Playing the rich-California-dude card against the initiatives

Plus new polling on the initiatives and the governor's race and the Supremes consider if those relentless "sale" emails are spam.

If you’re a PNW native of a certain age, there’s a good chance the phrase “f**king Californians” was part of your upbringing. The closing decades of the 20th century brought waves of in-migration from the Golden State, and many people weren’t all that happy about it. 

Many of those new arrivals sailed in on a tide of money from selling their insanely overpriced houses in the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles. They spent freely on real estate and other things, and all that money transformed neighborhoods and even entire towns, in many cases displacing longtime residents.¹ To many PNW locals, the Californians felt like—acknowledging the bloody historical freight of this word in contemporary discourse—colonizers. Anti-Californian xenophobia was rife. 

So we were interested to see a new ad from Defend Washington targeting the background of Let’s Go Washington’s leader as a “millionaire from California.” Defend Washington is a PAC set up to oppose the slate of conservative ballot measures put forward by Let’s Go Washington, led by Brian Heywood—a California millionaire who moved his home and business to Washington in 2010 in part to escape the state’s steep income tax, per Jim Brunner’s profile in The Seattle Times.