Adding up lawmakers' bill wins in Olympia

Plus some recommended reading

Editor’s Note: Part of our continuing series on what happened (and didn’t happen) in the Legislature. In this edition, Tim digs deep into the legislative record and tries his hand at graphics. 

It’s tough to pass a bill in Olympia—just ask any lawmaker on the hill. But just how tricky is it, really, and do some lawmakers have a knack for writing new laws, more so than others? We ran the numbers to find out which veteran lawmakers¹ are most effective at bringing forth new policies.

Graphic by Tim Gruver.

Methodology: We included lawmakers who served a minimum of 10 years in either the Senate or House. First-term lawmakers and those who are newer to the Legislature were excluded, because we felt they didn’t have enough time in the sun for a fair comparison.

Since the Speaker of the House doesn’t carry or co-sponsor bills per tradition in Washington, we excluded the current House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, and ex-House Speaker and soon-to-be-retired Rep. Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, who spent most of his almost 30-year career holding that same gavel, from the analysis.

Notably, many lawmakers chair committees while others also juggle leadership roles in their caucuses on top of writing biennial budgets. This tends to limit how many bills lawmakers in these positions sponsor, though both parties always have outstanding workaholics.

We exported and analyzed a mountain of data from the statehouse’s Detailed Legislative Reports page from the 39 lawmakers who met our inclusion criteria. Since it’s easy enough to sign on to a bill as a co-sponsor, we focused only on bills were a lawmaker was the prime sponsor in the count.

Our analysis revealed a surprising statistic: Veteran lawmakers had just a 27% chance of passing a bill into law.

Politics aside, many ideas underpinning legislation are super controversial and/or expensive, making them difficult to pass.