Reader IW sent this by on Monday. Made my day.
The town of Sequim (pronounced “Squim”; pop. 8.000; Clallam County pop. 77,000) on Washington’s Olympic peninsula found its local government hijacked by the fringe right. Covid had swamped the local hopitals. Restrictions put in place by the local health officer brought a “tsunami of hatred” her way in the summer of 2020.
“People called for my public hanging,” Berry tells The Nation‘s Sasha Abramsky:
Going into the 2020 election, there were 19 counties in the nation that had voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1980, when Ronald Reagan was first elected. Eighteen of those counties, all rural, lost their bellwether status in 2020 by going for Trump. Clallam County became the sole holdout by narrowly supporting Biden.
Clallam County residents were perhaps too comfortable with Biden’s 3-point win (even higher in Sequim). Sequim’s new mayor was not.
William Armacost was first appointed to the city council in 2018, was elected unopposed to a four-year term in November 2019, and was finally appointed mayor by his colleagues in January 2020. After he became mayor, he was caught on camera pushing a shopping cart at a Costco wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a Stars and Stripes–painted skull and the words “THIS IS THE USA. We Eat Meat. We Drink Beer. We Own Guns. We Speak English. We Love Freedom. If you do not like that GET THE FUCK OUT.”
You snooze, they win
Things got ugly fast. Armacost and his Independent Advisory Association (IAA) forced the resignation of the popular city manager and secured appointments to city council for QAnon conspiracists. A power struggle ensued.
Armacost’s ascent to the mayorship was a red flag. All around Sequim, residents—whether they had previously been apolitical or had long been involved in political organizations and protests—reacted in horror to his bullying persona and far-right antics. “It was so raucous, and some of the statements were so ugly,” says Lisa Dekker, a member of the local chapter of Indivisible. “It shocked the progressive community.”
And then? Then, people organized the Sequim Good Governance League (SGGL) in the spring of 2021.
“All these conservative people snuck onto the city council when nobody opposed them,” says Ron Richards, a rugged 77-year-old onetime Clallam County commissioner who lives in a ranch house at the base of the Olympic Mountains and regularly hikes miles up into the snows for exercise. “And then they appointed their friends to government. It resulted in the most right-wing people you could imagine running the city of Sequim.” Horrified, Richards got involved in the SGGL.
They recruited candidates, canvassed every neighborhood, got up in the middle of the night to send e-mail blasts, and wrote postcards. On election night 2021, the organizing paid off (emphasis mine):
“When it turned out to be two-to-one,” [Lowell] Rathbun remembers, his reaction was visceral: “Holy crap! We kicked butt.”
SOS, the IAA, Armacost, and the other conservatives had, for two years, told everyone who would listen that they represented the silent majority of the county, that their brand of divide-and-conquer politics was the only brand worth selling. But, says [Marsha] McGuire, the former Library of Congress researcher, “At the election we proved it: They are not the majority.”
When the votes were counted, they showed that the SGGL-backed candidates had ridden a wave of genuine popular fury against the faux populists aligned with Armacost. In Sequim, the five SGGL candidates for city council—Rathbun, Janisse, Vicki Lowe, Kathy Downer, and Rachel Anderson—all got between 65 and 70 percent of the vote. Both hospital commissioners’ positions in the county went to SGGL candidates, as did the fire commission and school district posts up for election last year.
That’s how it’s done. When the left forfeits, when the right runs unopposed, the right fringe comes to believe they are the majority even in places they are not. Proving they are not takes work. Even forcing them to lose by less helps statewide candidates. You can’t win if you don’t show up to play.
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