I told Eyman as much when I first contacted him for this piece in the days after the Nov. 5 election, asking for an interview.

What this story never was supposed to be about: profiling a serious candidate for public office — something Eyman still may or may not actually be.

“He's playing you guys," Condotta said. "Frankly, he's playing all of us."

Initiative activist Tim Eyman appears in Thurston County Superior Court, Feb. 22, 2019, in Olympia. (Ted S. Warren/AP)

Success at the ballot box, if not in court

Since sponsoring his first ballot measure in 1998, Eyman has found repeated success with voters, even as he has run afoul of campaign finance regulators and the law.

All told, 17 of Eyman’s initiatives have attracted enough signatures to get on the ballot in the past 21 years. Voters have rejected six of them.

Repeatedly, though, the effects of Eyman’s winning ballot measures have been curtailed by judges who have found them legally unsound. Of the 10 Eyman initiatives that voters approved before I-976, eight were thrown out or partly blocked by the courts. Only two — 2005’s Initiative 900, requiring performance audits of government agencies, and Initiative 200, a 1998 measure banning affirmative action in government programs — have been unaffected by legal challenges.

“The No. 1 thing Tim Eyman has shown me is how to write an unconstitutional initiative,” said state Rep. Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, recently chosen by her colleagues to become the next speaker of the House. “Honestly, if you look at his record, that’s what he has been most successful at.”

Some high-profile court proceedings have focused on Eyman himself, not just the validity of his initiatives. In 2002, Eyman paid $42,000 to settle a case brought by the state attorney general’s office. State officials alleged Eyman secretly siphoned money from his political committee to pay himself without properly reporting those payments. While Eyman admitted lying to the press, he and his lawyers insisted through the end that the state had no case.

As part of the 2002 settlement, Eyman was hit with a lifetime ban on serving as a treasurer of a political committee or controlling a political committee’s finances.

The past year has brought a new level of legal trouble for Eyman. He was charged with misdemeanor theft in February, after being captured on surveillance video taking a chair from an Office Depot in Lacey.

In July, authorities agreed they would drop the theft charge if Eyman avoids criminal actions and doesn’t return to the Lacey Office Depot for nine months. Eyman didn't admit guilt as part of the settlement.

Meanwhile, Eyman remains embroiled in yet another yearslong campaign-finance lawsuit, one that even he admits could derail his career of raising money for initiatives.

Right now, Eyman is in contempt of court for failing to turn over information in a civil case brought by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson. Similar to the 2002 case, Ferguson has accused Eyman of enriching himself with donations meant to support initiative campaigns.

If a judge rules against Eyman, the initiative promoter could be forced to pay more than $3 million in penalties and be banned from any involvement in the finances of political committees for the rest of his life. That’s a broader and more severe penalty than the more narrow ban he agreed to 17 years ago.

In the middle of it all, Eyman filed for bankruptcy last year, citing the financial burdens associated with his legal case, which he said also put a strain on his marriage and contributed to his filing for divorce in May.

Yet Eyman has been in high spirits this fall, at least outwardly. With I-976, he scored his first win at the ballot box in four years, even though business interests, labor unions and other groups spent more than $4 million to try to defeat the initiative.

“I think he was on the ropes, and punched himself back into contention with I-976,” said John Carlson, a conservative morning talk show host who ran three statewide initiative campaigns in the 1990s.

I-976 marks the third time Eyman has successfully passed a measure to limit car-tab fees. Voters approved Eyman’s first $30-car-tab measure in 1999, then passed another version of the idea in 2002.

Eyman’s political history similarly came full circle this month with the failure of Referendum 88, which would have lifted I-200’s ban on affirmative action in government programs. I-200 was the first initiative Eyman ever sponsored. It prohibited race, gender or ethnicity from being considered as factors in public hiring, contracting and public university admissions.

Carlson, who headed up the statewide initiative campaign for I-200 in 1998, said Eyman has been able to tap into Washington voters’ fiscally conservative streak, which he said “is rooted in a healthy skepticism of government.”

“Usually, when there is tax relief, it is for special interests,” said Carlson, who periodically writes guest opinion columns for Crosscut. “Tim Eyman told taxpayers at large, ‘You’re my special interest, and I want tax relief for you.’ And he doesn’t always win. But sometimes he does, when people think that his proposal is reasonable.”

That success has continually frustrated liberals, many of whom say Eyman’s tax-restricting initiatives hurt vulnerable people who rely on government services — especially transit — to go about their daily lives.

A few of those critics confronted Eyman this month, when he showed up at Seattle City Hall to crash a press conference where city officials were announcing their lawsuit against I-976.

“It’s [causing] harm for me and other folks who are transit dependent,” disability rights advocate Anna Zivarts told Eyman, in an exchange caught on video by journalists from KING 5 and KIRO Radio. “It’s disabled folks, it’s low-income folks, it’s folks of color, it’s our immigrant communities. We’re the ones who are suffering with this.”

In response, Eyman calmly replied that, once again, the voters had spoken.

Tim Eyman speaks with reporters after hearing that a judge had struck down his latest tax-limiting measure, Jan. 21, 2016, in Olympia. The decision found, among other problems, that the measure was a thinly disguised effort to pass a constitutional amendment — which can't be done by initiative in Washington. (Elaine Thompson/AP)

‘The lobbying power’ of Eyman’s initiatives

Eyman was still riding high from his I-976 triumph when we met the week after the election. Sitting across a coffee table from me, in a room with windows overlooking a busy street in downtown Bellevue, he often waxed philosophical, punctuating his speech with emphatic gestures.

“Initiatives have two kinds of power,” Eyman said. “They have the power to create a law that forces elected officials to do something they'd rather not do. There's also the lobbying power that they have — the power of the vote itself.”

There’s some truth to that. Twice — once in 2000 and again in 2007 — state lawmakers have enacted versions of Eyman’s tax-limiting initiatives on their own, despite the original measures being invalidated by the state Supreme Court.

To some progressives, reflecting on that history is maddening.

“The big blows he wants to strike against taxes and all the things that they fund, he ends up losing in the courts — but the Legislature comes and saves him. And it’s just mind-boggling,” said Robert Cruickshank, a Democrat from Seattle who serves as the president of Washington’s Paramount Duty, which advocates progressive tax measures to pay for education.

State Rep. Gael Tarleton, a Seattle Democrat who chairs the House Finance Committee, which deals with tax policy, said the impact of Eyman’s tax measures on government officials “has been profound” over the years.

“Those of us in elected office, we are contending with it all the time,” Tarleton said. That means not only having to scramble to find revenue to pay for government programs, she said, but also knowing that Eyman may be waiting in the wings to file an initiative aimed at overturning any tax measures that lawmakers enact.

Particularly frustrating to some government officials is a law establishing a 1% cap on property tax growth from year to year. The 1% cap was originally part of an Eyman initiative that voters approved in 2001. But legislators enacted the policy of their own accord six years later, after the initiative was struck down.

For local officials, the cap has resulted in a struggle to find money to keep up with the basics of government operations, such as paying for road maintenance and police, said former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn. Local officials say the cap means they can’t even keep up with the cost of inflation without having to ask voters for more money.

“It’s your parks, libraries, police, fire, streets and human services. It’s everything a city does,” said McGinn, who was in office from 2010 to 2014.

Eyman is not particularly sympathetic to those tales of woe, particularly when they come from officials in Seattle or King County. Nor does he mind being loathed by government officials and some slices of the statewide electorate, he said.

In fact, he said, it’s become part of his strategy.

“Your job as an initiative sponsor is to just take all the slings and arrows — to be the lightning rod to just take all the crap,” Eyman said. “Because if they're unloading on you, you're able to easily highlight the fact that, look, they don't have any really valid arguments against our initiative.”

He goes on. “The power of being hated is really, really strong. And you've got to learn to just love the hate ... because that's the role of an initiative activist. It’s not to be well-liked, or to be well-respected. It’s just to, you know, get your measures out there on the ballot, so that the voters have a chance to vote on it.”

Tim Eyman, center, dressed as Darth Vader when he delivered boxes of petition signatures to the Washington State Elections Office in Olympia for an earlier initiative he sponsored for $30 car tabs, June 5, 2006. (John Froschauer/AP)

From watch salesman to initiative pusher

Eyman is happy to explain how he got into the initiative business in the first place. In the 1990s, he was living in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood, running a mail-order watch business out of his home, he said. After attending Washington State University and serving as social chairman of his fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, he developed a niche selling watches emblazoned with fraternities’ letters and coats of arms.

He was focused on his watch-selling business when he got swept up in the popular outrage over the Mariners stadium deal in the mid-1990s, he said.

Eyman said he attended a public meeting where he was inspired by KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross, a left-leaning talk show host who would later run for the U.S. House as a Democrat.

“Dave Ross, of all people, was one of the speakers, and said, ‘If we're going to spend this much money, we should let the voters decide,’ ” Eyman recalled. “And it was like, ‘Oh my God, that's so powerful.’ ”

Eyman, who later would make “Let the Voters Decide” one of his recurring catchphrases, said he went to Green Lake with a cardboard sign bearing that message. In his first day of political activism, he gathered about 100 signatures for an effort to put the stadium deal to a public vote, he said.

Ultimately, King County voters rejected new taxes to pay for the Mariners stadium, only to have the Legislature call a special session granting local officials the authority to impose taxes to build the stadium anyway.

“They overruled what the voters did,” Eyman said. “That was kind of my baptism of fire.” After that, Eyman closely watched California’s passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, which banned affirmative-action in state programs there. He wanted to see a similar law adopted in Washington state, leading him to sponsor I-200.