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      Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, Climate Champion, Won’t Seek Re-Election

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      Mr. Inslee, 72, a former presidential candidate and a leading Democratic proponent of policies to slow climate change, said he would not seek a fourth term.Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, the nation’s longest-serving current governor and one of the Democratic Party’s leading climate defenders, will not seek a fourth term in office next year, he announced on Monday.“Serving the people as governor of Washington State has been my greatest honor,” he said. “During a decade of dynamic change, we’ve made Washington a beacon for progress for the nation. I’m ready to pass the torch.”Mr. Inslee, 72, who before becoming governor was elected to Congress eight times, ran for his party’s 2020 presidential nomination on a platform of sharply reducing the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. He dropped out of the race in August 2019 when it became clear he would not meet the Democratic National Committee’s threshold to appear in presidential debates.During President Donald J. Trump’s years in office, Mr. Inslee placed himself on the vanguard of the Democratic opposition to Mr. Trump’s policies. Mr. Inslee and the Washington State attorney general, Bob Ferguson, filed a series of lawsuits against Mr. Trump’s administration, challenging policies on its ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, its separation of migrant children from their parents and its unwinding of climate regulations.Mr. Ferguson, who has long had eyes on succeeding Mr. Inslee, is now considered one of the front-runners in an open-seat race to replace him at the helm of a solidly Democratic state. Though in 2012 Mr. Inslee won his first election for governor by just three percentage points, by 2020 he carried the state by more than 13 points. More

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      A New Voice for Winning Back Lost Democratic Voters

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      Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez chose her guest for last month’s State of the Union address in order to make one of her favorite points. She invited Cory Torppa, who teaches construction and manufacturing at Kalama High School in her district in southwest Washington State, and also directs the school district’s career and technical education program. President Biden did briefly mention career training that night in his very long list of plans; still, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez wasn’t thrilled with the speech.“I went back and looked at the transcript,” she said, “and he only said the word ‘rural’ once.”It’s safe to say that Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez was one of very few Democrats in the room listening for that word, but then she didn’t win her nail-biter of a race in a conservative district with a typical Democratic appeal. To court rural and working-class voters who had supported a Republican in the district since 2011, she had to speak to them in a way that her party’s left wing usually does not — to acknowledge their economic fears, their sense of being left out of the political conversation, their disdain for ideological posturing from both sides of the spectrum.She came to Congress in January with a set of priorities that reflected her winning message, and she is determined to stress those differences in a way that might help Democrats lure back some of the voters it has lost, even if it means getting a lot of puzzled looks and blank stares in the Capitol.Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez was already an unexpected arrival to the House. No one predicted that she would win her district, and her victory (by less than one percentage point) was widely considered the biggest electoral upset of 2022. The Third Congressional District is exactly the kind that Democrats have had trouble holding on to for the last 10 years: It’s 78 percent white, 73 percent without a bachelor’s degree or higher, and made up of a low-density mix of rural and suburban areas. It voted for Barack Obama once, in 2008, and Donald Trump twice, and the national Democrats wrote it off, giving her almost no campaign assistance.But as the 34-year-old mother of a toddler and the co-owner (with her husband) of an auto repair shop, she had an appealing personal story and worked hard to distinguish herself from the usual caricature of her party. She said she would not support Nancy Pelosi as speaker, criticized excessive regulation of business, and said there should be more people in Congress with grease under their fingernails. But she also praised labor unions and talked about improving the legal immigration system, boosting domestic manufacturing, and the importance of reversing climate change. In the face of this pragmatic approach, her Republican opponent, Joe Kent, followed the Trump playbook and claimed the 2020 election had been stolen and called for the F.B.I. to be defunded. She took a narrow path, but it worked, and you might think that Democratic leaders would be lined up outside her office to get tips on how to defeat MAGA Republicans and win over disaffected Trump voters.But some Democrats are still a little uncomfortable around someone who supports both abortion rights and gun rights, who has a skeptical take on some environmental regulations, and who has made self-sufficiency a political issue.“It’s a little bit of a hard message for them to hear, because part of the solution is having a Congress who looks more like America,” she said in an interview last week. “It can’t just be rich lawyers that get to run for Congress anymore.”She said there is a kind of “groupthink” at high levels of the party, a tribalism that makes it hard for new or divergent ideas to take hold. But if Democrats don’t pay attention to newcomers like Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, they risk writing off large sections of the country that might be open to alternatives to Trumpism.“The national Democrats are just not ever going to be an alternative they vote for, no matter how much of a circus the far right becomes,” she said. “But I think there obviously can be competitive alternatives. There are different kinds of Democrats that can win, that avoid the tribalism.”She mentioned Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Mary Peltola of Alaska, and Senators Jon Tester of Montana and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, as examples of elected officials with an unusually broad appeal because they understand the priorities of their districts or states.In her case, those priorities center on relieving economic despair and providing a future for young people who have a hard time seeing one, particularly if they are not college-bound. Pacific County, on the western end of her district, had an 8.4 percent unemployment rate in January, compared to the 3.4 percent rate in tech-saturated King County, home of Seattle, just 150 miles to the northeast. Not everyone needs a four-year college degree, or is able to get one, but the economy isn’t providing enough opportunities for those who don’t take that path. Many high school students in her districts are never going to wind up in the chip factories that get so many headlines, or the software firms further north, but without government support they can’t even get a foothold in the construction trades.She supports what has become known on Capitol Hill as “workforce Pell” — the expansion of Pell grants to short-term skills training and apprenticeship programs, many of which are taught in community colleges. The idea has won approval among both conservative Republicans and Democrats like Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. She said she could not hire older teenagers as apprentices in her auto repair shop because it would bump up her liability insurance. (A local nonprofit group has helped her shop and other businesses cover the extra cost, giving many students the opportunity for on-the-job training.)“My generation was the one where they were cutting all the shop classes and turning them into computer programming classes,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez said. “It took 10 or 15 years for that to hit the market, but now, coupled with the retirement of a lot of skilled tradespeople, there’s a six-month wait for a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician. You’d better be married to one.”She is also critical of putting certain environmental concerns ahead of human ones, a position sure to alienate some in her party.“My mom grew up in Forks, Washington, which is sort of epicenter of the spotted owl, and that decimated jobs,” she said, referring to the federal decisions in the 1990s to declare the northern spotted owl as endangered, closing off millions of acres of old-growth forest to logging. “People had trouble feeding their families. That indignity cast a really long shadow. People felt like they were being told they couldn’t work.”The Trump administration opened up much of that habitat to logging in its final days, but that decision was later reversed by the Biden administration. (The congresswoman hasn’t weighed in on that reversal.)Winning over lost voters can often mean just talking about the kinds of daily concerns they have, even if they are not monumental. That’s why Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez is an enthusiastic supporter of the right-to-repair movement, which promotes federal and state laws to give consumers the knowledge and tools to fix their own products, whether smartphones, cars, or appliances. Many companies make it virtually impossible for most people to replace a phone battery or make an adjustment on their car.“From where I live, it’s a three-hour round trip to go to the Apple Store,” she said. “Right to repair hits people on so many levels — their time, their money, their environment, their culture. It’s one of the unique things about American culture. We really believe in fixing our own stuff and self-reliance. D.I.Y. is in our DNA.”She and Neal Dunn, a Republican congressman from Florida, introduced a bill last month that would require automakers to release diagnostic and repair information about cars so that owners wouldn’t have to go to a dealership to get fixed up. That’s probably not a surprising interest for the owner of an independent repair shop, but it’s not something most Democrats spend a lot of time talking about.It’s the kind of thing, however, that may spark the interest of swing voters tired of hearing Republican candidates talk about cultural issues that have no direct relevance to their lives.“We have to stop talking about these issues of ‘oh, the creeping dangers of socialism,’ and start talking about getting shop class back in the high schools,” she said. “I don’t know anybody who stays up at night worrying about socialism. But they worry about a kid who doesn’t want to go to school anymore. Or, am I going to lose the house? Is there a school nurse? Those are the things that keep people up at night, and we have to find a way to make their lives better.”

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      The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Teacher wins free speech case after wearing Trump-themed hat to school

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      Teacher wins free speech case after wearing Trump-themed hat to school Eric Dodge wore Make America Great Again baseball cap twice but judge found no ‘tangible disruption’ to Washington school A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a former teacher in Vancouver, Washington, concluding that his wearing a hat supporting Donald Trump to school was protected speech under the first amendment.Documents from the ninth circuit court of appeals show that Eric Dodge, a science teacher, brought the Make America Great Again baseball cap to an Evergreen Public Schools building twice before the 2019-2020 school year.According to the Columbian newspaper, the first occasion was a staff-only cultural sensitivity and racial bias training.The principal of Wy’east middle school, Caroline Garret, allegedly told Dodge to use better judgment.Dodge said he was “verbally attacked” by Garret and other school employees after bringing the hat again, and that retaliation amounted to a violation of his first amendment rights.In a ruling on 29 December, the appeals panel concluded that the district failed to show evidence of a “tangible disruption” to school operations necessary to outweigh the teacher’s first amendment rights.“That some may not like the political message being conveyed is par for the course and cannot itself be a basis for finding disruption of a kind that outweighs the speaker’s first amendment rights,” wrote the judge, Danielle J Forrest, a Trump appointee.Under the US constitution, freedom of expression does have significant exceptions.“There is hate speech, there is threatening speech,” Stephen Kanter, a first amendment expert and dean emeritus at the Lewis & Clark Law School, told the Oregonian/OregonLive. “But a Maga hat falls far short of that.”The appeals panel also found that Evergreen Public Schools and the district’s chief human resources officer, Janae Gomes, did not take improper administrative action against Dodge, who resigned in 2020.Neither Dodge nor Garrett could be reached for comment. Michael McFarland, a lawyer representing the school district and Gomes, said his clients were happy with the ruling.TopicsWashington stateUS politicsUS educationnewsReuse this content More

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      Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wins key House seat in Washington state

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      Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wins key House seat in Washington stateGluesenkamp Perez’s win over Trump-backed far-right candidate Joe Kent helps buoy party hopes of keeping a majority in the House

      US midterm election results – live
      Democrats have won a second key House race in Washington state – an open seat in a conservative region that long evaded the party.Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto-shop owner who describes herself as an independent-minded Democrat, pulled off a victory against Joe Kent, a far-right “America First” ex-Green Beret who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump, in south-west Washington’s third congressional district on Saturday.Combined with Rep Kim Schrier’s reelection to what Democrats feared was a vulnerable seat, Gluesenkamp Perez’s victory helped buoy party hopes of keeping a majority in the House.Democrats retain control of Senate after crucial victory in NevadaRead more“I am humbled and honored by the vote of confidence the people of South-west Washington have put in me and my campaign,“ Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement.The third district, which narrowly voted for Trump in 2020, had been represented for more than a decade by Republican Rep Jaime Herrera Beutler. But she failed to make it through the state’s top-two primary after angering conservatives with her vote to impeach Trump after the attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.Schrier survived a challenge from Republican Matt Larkin to win a third term in the eighth district, which stretches from Seattle’s wealthy eastern ex-urbs across the Cascade Mountains to the orchard country of central Washington. Schrier, a pediatrician, in 2018 became the first Democrat to win the seat since its creation in the early 1980s.“I don’t know which party will control Congress, but it’s races like mine – the ones that are sitting on a razor’s edge – that flip one way or another,” Schrier told the Associated Press. “If more of them flip in this direction, that may mean we have the majority and set the agenda.”By flipping the third district, which Democrats had not held since former rep Brian Baird retired in 2010, the party will now have eight of Washington’s 10 congressional seats. Herrera Beutler won 22% of the vote in the primary, and how her voters split between Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent may have been the deciding factor in the race.Gluesenkamp Perez, who co-owns an auto shop with her husband just across the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon, said that as a small business owner who lives in a rural part of the district, she was more in line with voters than Kent, who repeatedly had to explain his connections to rightwing extremists.Survivor winner Nick Wilson secures seat in Kentucky legislatureRead moreGluesenkamp Perez supports abortion access and policies to counter climate change, but also described herself as a gun owner who opposes an assault rifle ban, though she does support raising the age of purchase for such guns to 21. She wouldn’t be a “typical Democrat” in Congress, she said.Kent, a former Green Beret who is a regular on conservative cable and podcasts, has called for the impeachment of president Joe Biden and an investigation into the 2020 election. He’s also railed against Covid-19 shutdowns and vaccine mandates and has called to defund the FBI after the search on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents.In the eighth district, Schrier stressed results she has achieved, including helping to secure money for road projects, rural broadband access and police body cameras. She also emphasized that as the only female doctor in Congress who supports abortion rights, she’s a bulwark against any Republican efforts to restrict abortion nationally after the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. She called Larkin’s opposition to abortion rights disqualifying.Larkin is a lawyer and former Washington attorney general candidate who works for his family’s company, which makes parts for water pipes. Unlike more extreme Republican candidates, Larkin says Biden was legitimately elected, though he also notes that many people disagree and are frustrated about it. TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Washington stateHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Patty Murray Faces Stiff Challenge From Tiffany Smiley in Senate Race

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      SEATTLE — Ahead of their first election in Washington State, Carys Hagen and her partner, Shaw Lenox, stumbled upon a rally held for Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, on a stage in the corner of the Seattle Center.“Like, don’t love,” said Ms. Hagen, who identifies as a socialist, summing up her feelings about Ms. Murray after listening to the opening minutes of her stump speech. “But I’ll take ‘like’ any day of the week.”For Ms. Murray, who is facing a surprisingly tough race after three decades in Congress, the lack of enthusiasm is reason for concern.“If they just — ‘Oh, Patty’s fine, she always has been’ — that’s when elections get really tight,” Ms. Murray said in an interview. “Because we need Democrats to vote.”Since she first won her seat in 1992, Ms. Murray has steadily climbed the ranks to wield heavy, though understated, influence as a senior member of leadership and the chairwoman of the Senate committee that focuses on health, labor and education. Should she win a sixth term next week, she will be the fourth most senior senator and in line to be the top Democrat on the powerful Appropriations Committee that controls government spending.But her re-election hinges in large part on voters like Ms. Hagen putting aside their frustrations with a national party that has fallen short of some of its most expansive policy ambitions and casting a vote for Ms. Murray, whom many of them have come to regard as a fixture who will be there no matter what.She is working to fend off a surprisingly stiff challenge from Tiffany Smiley, a Republican who is mounting her first run for public office after years as a nurse, veterans affairs advocate and caregiver.Ms. Murray has spent the final weeks of her campaign trying to ward off complacency within her party.“We are a Democratic state,” she told a group at a “pro-choice, pro-Patty, pro-coffee” event at a local Seattle coffee shop. “If people vote.”In an open primary this year, Ms. Murray easily bested Ms. Smiley, winning more than 52 percent of the vote to Ms. Smiley’s nearly 34 percent, and she is still seen as the favorite to prevail. But Republicans have continued to funnel millions of dollars into Washington State, Ms. Smiley has out-raised the incumbent senator and polls have tightened in recent weeks, rattling some Democrats.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.If Ms. Smiley — who is 41, the same age Ms. Murray was when she first announced her run for office — were to prevail, she would be the state’s first Republican senator in more than two decades.Underscoring the severity of Ms. Smiley’s challenge in what political handicappers considered a safely Democratic seat until this month, multiple high-profile surrogates have trekked to Washington to rally for Ms. Murray and try to galvanize Democratic voters who they fear might fail to turn out for midterm elections in a typically liberal state.Tiffany Smiley, center, a nurse and veterans affairs advocate, is challenging Ms. Murray.Chona Kasinger for The New York TimesVice President Kamala Harris headlined a donor gathering in the state last week, as well as an event highlighting investments from the $1 trillion infrastructure law. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts came to rally supporters for Ms. Murray, a cerebral politician more comfortable in a private negotiation than at a raucous rally.“Patty is not the first person to jump into the spotlight; she’s not the loudest in high-volume debate,” Ms. Warren said in an interview before she walked out with Ms. Murray to Dolly Parton’s working woman’s anthem, “9 to 5.” “But she is effective — anyone who underestimates her is going to find out that they’re on the losing end.”Ms. Murray, 72, has also made a point of crisscrossing the Seattle suburbs and other parts of the state to connect with local leaders and ensure that her core Democratic supporters are turning out to vote. On a gray, drizzly Friday before the rally, she shuttled from a meeting with leaders at a historic Black church to visits with Asian American political leaders and businesses in the city’s international district.In prepared remarks that tick through her legislative accomplishments, she revisits the themes that helped pave her path to Washington three decades ago: the lore of how a male legislator dismissed her as a “mom in tennis shoes” — a slight that she adopted as her campaign calling card — her desire to protect women’s rights and a push to provide affordable health care.She has also focused on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision establishing a right to an abortion, and vowed to codify it into a law — a message that has resonated in the deep-blue suburbs and cities like Seattle.“We had this assurance for 50 years that we could make choices about our bodies,” said L’Nayim Austin, 51, who brought her 10-year-old daughter, dressed as a suffragist, to see Ms. Murray speak. “It’s infuriating.”Senator Elizabeth Warren, left, campaigned with Ms. Murray in Seattle in late October.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesMs. Murray has focused her campaign on turning out Democratic voters and supporting reproductive rights.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesAt her campaign office, where there are well-worn posters from previous campaigns scattered around, Ms. Murray described the election as challenging because “this time I have someone who isn’t telling people who she really is, and that’s much harder — she’s trying to look moderate, be conservative without telling anybody.”Ms. Smiley, who has pointedly noted that Ms. Murray once made a speech on the Senate floor praising her, has distanced herself from some conservative stances, saying she will not support a federal ban on abortion access or cutting back Social Security benefits. She has centered her campaign on reducing federal spending, addressing crime and increasing security at the nation’s southern border.And pressed in a recent interview, she asserted that President Biden is the nation’s “legitimately elected president,” though earlier in the campaign cycle, she dodged questions about whether he had been legitimately elected.That has led Ms. Murray and her allies to frame Ms. Smiley as aligned with the Republican Party’s far-right extremists, airing ads evoking the Jan. 6 riot and the prospect of cuts to social safety net programs. Ms. Smiley has accused her opponent of relying on political talking points to hide an ineffective policy record.“Maybe some of Senator Murray’s intentions are good, but we can’t base policy off of intentions,” Ms. Smiley said in an interview aboard her campaign bus, where she criticized many of Ms. Murray’s policies. “It’s very, very dangerous. Policy has to be based off of results.”Supporters have also connected with Ms. Smiley’s emotional recollection of her years of caregiving and advocacy, after her husband, Scotty, was blinded in a suicide car bomb attack in Iraq and became the first blind active-duty officer in the Army.At a rally kicking off her bus tour across the state, Ms. Smiley held back tears as she talked about her husband’s encouragement for her political campaign, reiterating a pledge to work so “that our children have a country worth giving their eyesight for” as the crowd murmured and cheered in approval. She will linger after events to warmly embrace supporters and pose for selfies, thanking them for their prayers ahead of the election.“She’s probably the one and only person maybe in the state who can beat Patty Murray,” said Angela Dabb, a small-business owner and Republican who attended an event on Ms. Smiley’s bus tour at Nana’s Southern Kitchen, a restaurant in Covington that boasted fried chicken and catfish. “I was in tears — and so when a politician can move you like that, you know it’s coming from their heart.”Supporters of Ms. Smiley have connected with her emotional recollection of caregiving and advocacy, after her husband was permanently blinded in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq.Chona Kasinger for The New York TimesA crowd of more than 100 people applauded Ms. Smiley as she kicked off her bus tour in Maple Valley, Wash.Chona Kasinger for The New York TimesAt stops along Ms. Smiley’s bus tour, attendees described frustration with years of Democratic control in their state and across the country. For multiple voters, it was the first time they had decided to volunteer for a campaign and attend events, seeing a glimmer of hope that Republicans could not only claim a seat in the Senate, but also flip at least one in the House.Ms. Smiley, for her part, has also worked to weaponize Ms. Murray’s decades on Capitol Hill, riffing off Ms. Murray’s own motto to brand herself “a new mom in town.” At a bar in Maple Valley a short drive outside Seattle, where she began the bus tour, a raucous crowd of more than 100 people cheered and applauded as Ms. Smiley appeared with her husband, accompanied by Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, and a soundtrack of Americana classics.They whooped and laughed as Ms. Ernst joined other national Republicans in lampooning Ms. Murray’s more taciturn affect, noting “I don’t know that I’ve seen her smile once” and calling for a change in representation.But Ms. Murray remained adamant that there was more for her to do in the Senate.“When I was running before, it was — we had no voices in the Senate, there wasn’t anybody in the rooms who could say what we needed to say,” she said, reflecting on her first campaign, in what would become known as the “year of the woman.” “I’m now in that room, but I need to be in that room by being elected.”Ms. Smiley’s supporters described frustration with years of Democratic control both in their state and across the country.Chona Kasinger for The New York Times More