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Jay Inslee wants governors races to become the rallying cry for the resistance to President Donald Trump.


“It’s a great awakening that we have to fight on a state-by-state basis,” the Washington governor and chair of the Democratic Governors Association said in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

Democrats are tracking Republican gubernatorial primaries, where, in most states, candidates—even in Nevada, Michigan, Florida and Tennessee, where Trump’s backing of one candidate is already public—are still elbowing each other to out-Trump each other.

The strategy isn’t anything like that of many House Republicans, who are already trying to create distance from the president.

“If the Democrats want to use my support for the president and vice president against me, I say bring it on,” said Tennessee Rep. Diane Black, a Republican who’s running for governor, touting her support for the president wherever she goes. She believes her vote for his tax bill is going to be one of her best weapons.

That’s exactly the vulnerability Inslee believes Democrats can hit at, even though he continues to advise them to stay away from talking only about Trump himself all the time.

“We have Republican governors who are kowtowing to Donald Trump and will continue to do so, who have been lackeys to his abysmal record and his moral depravity and his inhumane policies, and that all across the country they will be called to account for that chaotic behavior,” Inslee said. “It’s been amazing to me, shocking and disappointing, that we have so many Republicans who now aspire for governor who just are afraid and shaking in their boots and won’t stand up against this man in the White House.”

Standing up to Trump is exactly what Inslee did, literally, last week in the White House, seizing a moment during a meeting of the National Governors Association to chastise Trump for his proposal to arm teachers. “We need to do a little less tweeting and a little more listening” to educators, Inslee told Trump, in what was the most direct public confrontation any Democratic leader has had with the president to date.

Trump listened, his arms folded across his chest, and moved on.

Inslee hasn’t. He wants his candidates to lean hard into pushing for restrictions on magazine size, banning bump stocks, raising the minimum age for buying assault rifles—and make it into an argument for states doing what Trump and the Republicans in Washington haven’t. “It comes down to Democratic governors who are standing up for action and the Republicans who are standing in the courthouse door just taking orders from the NRA,” said Inslee.

The difference between gubernatorial races in 2014 and 2018, Inslee argues, is both a wave now running in the other direction—“the potential tsunami zone,” he predicted—and the lack of many Republican incumbents in an environment when governors have been reelected in 50 of the 58 races since 2010. This year, 12 of the 26 races Democrats are chasing are open seats, and three—Kansas, South Carolina and Iowa—are against Republican lieutenant governors who moved up after their predecessors received appointments to the Trump administration and are now running for governor for the first time as incumbents.

Democrats have been down this road before. In 2014, they were convinced that the nine states President Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012 but which elected Republican governors in between, in the 2010 wave, were theirs for the taking.

Click here to subscribe and for the full podcast to hear Inslee discuss the song he recorded as a tribute to Carole King, how he channels his frustration into pastels, and the encounter he had last year with White House chief of staff John Kelly that defined his view of the Trump administration.

Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Ohio not only reelected Republican governors in 2014, but also went for Trump in 2016. Along the way, Trump picked up Pennsylvania, the sole Democratic gubernatorial flip in 2014.

But, Democrats argue, what also happened since was Ralph Northam winning Virginia in a blowout last year by talking up progressive issues (including gun control) and projecting an air of calm rejection of the president, while Republican nominee Ed Gillespie never found an answer to the Trump question that worked for both the GOP base and the general electorate.

Just as the Republican wins in 2014 governors races previewed Trump’s strength in key states and helped put in place policies that helped him along—passing right-to-work laws in Michigan and Wisconsin, for example, which undercut union strength on Election Day—Republicans are warning the White House to focus on governors races this year if only for the sake of protecting Trump’s reelection chances in 2020.

They’re also dismissive of any Democratic effort to nationalize gubernatorial races, pointing out that their own attempt to do that in Montana and West Virginia, two of the heaviest pro-Trump states, didn’t stop the states from electing Democratic governors on the same day in 2016.

Democrats and Republicans in Washington are both anxiously watching the states that put Trump over the edge to see how the dynamics will play out this year.

Bill Schuette, Michigan’s Republican attorney general and the front-runner in that state’s gubernatorial primary, dismissed Inslee’s strategy on Trump.

“It’s wishful thinking, and I think it really comes with the same strain and premise that said it was going to be Armageddon for Republicans in 2016, and that didn’t occur,” said Schuette, who likes to brag he’s the only candidate the president has tweeted about twice. (“The first time my name was misspelled. But you know what? Half of Michigan’s taken decades to learn how to spell my name.”)

Democrats who say that Trump is going to weigh down Republicans aren’t paying attention to what’s happening in Michigan or anywhere else, Schuette said.

Now, Schuette said, he’ll talk up the tax bill that House Republicans still can’t figure out how to message, and remind Michigan voters that Ram truck production has moved from Mexico to Macomb County under Trump: “It’s a shift of the rotation of the earth on its axis.”

Maybe try the Trump argument in bluer states—though in two of the bluest, Maryland and Massachusetts, Republican incumbents running for reelection have the highest approval numbers in the country—but not in any state where the president is popular.

“I’m delighted that this administration is going in the direction that they’re going,” Black said. “I lean into it, and I thank them for who they are.”

Inslee boasts not just about what happens when a state elects a Democratic governor, but what happens when a state puts the whole government in Democratic hands—as happened after a special election in the Washington state Senate last year flipped from red to blue—and upends control of the whole chamber.

In the few months since, Inslee has pushed through new laws on a clean energy plan, voting rights, pay equity and reproductive rights that he's preparing to sign.

Republicans say this represents overreach that will flip statehouse seats back in November. Inslee said he’s not worried, and he embraces the contrast with Congress.

“It’s not so much a debate between Plan A or B. It’s between Plan A and nothing, because that’s what the Republicans have offered,” Inslee said. “They’re not offering us a real solution on infrastructure. They’re not offering us a solution on climate change' they just denied its existence. They’re not offering a plan on really seriously what to do about gun violence. We are.”

The issue that grabs Inslee the most, though, is climate change. He wrote a whole book about it—“Apollo’s Fire”—in 2007, made a green jobs economy the centerpiece of his first gubernatorial campaign in 2012, and has prioritized it the past six years.

He thinks there’s enough attention to climate change that a candidate could even run on it in 2020 as an almost single-issue campaign.

“There’s points where things change, and I think we’re getting to that tipping point right now on climate change,” Inslee said. “And it has to happen now, because we don’t have a lot more time.”

He wouldn’t yet say whether that candidate might be him, despite the chatter about his running. His term is, after all, up in 2020, though there are no term limits in Washington.

“My term could be up as long as the people accept me,” Inslee said. “I have plans to be governor because I love the job and I feel that I’ve brought some things to the table for my state.”

