Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
Washington state Rep. Beth Doglio is backed by a broad collection of progressive groups in her run for the U.S. House.
Last year, Amazon tried to buy the Seattle City Council. It marked the first time that the company had used its considerable financial resources to intervene in a major way in local politics, spending well over a million dollars to boost business-friendly candidates and quash progressives across the board. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressives openly condemned the corporate intrusion into the political process, and warned about the precedent it would set going forward.
Incredibly, Amazon’s blitz failed. Of the seven candidates it backed financially, only two of them triumphed, and one of them was a progressive incumbent backed by labor. The entire effort was “a disaster,” according to various tech and business publications. And at the heart of that botch was its mastermind, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce president Marilyn Strickland, who raked in $1.45 million in Amazon money and then orchestrated the doomed strategy to deliver those City Council seats.
Now, Strickland, the former mayor of Tacoma, is aiming for higher office herself, running for an open House slot in Washington’s Tenth District, a solid blue seat in a broadly Democratic state. Washington state’s primary process advances the top two vote-getters to the general election, and Strickland emerged from a crowded field into a Democrat-on-Democrat runoff with state legislator and environmental activist Beth Doglio.
While Amazon hasn’t deluged Strickland directly with donations, she’s received significant financial support from the Chamber of Commerce that Amazon sponsors, as well as other area corporates like Boeing. Strickland and Doglio approximate the two poles of Democratic politics in both Washington state and the nation broadly, with Strickland representing the interests of massive corporations that benefit from sideways tax policies and Doglio representing a climate-centered environmental activism. Democrats pride themselves on their big tent; Strickland and Doglio are at far opposite ends of it.
Doglio, like an emerging class of Democratic representatives, is part organizer, part politician. She directed the Power Past Coal campaign, one of the most successful and high-profile environmental fights of the decade, which prevented the construction of seven separate coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest. She then ran for and won a seat in the state legislature, quickly becoming one of Washington’s most active lawmakers on climate, housing, and health care. “I was really frustrated at how there weren’t enough women in the legislature and we weren’t moving climate policy at scale, doing nothing for years,” Doglio told me.
In her run for the House, Doglio, who supports the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, has refused all fossil fuel and corporate PAC money. Her campaign has brought together a unique coalition of supporters, binding legacy environmental and LGBT groups with youth activists and national Democrats. She’s got the broad support of labor, including the nurses, teachers, firefighters, and other unions, a constituency that doesn’t often ally itself with the environmental movement. Local tribal leadership, whom Strickland alienated as Tacoma’s mayor by backing fossil fuel infrastructure projects that they said were in violation of their treaty rights, is on Doglio’s side as well.
She’s also been a priority of new progressive forces in Washington and Washington, D.C. She’s endorsed by multiple local chapters of Sunrise, as well as the national chapter, which is in the midst of a 100,000-dial phone-banking operation on her behalf. She was one of the first endorsements issued by Sen. Ed Markey after he vanquished Joe Kennedy in his Senate primary. She’s been endorsed enthusiastically by fellow Washingtonian and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal. And she secured the sought-after endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Courage to Change PAC. “Beth is the only candidate that will be an ally to youth and to environmental advocates,” said Mariana Sanchez, politics lead of Sunrise Tacoma.
Doglio is also backed by a new, more institutional Democratic force, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. This is the first cycle in which CPC PAC has been involved, spending on behalf of progressive targets in Democrat-on-Democrat races, echoing the strategy pursued by progressive groups like Sunrise and Justice Democrats. Doglio is one of the just three candidates they’ve spent big on in this cycle, joining New York’s Mondaire Jones and Nebraska’s Kara Eastman, and she factors in significantly to their strategy. In the primary, they paid to get her on TV ads and just announced another six-figure buy on her behalf.
Strickland and Doglio approximate the two poles of Democratic politics in both Washington state and the nation broadly.
Strickland, meanwhile, made an early attempt to cast herself as a progressive, touting an environmental record in the primary and pledging not to take corporate PAC money. But once she made it into the runoff, she rescinded that pledge, and has been reaping the benefits of corporate largesse. The basis of her environmental record, upon closer inspection, is largely built on the expansion of the region’s natural gas facilities during her time as Tacoma’s mayor, a case which relies on misclassifying liquefied natural gas as clean energy, a popular sleight-of-hand trick from the early 2010s that scientific studies have since debunked. “She calls herself a climate advocate but her record doesn’t show any of that,” said Sanchez. “Marilyn has always sided with big business and has never opposed new proposals for fossil fuel expansion. It’s a total greenwashing of her campaign.”
Strickland has benefitted from the name recognition of a multiterm mayoral stint from 2010 to 2018, during which she dubiously claimed to have led the city out of the crippling aftermath of the Great Recession. In fact, Tacoma bounced back more slowly than neighboring Seattle and the state broadly, a lopsided recovery that hurt the region’s Black residents particularly. Well into 2016, Tacoma’s unemployment rate remained higher than pre-recession levels and above the Washington average, while Black Tacomans were saddled with an unemployment rate 65 percent higher than the city at large, while big business flourished. In 2018, she left the mayor’s office to take over at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
“I don’t use the term ‘corporate Democrat’ lightly—I think it’s a very easy label to throw around that people use when they don’t like someone—but Marilyn strikes me as the most corporate Democrat I’ve seen in years of involvement in Democratic politics,” said RL Miller, political director of Climate Hawks Vote and member of the DNC. “Amazon, the Chamber of Commerce, and Seattle’s billionaire class attempted a corporate takeover of City Hall in last year’s election, and failed,” added Councilmember Kshama Sawant, one of the politicians targeted in last year’s election, in an email. “Strickland’s thoroughly pro-corporate background and blatantly big business election campaign are a reminder of why the Democratic establishment is not on the side of working people.”
That’s part of a concerning nationwide trend. This election cycle has seen a profound shift in the role of the Chamber of Commerce within Democratic politics. Long considered a functional outgrowth of the Republican Party, the U.S. Chamber has endorsed 23 vulnerable House Democrats for re-election, and 30 Democrats in total this cycle. That decision has rankled some conservatives, but is just as frustrating for progressives, who are watching pro-business forces quickly commandeer parts of the party.
Local chambers of commerce tend to be more parochial than the national, but Strickland’s experience makes her an exceptional avatar of this broader incursion. In 2018, after the Seattle City Council passed a large corporations tax, which levied a small charge (just $275 per employee) on corporate behemoths like Amazon to help pay for housing and homelessness services, the Chamber, under Strickland’s leadership, launched a pressure campaign to keep the bill from being enacted, threatening a referendum. They quickly succeeded; in a backroom deal, the city agreed to repeal it. “The announcement from Mayor Durkan and the City Council is the breath of fresh air Seattle needs,” said Strickland at the time. “Repealing the tax on jobs gives our region the chance to address homelessness in a productive, focused and unified way.” Seattle remains among the top four cities in the country in homelessness. During that same period, Doglio was working to pass housing legislation at the state level.
In her run for the House, Doglio, who supports the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, has refused all fossil fuel and corporate PAC money.
That record has endeared Strickland to all parts of the business community, including the real estate lobby and private health insurers like Cigna, both of which are supporting her campaign. Strickland’s long-standing mutual embrace of the corporate community, teamed with her disavowal of the “no corporate PAC money” pledge has helped lead to a widening fundraising advantage, as the Chamber of Commerce sees an opportunity to secure another Democratic seat in Congress, all of which has her poised to pull away in the final weeks of this race. “I cannot think of a clearer contrast between the two wings of the Democratic Party,” said Miller.
And yet, the WA-10 race hasn’t received the level of national attention from progressive groups that similar races have, which may prove extremely shortsighted if Strickland wins out. A safe Democratic seat like this is likely to be held by the incumbent for decades. Right now, progressives and climate activists alike are going to win either a powerful ally in the House, or a lifelong opponent.
Doglio would bring another activist voice to the Congress, someone who understands how to wield political power at multiple levels, both where policy is made and in the communities where it’s actually enacted. This cycle has seen Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush added to their ranks as Black Lives Matter activists; Washington state now has a chance to send one of its own. “I’ve been working it on the inside and the outside,” said Doglio. “We need someone to fight, fight, fight for people and our planet.”
