The quest for recognition

Facing long odds, 3 Democratic challengers for Legislature struggle for media attention. Should they campaign in the buff?

A political activist told me recently that Andi Day, Mike Coverdale and Terry Carlson could walk naked down Commerce Avenue in Longview and not get any press coverage.

Hyperbole? To be sure — but one born of frustration that these three Democrats, who are running uphill campaigns for the state Legislature, are getting scant media or public attention.

Day, Coverdale and Carlson are opposing Republican incumbents for seats representing the 19th District, a six-county area that stretches from Longview west to the coast and up to Aberdeen. But they are also fighting the decline in print media and the evolution of this corner of the state into a Republican stronghold.

Their plight highlights how this region has lost political clout and will likely remain a political backwater for some time.

Day, Carlson and Coverdale are personable, credible, well spoken and likable candidates. They are concentrating their messaging on a basic theme: The 19th District Republican incumbents — state Reps Jim Walsh of Aberdeen, Joel McEntire of Cathlamet and state Sen. Jeff Wilson of Longview —have not delivered for the district, partly due to Walsh’s extremism.

“Everyone is focused on the presidential and congressional and (county) levels (of government), and no one is talking much about the state level, and that’s where we are paying the most opportunity costs,” Day said.

Explaining herself, Day said that state transportation funding and projects for the 19th District have declined 50%, while state transportation funding has doubled. Walsh and Wilson serve on the House and Senate Transportation committees.

“This really paints a picture of the ineffectiveness of our (legislative) team in Olympia. It’s hard for people to see what we are losing,” Day says.

Day, 56, is a fifth-generation member of a Washington commercial fishing family who grew up in the 19th District and who is raising a 13-year-old son in Seaview. She is challenging Wilson, who is seeking his second four-year term as the district’s state senator.

Day is a self-employed tourism consultant whose work frequently puts her in contact with legislators and the business community. Her priorities are improving schools, job opportunities, public infrastructure and access to health care.

“It is so hard to create a campaign strategy when people are not getting their information from a central, unbiased source. That also contributes to polarization.”

— Legislative candidate Andi Day

Carlson, 44, grew up Granite Falls, Washington, and has lived in Longview for eight years. He worked in the woods for more than two decades, including as a Weyerhaeuser Co. timber processor operator. He’s on medical leave and earned an online degree in psychology from Washington State University. He’s a dyed-in-the wool union advocate and is vice president of The Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Central Labor Council. He opposes McEntire.

“In all honesty, I appeal to both sides of the aisle,” he told me in a recent interview. “I have gotten compliments from Republicans who tell me I’m the only Democrat they will vote for because the like my message.”

His priorities are supporting local economic growth, encouraging development of affordable senior housing and protecting reproductive rights.

Coverdale, 65, grew up in Westport and returned there to raise his family in 1991 after careers in the military and as a contract pilot. He’s now a real estate broker.

He is critical of Walsh, whom he is opposing. Among other actions, Coverdale objects to Walsh’s proposal to give families state money to send kids to charter schools — “that would gut the public school system” — and for voting against capping the price of insulin.

“Walsh is the one who is hurting us the most. He turns his back to us and is failing us,” Coverdale said. “He is grandstanding and climbing the political ladder and not representing us.”

The district needs representation on the Natural Resources Committee to advocate for the region’s industries, Coverdale said. For example, the heavily timbered region should be a natural place for the state to adopt incentives to start a laminated lumber mill, he said.

Coverdale, Carlson and Day all oppose three November ballot initiatives that their Republican adversaries support: I-2109, which would repeal a capital gains tax on the wealthy; I-2117, which would repeal the “cap and trade” carbon reduction law; and I-2124, which would allow workers to opt-out of the state’s long-term care insurance program.

The challengers also are very much long shots.

Campaign contributions to Wilson, Walsh and McEntire have generally doubled those to their challengers, according to state campaign finance records.

None of the three Democrats got more than 40% of the primary election vote, even though they were essentially the only challengers in the “top two” contest.

In some respects, they are in a political Catch 22: They get little money and attention because they’re considered long-shots in a conservative district. But the lack of support and media attention makes them even less likely to beat the odds.

Incumbents, of course, almost always have an advantage over challengers, both in campaign funding support and press coverage before campaigning even begins.

All the daily newspapers in the district have declined markedly. They no longer have enough staff to adequately cover legislative races, and do so only superficially when they do. Conflicts arising from the actions of the Cowlitz County Commissioners and the new Longview City Council, plus hotly contested races for county commissioner, have driven legislative races here into the information shadows.

“It is so hard to create a campaign strategy when people are not getting their information from a central, unbiased source,” Day said. “That also contributes to polarization” because voters fill the void by getting information from Facebook and other online sources that reinforce their own biases. “That is unfortunate. It is really challenging to reach people, especially in a district that is massive like this one.”

In the late 1970s and 1980s The Daily News employed a state capital reporter who also covered state government for Bellevue and Port Angeles dailies. That position vanished decades ago. At least two dozens news organizations once sent reporters to cover legislative sessions in Olympia, but that number has diminished to two or three.

When I was a young TDN reporter in the early 1980s, I once was assigned to cover a single state legislative race. Now a single reporter covers Kelso, Longview, County and our state lawmakers. An impossible task.

This shortage of local news coverage is a national problem, and it should be a grave concern for anyone concerned about the future of representative government.

There is a dearth of watchdog or even basic journalism in the state capital and legislative ranks. Voters simply know little about what their lawmakers are doing — or how challengers may be trying to call them out for it.

“The print media budgets are shot and we don’t have as many journalists writing about political stuff,” Coverdale said. “They do not have the people creating stories and talking about things, and they wait for submissions from Jim Walsh … and that leaves half the conversation unreported.”

“I get the same core group of people every time. You rarely get new people to attend. It’s hard to get a forum for people to listen to your message.”

— Legislative candidate Terry Carlson

The 19th District is also sprawling, making it a challenge to mount a successful campaign without press attention. It takes two hours or more to drive from end to end. It’s difficult for challengers to win name familiarity in its four different population centers — Longview, the Long Beach Peninsula, Willapa Harbor (Raymond/South Bend) and Twin Harbors (Aberdeen/Hoquiam.)

Coverdale, Carlson and Day are attending festivals, marching in parades, holding listening sessions, seeking endorsements, organizing joint forums around the district and managing Facebook pages in an attempt to attract attention and build support. They coordinate appearances so that at least one of them attends any major campaign opportunity.

But these and other grassroots campaigning techniques are marginally effective in a district of this size — especially when it is hard to get word out in the first place.

Carlson said he’s frustrated that the lack of publicity undercuts scheduled campaign events. “I get the same core group of people every time. You rarely get new people to attend. It’s hard to get a forum for people to listen to your message.”

Printed Primary Election voter guides also did not include the names of 19th District legislative candidates, in part for budgetary reasons. That deprived the candidates of name recognition and brief way of messaging voters at a critical stage of the election season.

Shifting political winds in the 19th District have also made success even more elusive for 19th District Democrats. The area was reliably Democrat for decades, electing centrist figures such as the late state Sen. Sid Snyder of Long Beach, state Sen. Dean Takko of Longview and state Rep. Brian Blake of Aberdeen.

But Blake and Takko both got voted out in 2020 and were replaced by McEntire and Wilson, respectively. In 2016 Walsh — a libertarian firebrand — defeated Longview Democrat Teresa Purcell for an open seat.

The political shift coincided with the national rise of Trumpism, the decline of the region’s rural economies and loss of industrial union membership. Carlson said he still gets union leadership support, but the rank-and-file “is all about MAGA,” with much of that support due to opposition to gun controls, he said.

Whether you approve of this political shift or not, it means a loss of political clout for the 19th District, because Democrats already hold solid Legislative majorities that might hit record levels depending on the outcome of the November election.

Democratic dominance leaves the district’s three-Republican delegation with scant influence. And Walsh’s extremism hasn’t helped: He’s the GOP state chair. His well-publicized rallies with the radical right Patriot Prayer and Three Percenters groups to protest COVID restrictions have put him and this district on the fringe, as if it were “a lost tribe,” as one longtime observer of regional poliics told me.

Barring a major upset in November, the district is likely to remain that way for some time.