Democrats predict anti-Trump 'tsunami' in 2018 governors races
By James Hohmann February 27 at 10:47 AM
THE BIG IDEA: As a House freshman, Jay Inslee lost reelection in 1994 because of voter frustration with Bill Clinton’s first two years as president. Tom Foley, who represented an adjacent district, became the first Speaker to lose reelection since the depths of the Civil War.
“I’ve personally experienced a 65-foot fall tsunami directed at a party whose president had caused a great backlash,” said Inslee, who returned to Congress four years later and is now in his second term as governor of Washington State. “So I know what blowback can look like, and I will tell you that the energy that now exists in the opposite direction is greater than existed in 1994.”
As the chairman-elect of the Democratic Governors Association, Inslee will quarterback his party’s efforts in next year’s gubernatorial contests. To say he’s bullish would be an understatement. “Democrats are going to crawl across broken glass on their knees to go vote in 2018, if the conditions exist as they do today,” Inslee said during an interview yesterday afternoon at the J.W. Marriott, before he headed to the White House for a black-tie gala hosted by President Trump.
Inslee was part of the lawsuit that resulted in the Ninth Circuit blocking Trump’s travel ban, and he has oodles of anecdotes about people getting politically involved for the first time since the president took office. The other day, for example, he saw nine grandmothers he knows riding the ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle wearing pink hats.
“I’ve never, ever within a factor of 10 received as much affirmative response from people in my 25 years in public life,” he said. “I would have loved for them to have been more involved in my campaigns, frankly, but they’re on that boat now. Because something has sparked. There’s some fuse that’s been lit here, that’s connected to something that’s very explosive. I’ve seen it most profoundly around the travel ban, but the fuse is definitely lit. The TNT is there.”
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