Spin Control: Flags at half-staff last week to mark Evans’ passing

Anyone who caught sight of a city or state flagpole last Tuesday might have wondered “Why is the flag at half-staff?” Which is probably more polite than the other reaction: “Who died?”

The city and state flags were at half-staff to honor former Gov. Dan Evans. Although he died in September, they were lowered because a memorial service was held that day in Seattle.

As a former legislator, former U.S. senator, former university president and the state’s first three-term governor, Evans always seemed to be the Energizer Bunny of Washington politics.

It wasn’t just that he outlived his three immediate successors, Dixy Lee Ray, John Spellman and Booth Gardner. After leaving office, he was active in academia, business and civic affairs.

And, as former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell put it at his memorial service, he was also a devoted conservationist.

That reminded me of five years ago, during a gathering of the Mainstream Republicans in Leavenworth, Evans offered to lead anyone interested on a hike in the nearby Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. On the way to the car, I happened to pass former Sen. Slade Gorton, the other elder statesmen of the group who was roughly the same age as his longtime friend and ally Evans.

When asked if he was going for the hike, Gorton looked at me like I was crazy and shook his head. “That’s Evans’ thing,” he said.

At the trailhead, where everyone was at least one generation younger and most were two or three generations younger, Evans produced a pair of well-used hiking poles and began to set a pace. I fell in next to him and started doing the kind of “walk and talk interview” reporters often have to do with politicians.

He explained how in the ’70s he showed a book about the area to then-President Gerald Ford when there was doubt whether the bill creating the wilderness area would be signed into law. Ford was so captivated by the book that their scheduled 15-minute meeting stretched to 40 minutes, and Ford promised to sign it.

When he finished the story, we paused to look at some wildflowers and happened to glance back. The pace Evans set had separated us from the rest of the younger hikers.

They were out of sight, somewhere down the trail, and we had to wait several minutes to let them catch up. He allowed them to catch their breath and led them to a spot along a rushing creek to pose for pictures.

At the service, his former chief of staff Bill Jacobs quoted the closing line from an earlier Evans speech:

“For all of our children and grandchildren, may you dream grandly and plan wisely in building a world class 21st century community.”

Voter participation down

For all the talk about engaging voters and getting out the vote, 2024 is going into the books as Washington’s first election in 28 years in which fewer votes were cast than the previous presidential election.

Four years ago, more than 4.1 million Washington voters returned their ballots, a turnout rate of 84.1%

Although about 64,000 votes remain to be processed and tallied statewide as of Friday, the total will not reach 4 million, and turnout won’t hit 80%.

So what, you might say. Another 200,000 votes wouldn’t have swung Washington from Kamala Harris to Donald Trump. That’s true. She’s currently ahead by 700,000 votes.

As in previous years, the Democratic presidential candidate got between 54% and 58% of the vote, and the Republican got between 38% and 41%. But Harris’s total was more than 200,000 below Biden’s total in 2020 and Trump’s 2024 is about 100,000 below his from four years ago.

The drop seems surprising after all the talk in the month before the election of “turning out the vote.”

That may have helped get more voters on the polls in Washington. The number of registered voters in the state grew by more than 24,000 between Nov. 1 and Election Day. Yet the overall turnout went down in Washington for the first time since President Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996.

Washington isn’t the only state with a drop in turnout, and the total number of votes cast in the presidential race is about 6 million below 2020. More than half the states are reporting lower vote totals. Many are still counting ballots, but don’t have enough to get in to the plus column for turnout.

It’s interesting, however, that six of the seven “swing states” had an increase in turnout, all of which benefited Trump, as he did better in all of them than in 2020, and Harris did worse than Joe Biden did four years ago.