting for Bodnar, Achilles, or Osborn to actually get somewhere if they win.

Once Rogers had the office, he governed like a man trying to balance a ledger. He vetoed spending bills the radicals in his own coalition wanted, ran the state efficiently, paid down debt, kept things orderly, and in doing all of that, became the kind of moderate his voters had just spent an election cycle rejecting.

The Fusionist legislature he presided over spent 1897 fighting itself instead of legislating, radicals against moderates against Silver Republicans, burning more energy on who would be the next U.S. Senator than on the platform that had elected them. They did pass one thing that mattered. The Barefoot Schoolboy Act equalized school funding between poor counties and rich ones, and it’s still worth remembering for that alone.

But one landmark law wasn’t what the base had been promised. Railroad regulation stalled. Tax reform stalled. The energy that swept Thurston County in November 1896 had nowhere to go by the spring of 1897 except sideways, into infighting, or backward, into disillusionment.

And then the ground under the whole revolt shifted for a reason that had nothing to do with any of them. Gold turned up in the Klondike in July 1897, and Seattle became the supply depot for the rush north. New gold flooding into circulation did quietly what Free Silver had been demanding all along, it loosened the money supply, and as it did, wheat and timber prices came back up. The debt trap that had radicalized a generation of farmers started closing on its own.

Then, in April 1898, the country went to war with Spain, and national attention swung hard toward patriotism and away from agrarian grievance, a mood Republicans used against the Populists by painting them as unstable at exactly the wrong moment. By the 1898 midterms, Thurston County had swung back to the Republicans in what the papers called a Redemption.

Which raises the question: What’s the Klondike this time? Is there some external shock sitting off in 2027 or 2028 that quietly resolves the affordability crisis fueling Bodnar and Osborn the way an accidental gold rush resolved the debt crisis fueling Rogers? Nobody running these 2026 campaigns knows, and neither do I. That’s the honest limit of the parallel. 1896 is a closed case with a known ending.

Washington already ran a version of this experiment once this cycle, and it didn’t work. A Spokane firefighter and Marine veteran named Nate Powell ran independent against Republican incumbent Michael Baumgartner in the state’s 5th District, arguing the real fight was top against bottom, not left against right. He came in third in the primary, well behind the Democrat, Carmela Conroy, who’s the one headed to November. Nobody cleared the field for him. The vessel doesn’t launch itself just because the conditions are right, and without a party willing to step aside first, sometimes the old label still beats the new one.

I can tell you the mechanism rhymes. I can’t tell you whether Bodnar governs like Rogers if he wins, moderate, disciplined, quietly disappointing to the people who put him there, or whether this cycle breaks differently. The pattern is real. The ending isn’t written.

There’s a name for what 1896 turned out to be a hinge of. It’s worth naming now that the shape of the thing is on the table instead of before. In the Strauss-Howe generational framework, 1896 sits at the exact point where a Fourth Turning, a Crisis era, resolves into a First Turning, a High. The three decades before it, stretching back to the Civil War, read as one long unresolved argument about who the country belonged to. McKinley’s win over Bryan didn’t just settle an election, it settled that argument, and industrial capitalism came out on top of agrarian populism for a generation. What’s easy to miss is that the losing side didn’t actually lose everything. The Progressive Era that followed spent the next two decades quietly building the very reforms Populists had demanded, in a form industrial capitalism could live with. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is Free Silver’s demand for flexible currency, granted seventeen years late.

That’s the pattern that later got a cleaner name, New Centrism, or pragmatic populism, and it isn’t the same thing as the neoliberal centrism of the 1990s that mostly told populist grievances to sit down. New Centrism absorbs the grievance instead of dismissing it. Regional decline, industrial hollowing out, a supply chain that snapped during a crisis, all of it gets folded into a stabilized version of statecraft rather than argued away. The 1890s version of that move ended in a central bank. Whatever 2026’s version ends in, reshored manufacturing, renewed antitrust legislation and enforcement, industrial policy with bipartisan cover, something else, it’ll probably look less like a revolution and more like the establishment quietly stealing the insurgents’ better ideas once the insurgents themselves are gone.

New Centrism matters now for the same reason William Butler Yeats was worried about the center when he wrote “The Second Coming,” in the six lines that begin “Things fall apart” and run through the line about the worst being full of passionate intensity.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

We see the behavior change in politicians. The best don’t step up, and the arena gets more combative and less meaningful, because the center has literally moved, off from the space between the two parties toward something else. Like a black hole passing through a solar system, it pulls the planets off their old orbits.

Because of first-past-the-post elections, American politics keeps pulling back toward two durable party labels. We’re not a parliamentary system where a small party can live off the land until it achieves relevance. There’s no living off the land here. So there’s a clock on independents, and it runs until they change the political center enough that the parties themselves adapt.

Thurston County is also where you can watch this whole cycle at true scale, small enough to see the machinery. Total Republican sweep in 1894. Total Fusionist sweep in 1896. Total Republican Redemption by 1898. And it didn’t stop being a live pattern after 1898, either.

In 2016, an independent slate took over the Thurston County Commission the same way, riding local frustration with both establishment brands. None of these were permanent third-party breaks. They were bridges. The county used the independent label to force a conversation, and then the national parties, eventually, adapted enough to win the county back.

Whether 2026 independents are a version of Rogers, or something the pattern hasn’t produced before, isn’t a question history can answer in advance. What history can say is narrower and still worth saying.

When a party brand goes toxic enough, voters don’t abandon their actual demands, they just stop being willing to hear those demands from the party that’s carrying them. They reach for whatever vessel is clean enough to carry the argument instead, independent, fusion, whatever the label happens to be that decade. The vessel does its job either way. It breaks the deadlock. It forces the parties that lost the argument to go steal the winning ideas in private, a decade or two later, once nobody’s watching closely enough to call it surrender.

Washington spent thirty-six years as a territory before Congress finally granted statehood in 1889. This in-between space lasted longer than almost any other territory in the country, and that wasn’t an accident.

Robert Ficken makes the case in Washington Territory: for most of those thirty-six years, the place didn’t function as one territory at all. The Cascades split it into two economies, two identities that barely spoke to each other.

Western Washington ran on San Francisco capital and San Francisco trade.

Eastern Washington answered to Portland, making it effectively an arm of eastern Oregon. It moved its wheat through Portland, took whatever price Portland offered.

What the territory lacked wasn’t ambition. It was a spine, some internal run of track solid enough to bind two halves that had never had much reason to look at each other. Only when railroads finally punched through the mountains and bridged the Columbia in the mid-1880s, threading one economy into the other for the first time, did the territory start acting like a single place.

Before statehood, Washington was not free. Territorial residents had almost no say in their own government. The delegate they sent to Congress couldn’t vote, and they still paid federal taxes and lived under federal law anyway, the exact arrangement that had fueled a revolution a century before. Even their governor and judges came from Washington, D.C., appointed as political rewards to men who’d rarely set foot in the West, who knew little about the place they’d been sent to run. They often left the moment something better came along.

For decades, the only real route between eastern Washington and the coast ran down the Columbia River, and Portland controlled it. It set the rates. It picked the terminals. The Oregon Railway and Navigation Company charged whatever it wanted to move wheat and goods out of the Inland Empire, and that turned eastern Washington into less of a neighbor and more of a captive market. If you grew wheat near Walla Walla or Spokane, Portland decided what you’d earn for it.

Frustrated by a decade of asking and getting nowhere, Washington’s non-voting congressional delegate asked Congress in 1877 for an “enabling act,” permission for the territory to write its own state constitution. Congress didn’t answer. So Washingtonians stopped waiting for permission. They elected delegates and sent them to Walla Walla in June of 1878, where the group spent forty days writing a constitution of their own, official blessing or not.

The choice of Walla Walla wasn’t random. It was the biggest city in the territory at the time, built on the wheat boom rolling across the Palouse, and picking it was a deliberate answer to the very split Ficken writes about, a way of telling eastern Washington it mattered just as much as the coast did. The delegates cared enough about healing that divide that they even invited northern Idaho to send a delegate, hoping to fold the Panhandle into the new state. Northern Idaho had more in common with Walla Walla and Spokane than with Boise. Its wheat and timber flowed toward the same captive Columbia River corridor as everyone else’s in eastern Washington.

You can almost imagine different state lines that would have produced states earlier. If western Washington had split and eastern Washington and northern Idaho joined, these states might have made it into the union faster.

What the delegates at Walla Walla proposed makes sense once you remember the timing. This was before the Northern Pacific had finished its transcontinental line, while the Portland monopoly still had its foot on eastern Washington’s neck, while outside corporate power was still, plain and simple, the enemy. The 1878 constitution came out swinging. It capped freight rates, blocked corporations from meddling in local politics, and went after the Columbia River monopolists’ grip on local farmers piece by piece.

Voters loved it. In November of 1878, they approved the constitution by better than two to one, 6,537 in favor against 3,236 opposed. Then they sent it off to Washington, D.C., and Congress just ignored it. Nobody in D.C. wanted to admit a territory that heavily Republican, especially not one trying to rewrite corporate law and redraw the borders of two other territories in the same document. The bill died quietly. The 1878 constitution never became law. It just sat there for eleven years, a preview of an argument Washington would have to have all over again.

What finally broke Portland and San Francisco’s grip was a bigger outside power. Congress had chartered the Northern Pacific Railroad back in 1864, but its headquarters was in New York, and its money came from Wall Street, first from Jay Cooke, later from Henry Villard and J.P. Morgan. When the NP finally built its line west, it wasn’t doing Washington Territory any favors. It was chasing profit, and Congress had handed it a massive incentive to do so, alternating sections of public land stretching forty miles deep on either side of the tracks, millions of acres of Washington timber and farmland, all of it controlled from New York. Because the NP owned the land and picked the route, it could make or break entire towns. Instead of routing its saltwater terminus through an established city like Olympia or Seattle, the railroad built its own town from scratch at New Tacoma, simply because it already owned every lot there.

By the time seventy-five delegates gathered in Olympia on July 4, 1889, they’d already watched the Northern Pacific spend a few years transforming the territory, laying track, pulling in settlers, building the very economic case that finally convinced Congress statehood made sense. The irony was hard to miss. The delegates weren’t grateful. They were nervous. They’d just watched one outside monopoly get smashed by an even bigger one, and now that bigger one owned a huge share of the state they were about to create.

That nervousness is the whole reason Article XII of the Washington Constitution, titled “Corporations Other Than Municipal,” turned into one of the most heavily fought sections in the entire document. It reads less like ordinary legal boilerplate and more like a list of grievances.

Section 1 barred the legislature from ever again handing a company like the Northern Pacific a custom charter loaded with special privileges, the way corrupt territorial legislatures once had, and it kept the legislature’s right to amend or revoke any charter whenever it wanted. Section 7 went after the “foreign corporation” problem directly, meaning any company headquartered outside Washington, and made it illegal for one of those companies to get better treatment in the state than a homegrown competitor. Sections 13 through 22 read like eastern Washington’s wheat farmers dictated them personally. Railroads became “public highways” under the new constitution, and railroad companies became “common carriers,” language that put them under strict state regulation. Discriminatory freight rates got banned outright, so a railroad couldn’t quietly charge a small farmer more per mile than a big shipper, or punish a town that had crossed it. Pooling, the practice of supposedly competing lines secretly agreeing to fix prices instead of actually competing, got prohibited too.

None of it was as radical as it could have been. Corporate lobbyists worked the halls of the old wooden capitol all that summer, and some of the sharper teeth from the 1878 draft, personal liability for corporate directors chief among them, got filed down before the final vote. Washington still needed East Coast capital to keep building, and the framers knew it.

Line the two constitutions up next to each other and they tell a single story in two acts. The 1878 constitution was written by people with nothing left to lose, before the Northern Pacific had finished a single mile of track, while Portland was still the only monopoly in the room and outside corporate power was simply the enemy, full stop. Congress killed it without a second thought. The 1889 constitution was written by people who’d already made the deal. They’d already watched the Northern Pacific break Portland’s grip, already build the towns, already decide who got a station and who didn’t. Statehood only became possible because Washington accepted that bargain. Article XII wasn’t an attempt to refuse the deal. It was an attempt to survive it, a leash written into the state’s founding document for a monster the state had already let across the threshold.

That’s the same trick the country pulled a century earlier, played out on a smaller stage. Franklin didn’t go to Paris because he loved the French monarchy. He went because Britain wasn’t going anywhere without a bigger power tipping the scales, and France had its own reasons to want London humbled. The alliance worked, and it also became something the young United States spent years trying to wriggle back out of. Within a decade, Washington’s own Farewell Address was warning the country against permanent foreign entanglements, and by the end of the 1790s the alliance with France had curdled into an undeclared war at sea. The country used France to win its independence, then spent a generation making sure France couldn’t collect on the debt. Washington Territory ran the same play on a faster clock. It used the Northern Pacific to win its independence from Portland and Washington DC, then wrote Article XII that same year, not a decade later, to make sure the Northern Pacific couldn’t collect either.

Self-governance, in both cases, was never a clean break. It was a deal cut by whoever held the leverage to cut it, followed almost immediately by a second deal meant to limit the first. Washington’s framers understood that as well as anyone in Philadelphia or Paris ever did. They just wrote their version into Article XII instead of a treaty. That’s worth remembering every Fourth of July in Washington.

We mark our statehood that got bought and paid for, same as the revolution they’re meant to echo. Both times, the generation that cut the deal spent its very next act making sure that deal couldn’t turn around and own them.