Jay Inslee Is Betting He Can Win the Presidency on Climate Change
The Washington governor believes his focus on the environment will resonate with voters. But can he persuade enough Americans to pay attention to him?

“When you’ve been working on something for over a decade, and now seeing people awakening to that, it’s just really gratifying and heartening,” the Washington governor recently told me, sitting in his private study on the top floor of the governor’s mansion. When it comes to climate change, there now appears to be “an appetite for someone who has credibility and a long track record and, most importantly, a vision statement. It’s changed to show an opening in a Democratic primary, I believe.”
As he did in Washington State, Inslee would propose a mix of government investments and incentives to spur other investment, restrictions on power plants and emissions, and programs to promote R&D and job growth. An endless number of jobs can be created in the climate arena, Inslee says. It’s the way to make a real dent in income inequality and have the Democratic Party bring tangible solutions to communities in rural America that have been left behind. With his inaction, President Donald Trump—Inslee calls him “the commander in chief of delusion”—is engaged in a “disgusting selling-out of the country,” a “crime” against the aspirational optimism of America.
Inslee is lining up donors and adding them to the political-action committee he launched in December. An official presidential exploratory committee is next. Aides note that he’s attracted new supporters and fans after serving as the Democratic Governors Association chair last year; with Inslee at the helm, Democrats in November picked up seven governorships. He’s put together an email list of 200,000 climate advocates, which could become a beachhead of support around the country. Friends have offered to move to Iowa for him.
His campaign, such as it is, seems a lot more seat-of-the-pants than the machines Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris have slowly assembled. For now, he seems to be counting on being able to stand out on his record—and preparing for future battles with Trump by testing out zingers like “I wish nothing but the best for Donald Trump, including having the top bunk.”
“Forty years ago, it was not easy to get people’s sustained attention for this looming crisis. It’s much easier now,” says former Vice President Al Gore, who spent years getting made fun of for talking about global warming.
Gore and Inslee met on the House basketball court in the early 1990s and have stayed in touch. Recently, they’ve been checking in with each other on the phone and talking about plans for the future. “He’s demonstrated leadership on this issue for a long time, both in the Congress and as a successful governor,” Gore told me. “He’s written about it, he’s spoken about it, he’s legislated about it, he’s made bold proposals.”
“We have blown up that myth,” Inslee said. “That’s a fundamental message that many Democratic politicians can talk about, but I have the unique ability to show the proof in the pudding that we’ve actually done this.”
Mark Schoesler, the Republican state-Senate leader, says Inslee is trying to claim credit he doesn’t deserve. “I don’t think things would be appreciably different if he never would have been elected governor,” Schoesler says. “Market forces, consumer demands, commonsense policies would have done about the same thing that we’ve had under six years of Jay Inslee.”
Schoesler argues that Inslee is incidental to most of the state’s environmental policy, too. Inslee calls this kind of argument sour grapes coming from an out-of-touch Republican.
Inslee’s voice, even on the attack, sounds like he’s constantly marveling, his midwestern accent from a few generations back crossed with the northwestern spruce trees. He has an ever-present good-natured goofiness. He likes to brag that Washington has “the best weed in the United States of America,” and he paints Christmas books for his grandchildren every year. (In the 2017 edition, he and his wife, Trudi, his high-school sweetheart, appear as colorful bears.)
Read: The new politics of climate change
The governor didn’t like any of their suggestions, and ended up improvising a question inspired by his brother-in-law, a teacher, about the proposal Trump was pushing after the Parkland shooting to arm teachers with guns. Inslee called it ridiculous. He told the president to stop tweeting and start listening. He watched the president’s arms cross into his telltale grumpy self-hug, his hands shoved back behind his armpits, elbows up, lips pursed. (“If he’s ever carved on a mountain, it won’t be Mount Rushmore, it’ll be Mount Petulant,” Inslee told me later. “And that’s the pose.”) Other governors in the room were considering jumping into the presidential race. None of them said anything.
Want to know what Inslee 2020 would be like? Like that, he says.
“I’m really happy to be in a confrontation with this person. I’m comfortable in that conversation,” Inslee said. “You have to do two things in beating Donald Trump: One, you have to show dignity and that you can help America to become united again, and you can help America rise to the better angels rather than our lower behavior—[while] at the same time, demonstrating a strength of character and a core conviction that you’re not going to be pushed around or bullied, and you’ve had it with his lower human behavior.”
People who love Inslee—who have been loyal to him for years, who gush about him and his record—know this is all a bit kooky. Come on: He has no name recognition. He’s done nothing to prepare for running. There’s no team of consultants; there’s no operation.
But … maybe?
“He wasn’t ever working to become president. That was not his operational goal,” says Bonlender, the outgoing commerce-department director. “He would observe what the president was doing, any given president, in particular those that he wasn’t fond of, and would have no problem viewing himself doing a better job.”
Truth is, Inslee might not be in a much worse position than the so-called front-runners in the race. They’re barely known, so he’s not that far behind. He’s not showing up in any polls, but neither are most of the people the D.C. crowd has been playing fantasy baseball with for years.
“He’s obviously got his eye on the shiny object in Iowa,” Schoesler scoffed.
Around the conference table in his office at the end of December, Inslee and his top aides held a brainstorming session for his State of the State address. Washington’s spike in homelessness and the local orcas facing extinction were both on the table. The time might be right, they discussed, to tease his plan for a public health-insurance option, or to explain how he’s going to pay for the green agenda he announced earlier that month.
“How do you argue, at the same time, unbelievable success and urgency? Is that too discordant in the human mind?” Inslee asked.
“Is the rallying cry that we’re the state that steps up?” an aide offered.
Before breaking for the morning, his deputy chief of staff quickly ran through the state’s contingency plans to handle the federal shutdown.
The governor was seated in his chair at the head of the table, the high leather back embossed with the worn-in seal of the state: George Washington’s softly caricatured head, framed in a circle. He marveled at what had become of the negotiations in D.C.
“I want to play poker with Donald Trump,” Inslee said. “I really do.”