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Rep. Travis Couture, a Republican state legislator, said Washington's job growth turned negative in 2026, the state forecasts just 0.1% growth, and prices are outpacing incomes. All three hold up. Jobs are flat: on the state's own count, 2026 so far is 0.05% below 2025, though federal estimates show a small gain.
Washington Policy Center says the 2025 Legislature passed the largest tax increase in state history. In dollars, no single session raised more, even after inflation: $3.6 billion in its first two years. Relative to the state budget, the 1981 recession taxes were bigger, and the 1993 package was about the same.
Washington schools chief Chris Reykdal said in June 2025 that schools have less money per student after inflation than six years earlier. Total spending per student grew faster than prices. His point holds only for state and local money measured with Seattle prices. Both sides' test-score numbers come from the same tests.
Washington's Paid Family and Medical Leave program pays workers during time off for a new child or a serious illness, and a payroll tax funds it. The Washington Policy Center says the 2027 rate is triple 2019's and still too low to keep the program solvent. State records back both points.
Washington's Climate Commitment Act (CCA), its cap-and-invest law, sells carbon allowances and spends the money. After the state fixed a large error, its report puts emission-cutting projects at $322 per ton on average. Allowances sold for $26 to $71. Most of the money went to the costliest projects.
Washington law requires greenhouse gas emissions to fall 45% below 1990 levels by 2030. In 2022, the latest official year, emissions were 13% above a straight-line path to that limit. Meeting it now takes cuts of 7.6% to 9.6% a year, far faster than the state has ever sustained.
LEAD is a Seattle program that sends people suspected of low-level drug crimes to case managers instead of jail. Since 2015, police, the program and officials have said participants were 58% less likely to be arrested. In the study, 58% were rearrested, versus 80% of a comparison group.
The Washington Policy Center, a free-market think tank, says Washington's overdose death rate grew faster from 2014 to 2024 than any other state's. CDC death records confirm it. Most of the rise came after 2019, as fentanyl reached western states; whether the 2021 Blake drug ruling added to it is unsettled.
A viral post says Seattle Public Schools' budget nearly doubled from 2014 to 2025 while enrollment stayed flat. State and district records confirm every number. Prices also rose, so spending per student grew about 31% after inflation, and districts statewide saw the same doubling as the state answered a court ruling on school funding.
The Yes on Initiative 645 campaign, which wants to repeal Washington's new tax on income over $1 million, says households leaving the state earn more than those moving in. IRS tax records confirm it for the last three years of data. But those records end with 2022 income, before the tax passed.
Posts urging a Yes vote on Initiative 645 say Washington's constitution bans an income tax. The text never mentions one. But since 1933 the state Supreme Court has ruled that income is property, which must be taxed at one uniform, capped rate. No court has yet ruled on the new 9.9% millionaires tax.
The Washington Post said gas prices are the highest for any Election Day in U.S. history. In plain dollars that's right: $4.27 a gallon, up from $3.80 before the 2022 election. After inflation, gas cost more before the 2012 and 1980 elections, and a gallon takes less work time than in 2012.
Initiative 001, a Washington ballot measure on parents' rights in public schools, would bring back rules telling parents about some medical care at school. Teens 13 and older could still get therapy without a parent's consent. Notice applies when school staff give care beyond a counselor's role, or arrange care.
Seattle's middle household, with half earning more and half less, had $122,809 in income in 2025. After rising prices, that buys 9.5% less than in 2021. The Seattle Times said incomes have lagged prices for three years. The direction is right, but the three-year dip is too small for the Census survey to confirm.
Fact check: Initiative 2066 aimed to protect natural gas service for Washington homes and businesses. Voters approved it with 51.71% in November 2024. In September 2026, the state Supreme Court voided it 6-3 because it bundled four subjects into one measure. The court did not rule on natural gas policy itself.
Fact check: The United States adopted daylight saving time on March 31, 1918, to save electricity during World War I. Farm groups opposed it because their work follows the sun, and they led the push that repealed national DST over President Wilson's veto in 1919. Today's dates come from the 1966 Uniform Time Act as extended in 2005; clocks fall back on November 1, 2026.
Fact check: Protect Kids Colorado says Proposition 134 doesn't invent the line on biological sex in sports, because the NCAA, the U.S. Supreme Court and Colorado schools already draw it. All three examples check out. What the post leaves out is that Colorado's anti-discrimination law currently points the other way for public schools and colleges, so the measure would change the state's default rule.
Initiative 638 asks a girl entering girls' school sports to have her own provider verify sex from anatomy, genetics or testosterone. For the athletes the rule is aimed at, transgender girls without a difference of sex development, anatomy and chromosomes are unambiguous, and adult testosterone ranges don't overlap. Testosterone can't verify sex before puberty, and blockers suppress it, though a girl's own provider would normally know of that treatment.
Independent estimates put the five largest operating AI data centers at 421 to 946 MW of IT power. Converted with the federal household benchmark, each uses as much electricity in a year as roughly 170,000 to 770,000 average U.S. homes, before counting cooling.
Fact check: Apollo 11's guidance computer had a one-megahertz clock, 2K words of erasable memory and 36K words of fixed memory. By a computer scientist's 2019 estimate, an iPhone of that year already had over a million times its working memory and over 100,000 times its processing power, and the Saturn V rocket's own computer was slower still.
In a live On Point taping released April 16, 2026, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said she would "even say" she is a Marxist, in the same answer where she called herself a socialist.
A concern raised about Initiative 001 is that schools would have to tell parents when their child reports abuse, even if a parent is the suspect. None of 001's notice rights is triggered by a child's report, but its crime notice lacks an exception for accused parents and uses an undefined trigger.
Washington's Legislature adopted the Parents' Bill of Rights in 2024, 49-0 in the Senate and 82-15 in the House. In 2025 the Democratic majority rewrote it on party-line votes, with an emergency clause that ruled out a referendum. Voters are now deciding the question through Initiative 001.
The Seattle Times editorial board says student mental health records are shielded from parents now and could be released if I-001 passes. Federal law, the state's own legal filings and district procedures show parents can already inspect most school counseling records; what is shielded is narrower.
