Category: Washington Politics (Page 1 of 27)

Democratic Party identification in Washington State has hit 50 percent. That’s the highest number I’ve found in over thirty years of polling data.

Because voter registration in Washington carries no partisan label, party identification floats. The only way to track it is through the demographic crosstabs buried in statewide polls, which I’ve been compiling in a spreadsheet. The numbers tell a consistent story: each spike of national tension pulls voters off the independent shelf and drops them, at least temporarily, into one of the two major parties.

Since the start of the current Trump era, Republican identification has ticked up roughly 1.5 percent on average across available polls. Democratic identification has surged approximately 7.5 percent, drawn almost entirely from independents, whose share has contracted by a corresponding 7 points.

We’ve seen this before. At the end of the first Trump administration, Democratic ID jumped 8.25 percent, Republican ID fell 1.2 percent, and independent ID collapsed 14 points. The Biden era ran the current in the other direction, lifting Republican ID by 3.3 percent and Democratic ID by nearly 2, while independents dipped modestly. Independent identification surged during the late Obama years and again after the 2022 midterms, but under conditions of sharp national polarization, that middle ground gets absorbed.

The data itself is thinning out. The Northwest Progressive Institute and Future 42 both release topline results without demographic breakdowns, which limits how useful they are. The Elway Poll, for decades the most reliable regular tracker of Washington opinion, has ended. SurveyUSA drifted out of the market when KING TV stopped paying for polling. DHM Research now appears to be the last pollster doing regular statewide surveys in Washington.

Two things explain what the numbers show. One is the outsized pull of national politics on a state that might otherwise develop its own distinct political character. The other is the internal fracturing that tends to hit any party dominant enough to have no serious external opposition.

How Ireland Explains the Gravitational Pull of the Center

To understand the first one, it helps to zoom out, well out, to late 19th-century and early 20th-century Ireland. I know that sounds like a stretch. Stay with me.

Think of Washington not simply as a blue state but as a distinct political ecosystem caught in the gravitational field of a distant center. When the Conservative Party held power in London, Irish nationalist identity hardened, drawing together urban constitutionalists and rural agrarians, moderate Home Rulers and more radical nationalists, bound by shared resistance to a government they couldn’t control.

Washington Democrats work the same way. The coalition’s internal disagreements over housing density, tax structure, and the pace of reform are real. But under a right-leaning federal administration, those disagreements get pushed aside by a more urgent question: who controls the shield? The state’s 50 percent Democratic identification is a defensive posture built by voters who see state government as their primary buffer against what’s coming out of Washington, D.C.

The British Tories understood this consolidation well enough to try to dissolve it. Their strategy of Constructive Unionism poured infrastructure investment into Ireland and passed local land reforms, betting that solving material problems would defuse nationalist sentiment. It failed completely, because in a highly charged political environment, the practical argument gets swallowed by the symbolic one.

Washington Republicans face the same trap. Campaigns built on local material issues, highway funding, gas taxes, public safety, struggle to gain traction because a vote for a local Republican reads to most voters as an endorsement of the national party. The local argument can’t escape the national frame.

The deeper warning in this parallel is what happened when the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party ran out of credibility. The IPP spent decades telling voters it was their only realistic shield against London, while failing to deliver structural change at home. After 1916, a frustrated electorate abandoned it for the more radical Sinn Féin. Washington Democrats holding a supermajority built on oppositional energy face a structurally similar problem. If the resistance framing outlasts its usefulness without being replaced by durable accomplishment, the coalition fractures from the left.

Mark Reed and the Dominant 1920s Washington Republicans

That fracturing brings us to a closer historical analogue, not Ireland but Washington State itself, a century ago, when Republicans held the dominant position in Olympia and the contradictions of one-party rule were playing out across the legislature.

The parallels are uncomfortable. Then, as now, the fault line ran between institutional consolidators and ideological insurgents. Speaker Mark Reed built his power on a pragmatic economic vision, state-funded infrastructure and modest worker safety nets, that reflected the timber industry’s long-term interest in a stable, functional state. Governor Roland Hartley represented the Old Guard’s hardline fiscal reaction, contemptuous of what he saw as creeping progressivism in Reed’s program. They weren’t fighting over whether Republicans should govern. That was settled. They were fighting over what governing in a one-party state actually required them to do.

Today Jinkins plays the Reed role. Under her speakership the Democratic majority has grown from 57 to 59 seats, and her argument for keeping the gavel is essentially electoral: protect the coalition, don’t hand swing-district members a vote they can’t defend in November. Berg is doing something different. She’s using her position as House Finance Chair as an ideological launching point, championing House Bill 2100’s millionaire’s tax, posting caucus-facing FAQs about it directly on the caucus website, signaling to the party’s progressive base that there’s a leadership path willing to push the supermajority’s power to its limits, whatever the institutional cost.

The geographic echo is hard to miss. Hartley’s factional base was rooted in Snohomish County, where he’d been Mayor of Everett and where the county’s GOP delegation served as the center of insurgent resistance to the Seattle and timber-coast establishment. Berg represents the 44th Legislative District, anchored in Mill Creek and Snohomish. A century later, a challenge to the incumbent legislative leadership is rising out of Snohomish County again.

The immediate timeline mirrors the old primary dynamics. Both Jinkins and Berg are deferring the real fight until after November, each needing first to survive and, if possible, expand in the August primaries. If progressive challengers unseat moderate Democrats this summer, Berg’s path widens. If moderates hold, Jinkins retains the leverage.

The Dominant Party’s Dilemma

What the polling data, the Irish parallel, and the Jinkins-Berg contest all point to is a single underlying condition. In Washington State in 2026, the most consequential political battles aren’t happening between the two parties on the ballot. They’re happening inside one of them.

The Democratic Party’s 50 percent identification reflects real voter consolidation against a hostile federal administration. But consolidation built on opposition is temporary. It depends on the threat remaining vivid, the alternative remaining unacceptable, and the dominant party delivering enough at home that its internal factions have more to lose from breaking ranks than from holding together. None of those conditions is guaranteed.

History is pretty consistent on this point. The Irish Parliamentary Party learned it after 1916. Washington Republicans learned it in the Depression. The question for Washington Democrats is whether the current leadership, whichever faction wins in November, understands that while Democratic Party ID has been growing consistently, 50 percent is the highest it has ever been, not an average. And things are bound to change in unpredictable ways.

When Howard Schultz criticized Seattle this week, he wasn’t inventing a grievance. He was re-enacting one.

He was the latest in a long line of people who’ve stood up in Washington State and said that Seattle has turned against the people who built it. That line goes back at least to the shopkeepers and labor organizers who faced off over Chinese exclusion in 1886, who believed roughly the same thing, and who were right and wrong in roughly equal measure. The players change. The tension underneath doesn’t.

To understand what’s actually happening in Washington State in 2026, the warnings about businesses leaving, the fights over taxes, the feeling that something has broken, you have to start not with Schultz but with a couple of historians who’ve spent their careers trying to explain why this place is the way it is.

Colin Woodard’s argument, in his book American Nations, is that the Pacific Northwest was built by two groups of settlers who had almost nothing in common. The first he calls the Yankee impulse. These were New Englanders who came west with a plan: build a better society, governed by rules and institutions, by people who believed government could actually improve human life. They founded the universities and the civic organizations and the reform movements. They also believed in the power of commerce and capitalism. For them, business was the building block of community and it wasn’t just a nice idea. It was a moral obligation.

The second group, what Woodard calls the Appalachian surge, came for the opposite reason. They weren’t building anything. They were getting out. They brought a deep suspicion of authority, a commitment to being left alone, and what Seattle critic Fred Moody would later call in Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, an “ethos of anti-ambition.” A pride in opting out. In refusing the terms the powerful had written. Seattle became a city that welcomed dropouts and rebels, a place with what Moody affectionately called “slob appeal.”

Put these two groups together and you get a region that’s been arguing with itself ever since. It wants good government and hates being governed. It builds large corporations and then turns on them as symbols of the conformity it was trying to escape. Woodard calls this a “fecund hybrid.” It can produce both Microsoft and the WTO riots in the same decade.

Moody’s account of the WTO riots, which he called “Apocalypso,” is still the best explanation of what happens when these two traditions crash into each other with nothing in between. Mayor Paul Schell, a classic Yankee “vision guy,” genuinely believed Seattle’s niceness would make it a model for the world. Instead, the streets blew up. The bicycle cops, the friendly symbol of the city’s relaxed self-image, were replaced overnight by what Moody called “Darth Vaders,” riot police in black gear. Beneath the utopian surface there’s always what Moody calls a “truncheoneer” waiting. Starbucks, which had been a scrappy local success story, had transitioned to the New England ideal of the Pacific Northwest corporation, along with Boeing and Microsoft and became a window to smash.

The pandemic, two decades later, showed what the synthesis looks like when it works. Christine Gregoire’s “Challenge Seattle” coalition pulled the private sector together fast. Boeing made PPE. Starbucks helped streamline vaccination logistics. It was the New England tradition at its most functional: disciplined, science-first, with business and government pulling in the same direction. The curve bent.

That spirit is gone now, or at least that’s what Schultz and Gregoire both say. And the question of why is where the standard take on this story goes off the rails.

Most of the coverage frames this as Seattle versus business, progressivism versus capitalism, taxes versus growth. It’s not a useless frame. But it misses the most important political fact about Washington State right now: the Republican Party hasn’t produced a statewide elected official or protected a statewide incumbent in a generation. So, this is a civil war inside the Democratic Party. And once you see that, Schultz’s op-ed looks completely different.

As a sidenote, this isn’t the first time Washington State politics have been defined by the internal politics of one party. In the 1920s, Republicans had been so dominant for so long, that only a handful of Democrats were elected to the state legislature. All the important political debates happened between various kind of Republicans.

But Schultz isn’t writing to Republicans. There are no Republicans to write to, not at the statewide level. He’s writing to the centrist, business-aligned Democrats who used to run Washington State, the people Christine Gregoire represented, that Gary Locke represented when he crafted a policy package to keep Boeing here. These are the ones who thought you could keep labor and the Chamber of Commerce in the same coalition. That coalition is losing ground inside the party, and Schultz knows it. His column isn’t really an economic argument. It’s a distress signal from a faction that’s being outmaneuvered within its own party.

Once you see it that way, everything shifts. The new taxes, the “socialist rhetoric” Schultz attributes to Mayor Katie Wilson aren’t accidents or failures of economic understanding. They’re the deliberate choices of a coalition that’s decided it doesn’t need the Schultz wing to win elections in Washington State. Lately, they’ve been right

But here’s where Woodard’s framework, useful as it is for understanding the past, might actually lead us astray.

He’s right about the history. The Yankee and Appalachian traditions really did shape this place, and the tension between them really does explain a lot, from the WTO riots to the pandemic response to what’s happening now. But those traditions aren’t frozen. They’re being recombined.

What’s happening isn’t the old synthesis falling apart. It’s two new versions of it forming, competing for the same ground.

The first version mixes the communitarian side of New England with the live-and-let-live ethic from the Appalachian tradition. The result is a politics that’s comfortable using collective power on social questions, pro-trans, pro-DEI, anti-racist, committed to equity as something the community actively builds, while also holding to the Appalachian idea that the government has no business regulating who you are or how you live. This coalition is fine with progressive taxes because it doesn’t read taxation of the rich as government overreach. It reads it as investment. It’s not anti-business, exactly. It’s indifferent to business as a civic priority. The economy, in this view, is plumbing. It needs to work, but it’s not the point.

The second version mixes the rules-based, institutionalist side of New England with the pro-business instinct from the Appalachian tradition. This is the Schultz coalition. It believes in civic partnership, in the kind of collaboration between business and government that made the pandemic response work. It also believes that growth comes first, that you can’t redistribute your way to prosperity, and that treating your biggest employers as adversaries is a serious mistake. It’s not against government. It’s against incompetent government. Those are different things.

These two coalitions have more in common than either would like to admit. They both trace back to the same regional mix Woodard describes. They both say they believe in good government. They both say they’re fighting for the soul of the Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has spent a generation mostly absent from statewide politics, occasionally trying to woo the Schultz coalition with pro-business appeals, but unable to get past what the national party has become.

So Democrats fight each other. In primaries. In city council races. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The party is big enough to hold both coalitions right now. But probably not forever.

Fred Moody has this image he uses for the history of the Northwest. He calls it a “bucking-bronco sine wave”: boom, bust, purge, renewal. He’s always liked tech collapses as what he calls “cleansing opportunities,” moments when the phantom wealth burns off and the region gets back to its actual self. There’s something glossy about that view. It suggests that what’s happening now is just another dip, and that the region will find its way back, as it always has.

But this time feels different. The automation rolling through Amazon and Microsoft isn’t a market correction. It’s structural.

Moody actually wrote about an earlier version of this. When he was covering the 1990s tech boom, he would recognize the Microsoft and Amazon generation as a new mutation of Woodard’s Yankee New Englanders: same utopian conviction, same faith that the right tools could perfect the world, just expressed through software instead of civic institutions. The people building Encarta thought they were democratizing knowledge. The VR evangelists thought they were reinventing human experience. Moody wasn’t unsympathetic, but he wasn’t fooled either. These were the “vision guys” in updated form, with the same blind spot the original ones always had: their utopia tends to arrive on the backs of people who don’t get to share in it. The Encarta team got laid off when the internet made their product obsolete. The VR evangelists mostly got absorbed or let go when the hype ran out. Now the engineers who built the AI tools are being displaced by the AI tools. It’s the same pattern, one cycle later, except this time the technology actually worked.

When Weyerhaeuser replaced loggers with machines through the 1980s, the region eventually settled on a story about spotted owls and environmental regulation that let everyone off the hook. The real story was that automation had been eating jobs for years before the spotted owl became a symbol. We’re probably going to be tempted to do the same thing now, to make this a story about taxes and progressive overreach, and miss what’s actually happening to workers as AI takes over more of what software engineers and middle managers used to do.

The Schultz coalition wants to restore what made the old tech economy work, without quite admitting that the new one is walking away from workers.

Which is why the debate Schultz is asking us to have might be the wrong one. Whether Jeff Bezos stays in Washington or moves to Miami, whether Starbucks shifts five hundred corporate jobs to Tennessee, those aren’t the numbers that will define this region’s future. The numbers that matter are the software engineers, the middle managers, the logistics coordinators whose jobs are being automated away by the same companies that spent decades making this one of the most prosperous places in the country.

Both political traditions, in their remixed forms, actually have something to offer here if they’re willing to use it. Progressive taxation applied to the profits of automation isn’t just redistribution for its own sake. It’s a way to make sure that when an algorithm replaces a team of engineers, the gains don’t just flow to shareholders while the engineers figure out what to do next. That instinct, using collective power to push back when technology rewrites the terms of work, is older than either coalition. It’s what the Yankee communitarians and the Appalachian labor organizers were both doing, in different ways, from the beginning.

Schultz ends his column calling for a “new compact,” and he’s right that one is needed. But the compact he’s describing is between government and business. The one that’s actually needed is between the economy that’s coming and the workers who built the one we have. That’s been the argument in this region from the start. The actors keep changing. The stakes don’t.

The streets were under a state of siege. They were gripped by a level of civic breakdown that feels ancient in its brutality. 

A powerful media figure styled himself as a guardian of law and order. He spent months radicalizing the public against a perceived foreign threat. Through his writing and speeches, he cast social conflict as an invasion and dissent as subversion. 

This campaign led to the formation of a heavily armed force that ignored the courts and civic institutions. In organized raids, its members rounded up hundreds of people they didn’t like. They beat them with clubs. They forced them at gunpoint out of town and banished them from the places where they lived and worked. 

The air was thick with talk of Americanism versus treason. The local press framed these purges as a necessary cleansing of the community.

This wasn’t Minneapolis or Chicago in 2026. This was Hoquiam in 1912.

The events of the Grays Harbor County War started a political firestorm. It shattered local politics and created the framework for the immigration system we’re still fighting over today. What happened on the banks of the Hoquiam River wasn’t a weird one-off event. It was a prototype.

Albert Johnson was the central figure. He was a newspaper editor who later carried this model of vigilante justice to Congress. The workers he targeted were immigrants tied to the Industrial Workers of the World. Like the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Citizens’ Committee that terrorized the IWW was made up of local businessmen. These men believed they could restore order with ax handles and rifles. This conflict was a rehearsal for the nationalistic energy that became the Immigration Act of 1924. Our technology is different now, but the blueprint is the same. People exploit local unrest, turn economic stress into a cultural threat, and use that panic to justify national fear.

Grays Harbor was the lumber capital of the world. Its wealth came from the hard work of Finns, Greeks, and Slavs. These immigrant workers lived in dirty camps and worked ten-hour days in dangerous mills. In late 1911 and early 1912, the IWW organized them. They started with free speech fights and ended with a massive strike in March 1912. The mills stopped. The business elite panicked.

Johnson was the editor of The Daily Washingtonian. He became their main voice. He didn’t just write columns. He used his paper to help lead the Citizens’ Committee. This was a vigilante group made up of people who saw themselves as “respectable.” They ignored the police and did whatever they wanted. They raided union halls and beat strikers. By May 1912, they crushed the strike. Workers were loaded onto trains at gunpoint and told to never come back. Johnson told the public this wasn’t about wages. He said it was about protecting America from foreign anarchy.

That story became the foundation of his career. He was elected to Congress in November 1912. He brought another paper, the Home Defender, to D.C. to keep the fight going. Over the next decade, he turned the logic of Grays Harbor into federal law. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which added literacy tests. This was just the start.

By 1919, Johnson was the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He wanted his ideas to look official. He hired a eugenicist named Harry Laughlin to be his expert. The results were laws that narrowed who was allowed to be American. In 1921, he wrote the Emergency Quota Act. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act finished the job. It used the 1890 census to decide who could enter. This was a trick to exclude the same Southern and Eastern Europeans Johnson fought in Washington. When President Coolidge signed it, Johnson called it a second Declaration of Independence.

He turned mob violence into a government machine. Things like deportation and visas weren’t acts of a crowd anymore. They were part of a permanent system.

Alternative History of Hoquiam

But I’m not writing today to just tell you what happened in Hoquiam was inevitable. Right now, we’re trying to find a way out. So, let’s imagine a world where Johnson didn’t succeed.

But what if this didn’t happen? It’s useful to look at how history could have gone differently. We’ve seen that history isn’t always a straight line. There’s a version of this where the “Red Coast” didn’t just resist but built a bridge between different groups. Imagine if the 1912 strike ended with a coalition of workers and farmers. In this version, the local middle class is disgusted by the violence. They decide that you can’t have law and order if you’re breaking the law to get it. Johnson’s paper is sued for libel. He loses his money and his reputation before he ever gets to D.C.

The Washington State Grange helped make this possible. They were a powerful group of farmers who cared about the democratic process. They hated the vigilantism of the Citizens’ Committee. They saw the deportations as a threat to everyone’s civil liberties. The Grange condemned the business elite. They put their support behind local leaders who stood against the violence. This gave the middle class the cover they needed to speak up. It broke the power of the anti-labor group and made room for a new Labor Defense League.

In this timeline, Stanton Warburton, a progressive Republican, wins the 1912 election instead of Johnson. He beats him by speaking out against the ax handle tactics. Because Warburton keeps his seat, the path to the 1924 Act is severed. Instead of racist quotas, we get the 1928 Integration Act. It creates a federal office to help new workers. By 1930, 18% of the population is foreign born. These people become a huge group of customers that helps the economy stay stable during the Depression. American identity becomes about what you contribute rather than where your parents were from.

The labor movement wins by changing what it means to be American. They argue that including people is the best way to stop exploitation. The Labor Defense League teaches English and civics while they organize. They say an immigrant with a union card is a better American than a man with a club.

Without Johnson, eugenics would never have become a part of our policy. The leaders of the immigration committee are progressives who care about the economy, not “purity.” This focus on solidarity changes everything. Unions and farmers work together. Farm owners in the fruit regions agree to fair wages and housing in exchange for a stable workforce. They create a direct path to citizenship.

If that had happened, our politics today would be different. We wouldn’t be obsessed with demographics or cultural panic. We’d talk about economic solidarity instead. We wouldn’t hear much about “replacement” or “dilution.” We’d focus on building unions and protecting workers. This would stop the race to the bottom that makes people hate immigration.

Our experts would change too. We wouldn’t listen to people who scream about border crises. We’d listen to people who study how to help newcomers join the community. Success would be measured by how fast people pay taxes and join the workforce.

Johnson’s power came from turning local fights into a national panic. We still see this. A fight in a city or a border dispute becomes an existential crisis. The lesson of this alternate history is that local resistance matters. If Hoquiam had said no to Johnson in 1912, we might have a more open democracy today.

The 1924 Act is still with us because it made immigration a matter of crime and race. Before Johnson, “illegal aliens” weren’t really a thing in our laws. He built the world of border patrols and caps. Even after the overtly racist parts were removed in 1965, the structure stayed. Johnson didn’t just win a fight in a small town. He changed the whole conversation. He made us ask if people should be here at all instead of asking how to welcome them. That choice still has us stuck today.

The Current Counterfactual

We can see the emotional reality of this counterfactual in modern Pacific County. It sits right next to Grays Harbor. In 2017, the area was shaken when ICE agents detained Mario Rodriguez at the post office in Long Beach. Mario wasn’t a stranger. He’d lived on the peninsula for twelve years. He worked as a bilingual teaching aide in the local schools. He was a neighbor, a volunteer, and a friend. When he was taken, the reaction from the local white community was not what you might expect. Many of these people had voted for the very policies that led to his arrest, but they weren’t happy. They were shocked.

Even the local police chief, Flint Wright, was rattled. He had supported a tougher border, but he spoke up for Mario. He called him a pro-law enforcement guy. He said anyone would want him as a neighbor. This reaction shows that when abstract talk about “illegal aliens” meets a real human being, the old logic falls apart. The people of Pacific County didn’t see an invader. They saw a hole left in their neighborhood. They formed a support group that eventually became a nonprofit. They fought for their neighbor.

This local pushback is today’s proof that Johnson’s vision was never inevitable. It shows that even in the conservative timber and fishing towns of Southwest Washington, people can choose their neighbors over a club. The ghost of 1924 is still in the machine, but stories like Mario’s remind us that we can choose a different path. We don’t have to live in the reality Albert Johnson built. We’ve seen a glimpse of something else. It’s much closer than we think.

For the last year or so, the state has been tied in knots over a very simple question: where should we put the Marcus Whitman statue once it’s removed from its current spot at the Capitol?

Down the hall? Near the Senate dining room? Outside, under cover, fingers crossed it doesn’t get vandalized or fall apart? Maybe leave it where it is and move everything else around it?

Watching this debate unfold has been oddly familiar. Not because the details are the same, but because the pattern is.

We’ve seen this movie before. Just not here.

In the South, communities spent decades arguing about what to do with Confederate statues. Every option was explored except the obvious one. Move it somewhere else. Add context. Put up a plaque. Keep it for history. Avoid controversy. Respect “both sides.” Study it a little longer.

Sound familiar?

Eventually, many of those places had to face the truth. Those statues were never neutral. They weren’t built to teach history. They were built to tell a story about power, race, and who belonged. And once that truth was unavoidable, the only honest option was removal.

Marcus Whitman occupies the same space in Washington’s history.

That may make some people uncomfortable, but discomfort isn’t a reason to avoid clarity.

The Whitman statue was not erected because historians reached a careful consensus about his importance. It was erected because a specific myth needed a physical anchor. The “Whitman Saved Oregon” story wasn’t just wrong. It was useful. It framed white settlement as inevitable, benevolent, and divinely sanctioned. It pushed Native people to the margins. It wrapped colonization in religion and heroism.

That story has been thoroughly debunked. Not recently, but decades ago.

And yet, the statue remains.

That’s why the comparison to Confederate generals matters. In the South, statues of Robert E. Lee and others weren’t really about the Civil War. They were about reinforcing white dominance long after the war ended. Many were erected during periods of backlash against Reconstruction or the civil rights movement. They told a story about who was in charge and whose version of history mattered.

Whitman’s statue does the same thing here. Different region. Different century. Same purpose.

The Whitman myth emerged in the late nineteenth century, decades after his death, at a moment when the Pacific Northwest was trying to explain itself to the rest of the country. The story claimed that Whitman’s 1842 ride east “saved” the region from British control and secured it for American settlement. It cast him as a lone, heroic figure whose actions supposedly determined the fate of the entire region.

That version of events was never supported by serious evidence. The boundary question between the U.S. and Britain was already being negotiated through diplomacy, economics, and military power. Whitman played no decisive role. But the myth stuck because it did important cultural work. It centered white, Christian settlers as the rightful authors of Washington’s history and treated Indigenous nations as background characters in their own homelands.

The myth also served a political purpose. Elevating Whitman, it justified land seizure, missionary violence, and the displacement of tribal members as part of a righteous and inevitable process. It replaced treaty rights and sovereignty with a comforting story about destiny and sacrifice. That framing made colonization feel moral instead of brutal. It made white supremacy feel like history instead of ideology. It is no mistake that we spent decades denying treaty rights and jailing tribal fishermen like Billy Frank Jr., because the story of Whitman made that inevitable.

The Legislature already recognized this, even if it didn’t quite finish the job. In 2021, lawmakers voted to replace Marcus Whitman with Billy Frank Jr. in both the U.S. Capitol and the Washington State Capitol. That decision wasn’t subtle. It was a clear statement about who represents Washington’s values and history.

Billy Frank Jr. fought for treaty rights, environmental protection, and the rule of law. His life and work are grounded in truth, not myth. Elevating him was the right call.

But when it came time to deal with the Whitman statue in Olympia, the Legislature stopped short. No clear instructions.

At a recent joint meeting of the State Capitol Committee and the Capitol Campus Design Advisory Committee, Lt. Governor Denny Heck said the quiet part out loud. The committees, he acknowledged, don’t have guidance from the Legislature on what to do with the Whitman statue here. They’re trying to navigate “sensitivities” without knowing what outcome lawmakers actually want.

So now we’re stuck in the process.

We’re talking about structural engineering studies to see if a four-ton statue can sit in a hallway. We’re debating whether it should be inside or outside. We’re spending time and money figuring out how to preserve a monument the state has already decided should no longer represent us.

Meanwhile, Billy Frank Jr.’s family has made it clear they don’t want his statue sharing space with Whitman. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Pairing them would flatten history into a false equivalence. As if these figures occupy the same moral or historical ground.

They don’t.

What’s striking is how often people say this is all too complicated. It isn’t.

Across the country, far larger and heavier bronze statues have been removed. Robert E. Lee monuments towering multiple stories high came down in Richmond and Charlottesville. A massive Confederate monument in Raleigh was dismantled. One Lee statue was melted down and turned into new public art. Size didn’t stop those communities. 

Washington isn’t being asked to do something unprecedented. We’re being asked to catch up.

And here’s the part that often gets lost. Removing the Whitman statue does not erase history. It corrects a distortion. History lives in books, archives, classrooms, and museums. Statues live in civic space. They tell us who we choose to honor.

Right now, the state is bending over backwards to honor a lie because it’s heavy and old and awkward to deal with.

That’s not a good reason.

The Whitman statue is our Confederate general statue. It was built to promote a false, harmful narrative. We know that now. Pretending otherwise just delays the inevitable.

The Legislature should finish what it started: tell the Capitol Committee plainly that the Whitman statue should be removed from the Capitol Campus entirely. Not relocated. Not tucked away. Retired.

Deaccession it. Dismantle it. Repurpose it. But stop pretending it needs a place of honor.

This isn’t about tearing down history. It’s about telling the truth.