Why This Year's Supreme Court Elections are Going Big Money

When the Let’s Go Washington initiative factory announced a sprint to a November challenge of the millionaire’s tax, there was heartburn among some right-leaning political strategists, and not just because Tim Eyman, of all people, laid out its long-shot odds. There is more interest from at least some of that crowd in tackling a related but different electoral goal: shifting the Supremes to the right.

If you’re a close political reader, that might cause some cognitive whiplash. Polling suggests a blue wave election will crest in November, with Democrats seeing a 4- or 5-point bump. And Washington Supreme Court races are pretty low-information affairs in which voters often go with the home team, and in WA, that’s mostly the leftier candidate.

But here’s some of the thinking why the smart business money might go big on the Supremes: This is a King Tide year – two wide-open seats, which is very rare, and the new-car-smell is still on two Gov. Bob Ferguson appointees who’ve never run before. The court’s leftward drift has produced opinions that read as political, including the Blake decision that effectively legalized drug possession; consistently swatting down initiatives from the right; some racial justice rulings and rules considered on the far left. There is a general mood of distrust of judicial impartiality that flows from the U.S. Supreme Court but attaches to the state Supreme Court, where a majority — and a vast majority of Superior Court judges — were first appointed by Democratic governors. The races, of course, are technically nonpartisan, but there’s a ton of partisan coding via endorsements and donations.

Which gets us to the money. In general, judicial races are low-dollar affairs. Business and right-leaning money haven’t spent heavily on Supreme Court races since 2016, when almost $2.8M was spent for and against a slate of GOP-backed candidates (including now-retired district court judge Dave Larson, who is running this year) in the wake of the court’s education-funding McCleary decision. That was almost triple the normal spending in any election cycle since then. If the thesis of this story holds, we’ll see the 2016 number get blown away, to the tune of $5M or more spent on Supremes races.

https://www.postalley.org/2026/06/05/why-this-years-supreme-court-elections-are-going-big-money/