It seems this legislative session has seen one surprise and standoff after another, from fallout over the DOC early release debacle to the Friday afternoon ouster of WSDOT Secretary Lynn Peterson.
“Poppycock. Bullfeathers,” said Governor Jay Inslee in a news conference the following week. “This is an election year stunt.”
Politics and polarization that feels more like Washington, D.C., but it turns out the other Washington suffers from its fair share, too.
Researcher Boris Shor, a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown, studies state legislatures across the country. He said Washington state has ranked as one of the most polarized since the mid-1990s.
Speaking at a Foley Institute Forum at the Capitol on Friday, he pointed to a graph showing California at the top of the list, followed by Colorado and Washington between the years 1986 to 2015.
Washington drops to fifth place upon analyzing only 2015, behind Texas and Arizona.
“This is something that I don’t see stopping anytime soon. The two parties are pulling apart nationally, and that tugs locally here as well. I don’t see any solution to this long term,” said Shor.