When Washington's new Democratic governor, Bob Ferguson, gave his inaugural speech two months ago, I drove down to the Statehouse in Olympia to check it out.
In a time of maximal partisanship, an unexpected scene played out in the House chambers.
As Ferguson waxed bipartisan or talked of slashing the budget, legislators took to their feet in enthusiasm and fist-bumped one another in the aisles. Only that was the Republicans.
His own party sat grumpily on their hands much of the time.
"How did you like the speech from our first Republican governor in 40 years?" one eye-rolling Democrat asked me when it was over.
For the record, I liked it fine. As I wrote back in January, what Ferguson is trying as governor is to "triangulate" between the two political parties, channeling the likes of former President Bill Clinton. As I recall, Clinton was pretty darn skilled on budget and tax issues.
Nobody's attempted such political triangulation in years. Because we're stuck in a political civil war of sorts — where moderation or working across the aisle are considered crimes punishable by primary.
Well now there's the first solid evidence that Ferguson's Democratic base might — I repeat, might — be growing a little squeamish about his new centrist flair.
DHM Research is a Portland-based company that polls Washington state four times a year. They did one in November, just after the election, that showed Ferguson had a plus-20 approval rating, 56% positive versus 36% negative. That included an overwhelming 86%-10% endorsement from Democrats.
Since then, Ferguson has begun to "come back down to earth," said DHM's research director, Devin Bales.
In a poll of Washington state released last month, DHM found Ferguson's approval rating had softened to 42%-32% — a net of plus-10 points.
Some of this drop was expected, as a winning politician is never more popular than on election night. A lot of the decline came from Democrats, though. The share of Ferguson's own party who have positive feelings about him fell from 86% in November to 65% now.
Republicans were sour about Ferguson in both polls. But the poll found approval of the new governor has soared among self-identified independents. It went from -19 points in November to +12 in the latest poll.
Bales said many independents in Washington these days tend to be moderate or right-leaning voters who can't abide the MAGA turn of the GOP. Ferguson seems to be resonating with them, while his own base softens.
"I think there's a bit of feeling that his actions, the messaging he's chosen as governor, are not what some people expected," Bales said. "He's presenting more as a realist, as a pragmatist. It isn't fire-breathing Trump fighting, which is maybe more what Democrats had hoped they were getting."
Example: Ferguson has now proposed $7 billion in state budget cuts, including furloughing state employees without pay one day every month. On social media on Sunday, he defended this by saying "we must make difficult choices and right-size state government."
He got pilloried by progressives. Every reaction to his post on the liberal Bluesky site mocked him for ceding the budget debate to the party that got shellacked in the Washington state elections, the Republicans.
One commenter dubbed him "the DOGE governor," name-checking Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Another called him a "cost-cutting Republican."
"If after you lose the next primary, you wonder what turned us against you, it was when you used the MBA-speak nonsense word 'right-size,' which is code for 'firing the people who make the least money,'" blasted a Sammamish book editor.
Now, social media isn't real life. And Bales cautioned that his poll is just one temperature reading at a time of swirling upheaval in politics, especially inside the Democratic Party.
"We'll be out with another poll in April, so it will be interesting to see where these trends go," Bales said.
Ferguson has positioned himself as an antidote to extremes in both parties — which is supposedly what a lion's share of voters say they want. But is it?
The same poll asked respondents to name the most important issue facing the state. Concerns about taxes ranked only ninth while "budget/spending" ranked 13th. Numbers 1 and 2 were "homelessness/poverty" and "cost of living," far outdistancing everything else. I haven't noticed Ferguson or state Democrats proposing strong new action so far on either of these top issues.
Appealing to independents might make editorial boards or chambers of commerce swoon, while leaving the Democratic base cold. That's a risk in a blue state getting bluer.
The poll also sent up a warning flare. In Washington state, Elon Musk and his chainsawing of the federal budget clocks in with a minus 18-point approval rating, 38% to 56%. Among Democrats, Musk is an irredeemable 70 points underwater, and with independents he's minus 29. Meanwhile, Republicans love what Musk is doing to the tune of plus 58.
Ferguson is going old-school to try to straddle the two parties on budget issues. But when they're this far apart, he might just end up doing the splits.
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