Dave Upthegrove (photo, left; bio here), 53, a Democrat, likely will be Washington’s next Commissioner of Public Lands.
He’s currently a King County Councilman, and previously served in the legislature. He will succeed Hilary Franz, a Democrat who didn’t seek reelection and instead is running for Congress in 2024.
Currently, Democrats hold all of Washington’s statewide elective offices, and it’s likely to stay that way. But the 2024 Public Lands race is the result of a fantastical, and fascinating, game of musical chairs that began with GOP congresswoman Jaime Herrera-Buetler’s defeat in 2022.
That resulted from her vote to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. She lost the 2022 primary to a Trump loyalist who was beaten in the November 2022 midterm election, and that congressional seat is now in Democratic hands, with the same two candidates facing off again in November 2024.
Meanwhile, Washington’s 3-term governor, Jay Inslee, also a Democrat, now 73 years old, decided to retire, prompting Franz to give up the Public Lands office to run for governor. But then U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, 50, a Democrat, decided to leave Congress and Franz switched to that more winnable race.
Back in 2020, Franz won re-election to Public Lands against Sue Kuehl Pederson. In 2024, with that office up for grabs, Pederson decided to try again; Herrera-Buetler saw an opening to return to public office; and Upthegrove decided to seek a promotion from county council to statewide office. Several lesser aspirants also decided to run.
Washington uses a top-two primary system in which the two candidates with the most votes advance to the general election. In the August 6, 2024, Public Lands primary, Herrera-Buetler got the most votes with 419,297. Her November opponent would be either Upthegrove with 396,300 votes, or Pederson with 396,249 votes.
With Upthegrove and Pederson just 51 votes apart, a hand recount was automatic. If Pederson bested Upthegrove, there would be two Republicans on the November ballot. But that didn’t happen. The recount reduced Upthegrove’s lead by 2 votes, to 49 votes (see story here), and Washington voters tenatively will have a choice between a Republican (Herrera-Buetler) and a Democrat (Upthegrove) in November 2024.
However, those results may not be final, because the state GOP has filed a court challenge over King County’s handling of ballots with missing or defective signatures (link directly above). But assuming these results stand, the primary election math says Upthegrove will win the November election.
Before the recount, Herrera-Buetler had 22,997 more votes than Upthegrove, but the Republican vote was split between two candidates, while the Democratic vote was split among five candidates. Of 1,903,073 total votes, the five Democrats got 1,085,859 votes and the two Republicans got 815,546 votes (the other 1,668 voters were write-ins).
Of course, the November electorate won’t be precisely the same. Usually more people vote in November, plus there’s turnover from people entering and leaving the voting rolls. But let’s talk percentages.
I’ve written on this blog that any Republican in a Washington statewide race will get 42%, because that’s the GOP voter base in this state. Gadfly candidate Loren Culp, running against Inslee in 2020, got 43.12%; and Tiffany Smiley, a newcomer to politics, got 42.63% against U.S. Sen. Patty Murray in 2022 (see article here).
But it’s very difficult for any Republican to get much above that baseline. Washington is a blue state, with two-thirds of its population concentrated in the Seattle-Tacoma metro area, where liberal politics dominates.
In the 2024 Public Lands primary, the two Republican candidates got a combined 42.85% of the votes, smack in that target range. Herrera-Buetler might do a little better in November, because of name familiarity and her image as a moderate Republican, but she will not get close to 50%. Public Lands is a low-profile race, so I’m guessing most voters will vote party, rather than candidate, and that likely will limit Herrera-Buetler to 43-44% of the vote.
I feel confident in saying Dave Upthegrove, despite his close call in the primary, will win easily in November and become Washington’s next Public Lands Commissioner. But if he has ambitions beyond that, there’s not a clear path for him to the governor’s office, and he’ll more likely turn his gaze to a seat in Congress if/when one opens up.
Inslee will be succeeded by Bob Ferguson, the current attorney general. The governor before Inslee also was attorney general, so that’s the stepping stone to the statehouse. With Ferguson vacating that office to run for governor, his successor would be the logical candidate to succeed him in the statehouse. Upthegrove isn’t a lawyer, so he can’t move from Public Lands to attorney general in the future; that path to the governor’s office is barred.
If he stays at Public Lands for 8 years, he’ll be 61, still young enough to seek another office. With his legislative and county council experience, the logical path for him would be one of the U.S. House seats in western Washington, possibly even the one Herrera-Buetler vacated in 2022.
I can’t guess what she’ll do after losing the 2024 Public Lands race; by the next election, the 2026 midterms, she’ll have been out of public office for 4 years, so maybe this election is the end of the road for her poltical career.