One of my least favorite acts in political commentary is when someone tries to solve Washington State’s politics by invoking Dan Evans. Pollster Stuart Elway’s numbers give that nostalgia something to point to: forty years of unbroken Democratic control over the governor’s office, and voters who feel less represented in state government with every passing cycle. The fix, we’re told, is a return to the “Evans moderate middle,” a lost bipartisan sweet spot the state misplaced sometime after Dixy Lee Ray. The trouble is that Dan Evans was never a moderate. To lean on another hackneyed cliché about Evans: he trained as a civil engineer before running for office, and it showed. Moderates manage what already exists. Engineers build what doesn’t. I want to acknowledge that taking on Stuart Elway is a steep climb. He has forgotten more about state government than most of us will ever know. But when commentators cleave too tightly to a common-sense understanding of the past, we are led deeply astray about our current situation. Evans governed from 1965 to 1977, a Republican in the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, closer in temperament to Nelson Rockefeller than to anyone currently running under that party’s banner. He didn’t administer the state so much as reconstruct it in ways that mayors like Katy Wilson or Zohran Mamdani, or other Democratic Socialists of America, could only dream of. His greatest achievements resemble a Beatles catalog more than the modest but snappy Cars discography his reputation suggests today. In 1970, before the federal EPA existed, his administration stood up the nation’s first state-level Department of Ecology. In 1967, he took a loose patchwork of junior colleges and welded it into a single, state-funded community college system, then built Evergreen State College out of nothing as an experiment in public liberal arts education. That same year, even before the Boldt Decision or co-management was a twinkle in the state’s eye, he created the State Indian Affairs Commission by executive order. In 1971, he did the same for the State Women’s Council. In 1975, over real regional hostility, he sent state officials to Camp Pendleton to welcome Southeast Asian refugees into Washington. In 1972, he pushed through the Washington Futures bond measures, a statewide investment in water systems, parkland, and pollution control that people now mostly take for granted, the way you take for granted a bridge you’ve never thought about falling down. None of that reads like the record of a man who split differences. Then come today’s actual battles. This fall’s election is shaping up to be an OK Corral over the idea of a state income tax. Even in what passed for Republicanism in the 1960s and 1970s, expanding the tax base was not a mainstream idea. Twice, in 1969 and again in 1973, Evans spent real political capital trying to replace the state’s sales-tax-dependent revenue system with a state income tax. He lost both times. The attempt was a bid to rip out the foundation of how Washington funds itself and pour a new one, which is as far from splitting the difference as a governor can get. I’m going to pause here to reflect on why I think Evans’ legacy is so misunderstood. Brent Walth’s “Fire at Eden’s Gate” is a definitive, third-party biography of Tom McCall, who in many ways was Oregon’s splashier counterpart to Dan Evans. Both governed as progressive Republicans during the 1960s and 1970s, and both harbored national political aspirations. McCall died in 1983, but both men were ultimately stymied because being a progressive in Republican politics left them without a clear lane. Crucially, “Fire at Eden’s Gate” (unlike McCall’s own autobiography, “Tom McCall: Maverick”) offers a clear-eyed explanation not only of who McCall was, but of how he developed and where he fit into Oregon’s trajectory. Rather than depending on short, 500-word spurts of political commentary, we have a 500-page literary history of the politician and the state to learn from. Evans’ own autobiography, disappointingly released four years ago by the Legacy Washington Project, is a mishmash of personal reflections, low-density insights, and oral histories. To say it fails to meet the moment is a drastic understatement. I can imagine a Brent Walth version of Evans’ life written in the 1980s or 1990s, offering Washington State historians and commentators a far clearer view of our political history through his career. Instead, we are left with a gauzy view of a moderate who never existed. So why does “moderate” stick to him anyway? Part of it is an optical illusion created by distance. Washington’s two parties no longer share any real ideological overlap. So any Republican who governed before that gap opened reads, in hindsight, as a centrist by default. If we cared about all three-term Republican governors equally, Art Langlie might equally be cited as Evans as our uber-moderate. Another part of it is a category error, the assumption that “worked with Democrats” must mean “wanted less” Republican things. The real story is that Democrats held the legislature through nearly all of Evans’s tenure, and working with them was the only way anything got done. He was simply doing what a governor does when he is looking for a win. It’s also worth asking who actually killed the income tax, because it wasn’t a mythical moderate middle failing to show up. Evans purged the John Birch Society from the state GOP in 1965 and took fire from his own party’s right flank for years afterward. His tax package died ironically at the hands of the Washington State Labor Council, working alongside conservative Democrats who didn’t trust that sales tax cuts would stay cut, that corporate loopholes would actually close, or that a Republican governor’s hand on an income tax lever wouldn’t eventually fall heavily on working people. That was an entrenched coalition choosing a flawed status quo over structural risk, which are two very different political afflictions. This is where Elway’s historic framing, for all its useful polling, points in the wrong direction. His numbers are accurate: voter optimism has fallen steadily since 2000, the sense of being represented in the state legislature has eroded just as steadily, and Gary Locke, Chris Gregoire, Jay Inslee, and Bob Ferguson have each posted negative job-performance ratings despite Democrats holding an eighteen-point (and growing) identification advantage and solid legislative majorities. But Elway’s frame treats the loss of two-party equilibrium as the cause, as if the discontent would ease the moment Republicans could compete again. It wouldn’t, because competition was never what people were actually missing. What voters are reacting to is that they keep electing candidates who run on structural change, and they keep getting careful administrators running Evans’s institutions on autopilot. Locke and Gregoire inherited the Department of Ecology, the community college system, Evergreen, the whole architecture Evans built, and they governed it defensively, protecting what already existed instead of building what didn’t. That approach stops holding up when housing costs triple in a generation, when transit can’t come close to keeping pace with growth, when the state still runs on the most regressive tax structure in the country. Running 1970s machinery with real competence starts to look, after enough years, less like governance and more like curating a museum. The actual disease is what one-party rule lets a party get away with: governing cautiously out of fear of a Republican challenger who, across most of Washington, doesn’t meaningfully exist. The cost of caution compounds. When a technocratic government stops asking why the road is falling apart and gets really good at patching the potholes, it opens a gap between what the government does and what people need it to do. That gap doesn’t stay empty for long. It’s exactly the space anti-institutionalism moves into, whether that takes the shape of a tax-slashing ballot initiative, a fringe candidate, or plain contempt for the idea that institutions can still accomplish anything. You don’t argue your way out of that kind of contempt with tighter management. You build your way out of it, the way Evans did, by giving people new institutions worth believing in. Evans was never the patron saint of restraint we keep invoking when they get tired of our government. He was the last governor in Washington State willing to treat the state itself as something you build. The moderate middle everyone’s nostalgic for never existed. What existed was a governor who thought building government was the job.

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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.