Brian Heywood speaks on results of WA ballot initiatives

All right, so that was Marie Glusenkamp-Perez. She took the lead now over Senator John Braun. And we now want to go over to Brian Haywood, who is the founder of Let's Go Washington, who was behind those three ballot initiatives. We understand he's speaking. Let's take a listen. Sports arena. But it shouldn't come at the cost of every other girl that wants to compete. And I think it's that simple. Brian, to see this happening in a blue state right now, the 27 states that have bans, the boys and girls sports are in red states. To see it happen here, it's on the cusp of happening. What do you think that will mean for the rest of the country? I think it's a big bellwether for the state because most of the other states that have this law, it was done through the legislature in red states. And this was citizens who were... Voting very blue still in a lot of ways, saying, hey, I don't... It's not a Republican Democrat issue, it's a parental issue, it's a fairness in girls sports issue. And I think that carries a huge amount of weight that the citizens of Washington state said, yeah, we think that girls sports should be protected as Title IX was supposed to give them in the first place. Brian, you've never had a ballot initiative be passed by voters. I have. Which one? Overturning the natural gas ban. That is correct. We had almost 2 million people voted for that. That was the Supreme Court, but the voters, Supreme Court, I think, needs to be held accountable for that. At what point would you say that voters understand your position and perhaps just disagree with it? I mean, are there any of these issues that you would not bring back, like the Parents' Bill of Rights, for example, that you would not try to resurrect at another time? I'll tell you, I look at this, of the initiatives that I've got qualified, there's been now 10, right? And we'll see how these three turn out tonight. If we only get one of them tonight, then five of the ten have been enacted into law. Five out of the ten, I would put that up against the state legislature over the last 70 years has tried ten times to get an income tax passed. And the voters kept saying no, and they said, okay, let's try it again. And the voters would say no, and the legislature said, let's try it again. So I'm not going to go home and cry big crocodile tears if we have a single loss because I look at... On the income tax, we got outspent, you just heard on the, Randy Pebbles was saying, we got outspent 10 to 12 to 1. On the girls' sports and the parents' rights, they put $44 million up against what we had, about a million dollars in spending on advertising. So why not bring back another one like the capital gains tax and the private investment act Well, I think we'll see what makes sense, right? I've been funding a lot of this, so it's been me saying, hey, I'm going to do this, anybody with me, and trying to get people to come along. Thank you very much. What I've done now is I've created the infrastructure that shows that we can get it on the ballot for a lot cheaper. It used to cost, it used to be about $10 million to get an initiative on the ballot. I've got that down to anywhere from $2 to $3 million. That's a huge, huge cut in how much that costs. And so I've shown now we can do that. Number two, I have... 1.2 million people that have signed one that I think are willing to sign other ones in this common sense space. And it's not a red-blue, right? 50% of our signers are Democrat or independent. So I've created the infrastructure, and I think the next thing is to find other... Backers that are willing to support these issues and they need to be broad issues that are fixing stupid stuff that Olympia has done. Bringing us back to the Millionaire Tax and talking about that, do you think there was an attitude shift since there was all the vitriol and anger coming out of the legislative session to where we are right now to see the poll numbers that we're just seeing there on the screen? What do you mean an attitude shift? Well, I felt like you brought forth this argument, right? And obviously you wouldn't bring forth and spend the money if you weren't confident. So what do you think has happened since then? Well, first of all, it's $14 million by the public unions who directly benefit from this. This is bought and paid for by the unions. Bob Ferguson was against this until, I think, the public unions pulled his little puppet strings and then he was dancing like a sock puppet to support it. So the unions are the ones that are going to benefit from this. More spending by the state means more jobs that get in the public unions' coffers. And it's hard to fight $14 million. It just is, right? I think there's $2 or $3 million in the campaigns. To support the Yes campaign against $14 million. That's a hard fight to fight. Do you think the voters actually understand what they voted against? Thank you. Well, that was always our question. If the voters believe that it was only going to stay at $1 million, then we lose. We knew that. 60-40, we lose. There's 40% that say, I don't care whether it's rich people or not, I'm not voting for an income tax. If they spent two seconds thinking, does this income tax come for me, is that threshold gonna come down, then it switches 64 to the other way, as it has been 10 times before. And that was really, I think that so far, it looks like the no campaign was able to get their message out with a lot of money to convince people, no, it's only gonna stay at a million dollars. So is the click attack case gonna be the end all be all? No, I don't think so, but it'll be important, and I think the click attack case It's really important for two reasons. The first is that- All right, so that was Brian Haywood there talking about his three ballot initiatives, very hotly contested, we're gonna go back to that throughout the night.