Takeaways from the GOP convention

How much will the party's endorsements really matter?

The Washington State Republican Party’s convention this weekend was an attempt to unite the GOP behind a slate of candidates and avoid past blunders. Party leaders asked candidates to pledge to abide by the delegates’ decisions and drop out if they lost. Not too surprisingly, given the political parties’ limited juice¹ in Washington, some candidates took a pass. As a result, the grand unification plan failed spectacularly in some key areas and kinda-sorta succeeded in others, though the successes look unlikely to lead to Republican office-holders.

We’ll break down the fallout, but first, a little context:

Republicans surrendered the governor’s office in the 1980s, and currently hold no state offices. Democrats have seized their former strongholds in the suburbs. The party’s candidates had a rough year in 2022, weighed down by the dual anchors of Donald Trump and the Dobbs decision, both of which fired up Democrats. The rising power within the party of hard-right Trump zealots does not bode well for folks who yearn for the comparatively even-keeled conservatism of the past. A bad 2024 could leave the party marooned in the backwaters of irrelevance and riven by internal strife.