Has Brian Heywood learned a lesson?
Why is Brian Heywood using more surrogates this year?
In 2024, it seemed like Heywood was everywhere all at once promoting his losing initiatives to cut funding from education (at Seattle Times on I-2109), rollback long-term care (at Seattle Times on I-2124), decimate climate funding (at Seattle Times on I-2117). It seems that he’s learned a lesson that a right-wing hedge fund mogul is not the best voice for voters.
This year Heywood skipped the Seattle Times editorial board interviews (after appearing at nearly all of them in 2024), instead sending conservative Washington Policy Center’s Vicki Murray (I-001) and Ryan Frost (I-645), and Spokane Republican donor Dori Whitford (I-638).
Republican Jamie Herrera Butler, who lost her Republican seat in 2022 and lost a run for public lands commissioner in 2024, is standing in for Heywood during an upcoming King 5 debate on the initiative to repeal the Millionaire’s Tax. She appears to be I-645’s new spokesperson, appearing in the Spokesman Review, KIRO, and Center Square coverage.
Tri-Cities realtor and Republican State Representative April Connors (LD-8) is standing in for Heywood on KUOW’s Soundside this week to defend I-001 and I-638.
Is driving girls out of sports Brian Heywood’s real motive behind I-638?
In an interview with KUOW last year, Heywood said the quiet part aloud. In defending his initiative (I-638) to require all girls - but NOT boys - to undergo sex inspections to play school sports, Heywood described Title IX, the landmark measure responsible for gender equity in school athletics, as “brute force legislation” that “destroyed or decimated some boys sports.” (Transcript)
Heywood’s sentiments overlap with a Heritage Foundation report from July that recommends rolling back “Title IX, the law that, according to the paper’s author, was “designed to produce a new sort of woman — one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood,” from USA Today columnist Nancy Armour’s take on the report.
Billie Jean Sweeney, a board member of the Accountability Journalism Institute, former editor for The New York Times and AP, and editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists points out that I-638 and other initiatives like it around the country are pushing the “exploitation of trans people to promote a broader anti-women agenda…”
On KIRO’s Gee & Ursula, John Lovick blasted Heywood’s I-001 for its impact on child abuse victims.
I-001 “forces schools to release records to parents even if that parent is charged with assaulting that child. A father could have assaulted a child and he would be able to go to that school and access that child's records.” - Former Snohomish County Sheriff and WA State Trooper John Lovick
“I can tell you as a reporter who has spent years interviewing folks, I have seen some really awful parent situations. I interviewed two who their parents sold them to people sex trafficking. And if you don't have any safe place to go to, to talk or to tell someone without maybe that person who's your trafficker finding out. It's real to me because I've encountered it.” - KIRO reporter Angela Paul Russell