In his column last week about Gov. Jay Inslee, Mr. Stepankowsky cites fighting climate change, eliminating the death penalty and gun control that are central to the governor’s unpopularity in rural counties. Remember what Obama said about “God, gays and guns” three election cycles ago?

The GOP from Nixon through Trump has figured that the best way to win the votes of non-college white voters is by taking dog whistle stands on critical issues of our time. This has been condensed into using fear and hatred to create and hold the MAGA base while repelling other voters. Part of this formula is to reinterpret religious faith as gullible susceptibility to blatant lies.

The GOP has moved the center of political discourse so far to the right that it has found that only the MAGA crowd will continue to swallow this Kool-Aid. If fear, lies and hatred were indeed the correct game plan to win gubernatorial elections in Washington, maybe there would have been more than one Republican governor in our state in the last 40 years.

A recent Chinook Observer saw that there has developed a voting split in Pacific County between the Republican North and Democrat South. There is an explanation for this. The Economist magazine a few years ago looked at all rural counties in the United States and found that the less an area depended on agriculture for economic activity, the more prosperous it was likely to be. Farming is simply so mechanized today that it creates very few jobs. In contrast, tourism and hospitality are central to the jobs and prosperity of the Peninsula.

Reread what Andre wrote. Hidden in it is the undeniable message that MAGA was a disastrous “marketing strategy” for the GOP in the last two elections.

Vote for the sane — I know I am being redundant —  Democrat candidates for governor next time around.

BILL O’MEARA

Seattle