Union shares of No on 645's money

What this dataset measures

Built to check claims about who is funding the I-645 campaigns: the No side's description of Brian Heywood's role and the question of how much of the No side's money comes from unions whose members are paid through the state budget. All committees and contributions are taken whole from PDC's open data; nothing is sampled.

Geography

Washington State

Unit of observation

Donor per committee (contributions); legislator (union contributions); bargaining unit (contract costs).

Update cadence

One-time snapshot taken October 21, 2026. Committees keep filing until after the November 3, 2026 election; rerun the build script for later totals.

Curator

FactHub Research Team

Supporting files

Source snapshots, manifests, quality reports, documentation, and other materials used to produce or review this release.

• i645_campaign_finance.js Transformation manifest · text/javascript · 12.5 KB (12,770 bytes)

  Node.js script that downloads the PDC and Legislature data and builds every table except the contract costs.

Saved analyses

Sources

1. Washington Public Disclosure Commission: Contributions to Candidates and Political Committees (data.wa.gov kv7h-kjye) Itemized contributions to No on 645, Vote Yes Repeal the Income Tax, Let's Go Washington and legislators' campaign committees

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record (RCW 42.17A); Washington open data. Public disclosure data; redistributed in aggregate with attribution

   Reliability: Government. Filed by the committees themselves under Washington's campaign disclosure law and published by the PDC. Committees can amend reports, and in-kind values are the committees' estimates.

2. Washington Public Disclosure Commission: Expenditures by Candidates and Political Committees (data.wa.gov tijg-9zyp) Let's Go Washington's 2026 itemized expenditures and their stated purposes

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record (RCW 42.17A); Washington open data. Public disclosure data; redistributed in aggregate with attribution

   Reliability: Government. Purpose descriptions are written by the filing committee. PDC does not verify how shared costs are split between measures.

3. Washington Public Disclosure Commission: Campaign Finance Summary (data.wa.gov 3h9x-7bvm) Committee totals and the candidate committees of each legislator

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record (RCW 42.17A); Washington open data. Public disclosure data; redistributed with attribution

   Reliability: Government. Totals are computed by PDC from committee filings and updated as reports arrive.

4. Washington Public Disclosure Commission: Loans to Candidates and Political Committees (data.wa.gov d2ig-r3q4) Brian Heywood's loans to Let's Go Washington

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record (RCW 42.17A); Washington open data. Public disclosure data; redistributed with attribution

   Reliability: Government. Loans are reported by the borrowing committee, with the lender's name.

5. Washington State Legislature web services: roll calls on SB 6346 (2025-26) How each legislator voted on final passage of ESSB 6346 (House, March 9, 2026; Senate concurrence, March 11, 2026)

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record. Public legislative record

   Reliability: Government. Official roll-call record of the Washington Legislature.

6. Washington State Legislature web services: members, 2025-26 Legislators' names, parties and districts

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record. Public legislative record

   Reliability: Government. Official member list of the Washington Legislature.

7. Washington Office of Financial Management: Costs of 2025-27 Collective Bargaining Agreements State cost of the 2025-27 WFSE, SEIU 1199NW and SEIU 925 agreements, split into NGF-O and other funds

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record. Public government document; figures transcribed

   Reliability: Government. OFM negotiates these contracts for the Governor and prepares the cost estimates submitted to the Legislature; figures are estimates of added cost, not payroll totals.

8. Washington Secretary of State: 2026 Voters' Pamphlet, Initiative Measure IP26-645 statements The No committee's statement about Brian Heywood, quoted verbatim

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. Public record. Public government document; short quotation

   Reliability: Party to the dispute. Has a stake in this finding. Statements are written by each campaign's committee and printed unedited by the Secretary of State. The No statement's listed authors include the presidents of the Washington Education Association and the Washington State Labor Council.

9. Washington Federation of State Employees: 2026 WFSE Legislative Victories (March 22, 2026) The state employees' union's own statements about the millionaires tax and the Legislature's role in its pay

   Retrieved October 21, 2026. All rights reserved (short quotation). Quoted briefly for commentary

   Reliability: Party to the dispute. Has a stake in this finding. Published by WFSE, the second-largest donor to No on 645, describing its own legislative goals.

Limitations and reproducibility

Fully reproducible from public data: The included script i645_campaign_finance.js queries data.wa.gov (PDC datasets kv7h-kjye, tijg-9zyp, 3h9x-7bvm) and the Legislature's web services and writes every table except the contract-cost table, which was transcribed from OFM's published cost summary. Totals will differ if run later because committees keep filing reports.

• Snapshot as of October 21, 2026. PDC totals change as committees file; No on 645 received $250,000 on October 21 alone.
• Donor type is FactHub's classification. Labor organizations were classed by whom they mainly represent: WA public-sector unions (WEA, WFSE, SEIU 775, SEIU 925, PTE Local 17, UAW 4121); national unions whose members are mostly public employees (NEA, AFSCME, AFT); and other unions. Some WA public-sector unions also represent some privately employed workers, and SEIU 775 home-care workers and SEIU 925 family child-care providers are public employees only for collective bargaining.
• Donors giving less than $25,000 to a committee are aggregated by type rather than named.
• National union money comes from national treasuries funded by members across the U.S., not from Washington payrolls.
• Let's Go Washington's I-645 spending is taken from the purpose descriptions in its own expenditure reports; $1.08 million of its 2026 spending (mostly legal, staff and overhead) names no measure and is not counted toward I-645.
• Legislator totals match PDC candidate committees by last name and legislative district and count contributions from WEA, WFSE, all SEIU locals and funds, AFSCME, UFCW and AFT affiliates under any spelling the pattern catches; small misspelled contributions may be missed. They include all years' giving, not just giving tied to ESSB 6346.
• Contract costs are OFM's estimates of the added cost of the 2025-27 agreements, not total payroll. NGF-O (near general fund-outlook) is the state general fund plus three related accounts.