GOP state Sen. Phil Fortunato (holding megaphone)

This week, GOP state Sen. Phil Fortunato announced that he would run for governor of Washington. The last time the GOP won the governor’s office was the 1980 election, and the very conservative Fortunato, who acknowledged that “the rank or the mainstream Republicans are not excited about me running,” may not be the ideal candidate to lead them out of the wilderness.

Fortunato has served in the Senate from a conservative seat east of Tacoma since 2017, and he's made quite a bad impression during that brief time. Earlier this year, he proposed a bill that would require any legislator who wanted to pass a law dealing with guns to "pass Criminal Justice Training [Center] firearm training requirement for each firearm that you want to regulate."

Also this year, Fortunato took to the Senate floor after freshman Democratic colleague Joe Nguyen, who is the chamber's first Vietnamese American member, passed his first bill. Fortunato joked, "I'd like to know how you get 'win' out of Nguyen," and Nguyen was not amused by this or by a similar remark from Minority Leader Mark Schoesler. The Democrat told The Stranger how "exhausting" it was "[w]hen people ridicule my name on the Senate floor. When they make racist comments unknowingly on a regular basis. When I have to explain institutional racism to members of my own caucus sometimes."

That's not all. Earlier this year, as Washington was suffering its worst measles outbreak in two decades, Fortunato joined the rest of the GOP caucus in voting against a successful bill that no longer allows parents to invoke personal or philosophical reasons in order to prevent their children from receiving vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. Fortunato even tried amending the bill to allow children to receive vaccinations for just one of the three diseases as an alternative to the combined MMR vaccine, even though ThinkProgress notes that "a single-ingredient vaccine isn't even available, and taking two shots of the MMR vaccine is 97% effective."

Fortunato may still be a better contender for Team Red than Loren Culp, the police chief in the tiny eastern Washington community of Republic (pop. 1,100) and the party’s only other declared candidate. Last year, Culp made headlines when he announced that he wouldn’t enforce Initiative 1639, a gun safety ballot measure that had just passed 59-41. Culp’s stance drew a very favorable response from far-right rocker Ted Nugent, who posted a typo-ridden “Chief Loren Culp is an Anerican freedom warrior. Godbless the freedom warriors” message to his Facebook page.

Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee is up for a third term next year, but he has not said yet if he’ll run for re-election should his presidential campaign fail.

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