Last November, dishonest initiative promoter and chair thief Tim Eyman declared at a meeting of the Sound Transit Board of Directors that he would be running for Washington’s highest office in 2020. Eyman subsequently filed a declaration of candidacy with the Public Disclosure Commission and began holding nonstop campaign events — something he’s still doing today, despite the pandemic.
Despite having convinced reporters to cover his legal antics in opposition to Governor Jay Inslee’s stay home, stay healthy orders and despite being a regular fixture on right wing talk radio (Dori Monson and John Carlson just love having Eyman as a guest), Eyman has been experiencing negative momentum in his campaign. That’s right: Eyman has been losing support as he goes along.
The huckster never had much support to begin with, of course, but it’s still notable that the evidence suggests his candidacy is going in the wrong direction.
If the latest polling is accurate, Eyman will not survive the Top Two election, which is now in progress and set to conclude next month. (The voting deadline is August 4th and the election will be certified two weeks after that.)
The trend is certainly clear.
In January, not long before Eyman announced he’d be running as a Republican instead of as an independent, a KING5/SurveyUSA poll found Eyman at 11% against Inslee — more than any other Republican candidate, but not by much.
In May, another King5/SurveyUSA poll found that Eyman had dropped to 8%, while remaining the top Republican contender by less than the margin of error.
Today, a Crosscut/Elway Poll conducted just before voting began found that Eyman had dropped to a mere 4%. (With respect to methodology, the poll has a margin of error of 5% at the 95% level of confidence; the sample includes four hundred and two registered voters in Washington.)
Eyman now trails three other Republicans (Loren Culp, Raul Garcia, and Joshua Freed) while still coming in ahead of his former ally turned rival Phil Fortunato, who has called this year’s Republican contest for governor “a clown race”.
Elway’s survey finds that Culp is now the leading Republican in the race, with 14%. The Republic police chief has been promoting his extremist candidacy with billboards and online ads; he is well known among the Republican grassroots, and it looks like his message could be catching on with the party faithful.
Raul Garcia — who has received the backing of the elder statesmen active in the Mainstream Republicans of Washington — registered at 6%, while former Bothell City Councilmember Joshua Freed received 5%, the equivalent of the poll’s margin of error. Fortunato received only 2%. 24% of respondents said they were undecided; 46% expressed support for incumbent Jay Inslee.
If this polling is borne out by the actual election results next month and Eyman comes in second to last among the better known Republican candidates (none of whom are a credible challenger to Jay Inslee), it would represent an emphatic rejection of Eyman’s toxic “moshpit politics”, which he has erroneously claimed make him widely liked by voters and capable of getting results.
It’s important to note that 24% of voters told Elway’s interviewers they were undecided as to their choice for governor. That group of voters is larger than the group intending to vote for Culp and identical in size to the groups planning to vote for Culp, Garcia, and Eyman combined.
At least some of those voters will probably break for one of the Republican candidates, while others may decide that they’d rather stick with Inslee even if they’re not enthusiastic about his third term candidacy.
It’s safe to presume Inslee will secure the first place spot in the Top Two election. That means that only one of Inslee’s more than three dozen challengers will move on to the November runoff along with him.
Tim Eyman has been telling anyone who will listen that he’ll be that challenger.
“For twenty-two years, I’ve won the support of voters — Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. Repeatedly,” Eyman boasted in a July 10th email.
“I firmly believe I will win the August 4th [Top Two] and be the candidate chosen by the voters to challenge Jay Inslee in the fall campaign,” Eyman yapped in a July 15th email, adding for emphasis: “I’m confident of that.”
Swagger all you want, Tim, but the voting is happening now and the data suggests your campaign is going to end in a worse place then where it started.
It’s your name on the ballot this time, not a deceitfully worded ballot title that you selected when finalizing plans to force a vote on one of your poorly written initiatives. Voters will be passing judgment on you instead of responding to a one sided prompt that’s lacking in context. The clock is ticking — we’ll soon know how millions of Washingtonians really feel about your egotistical candidacy.
One Comment
402 registered voters doesn’t seem like a big enough sample size to result in an accurate poll. I’m not an expert on polling, but it would seem at least 2 to 3 times as many voters would need to be surveyed in order to obtain more accurate polling data. At least, that’s the kind of sample size that was used in at least one of the previous polls mentioned above. Also, a 5% margin of error is rather large if a poll is going to be accurate.
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