Hey! Its Rodney Tom with Fuse Washingtons official oil portrait of King Tom.
  • Fuse Washington
  • Hey! It's Rodney Tom with Fuse Washington's "official" oil portrait of "King Tom" in Olympia this January.
This week I just had to get some Rodney Tom rage out of my system. Satisfying, yes. But Fuse Washington has been mocking him for a long time and yesterday, they released something more useful than mockery—a report about his poll numbers. Spoiler alert: They're down.

From Fuse's polling memo:

According to the results of our recent survey in Washington's 48th Legislative District, State Senator Rodney Tom's teaming with Republicans to create the Majority Coalition Caucus has resulted in significant damage to his standing. Indeed, Tom's ratings are the lowest that we have seen over the seven years we have conducted research in this district... Today, just one quarter of voters (25 percent) rate the job he is doing as state senator as excellent or good, while 44 percent give him just fair or poor job reviews, a -8 point net drop since last June.

They also point out that "when it comes to reelecting Tom, just 22 percent of voters would reelect him at this point while a plurality (41 percent) choose someone new." (The poll itself is here.)

I called Fuse's communications director Collin Jergens to ask about all their work—both serious and joking—keeping Senator Tom's feet to the fire. "Tom has been an obstacle to progress on all sorts of important legislation," Jergens said. "The Reproductive Parity Act, the Dream Act, background checks... We are trying to hold him accountable."

But accountable will hopefully turn into "unemployed" at some point soon, right? State Democratic Party chair Dwight Pelz says that's the plan: "The plan is to recruit a superior candidate, run an aggressive campaign, inform and remind people of Rodney Tom's duplicity, and defeat him in the primary." Ah! Simple. Pelz then called Tom a "hypocrite" and an "egoist," saying "it's about his vanity, and we don't think the voters are going to accept that."

Everyone is thoroughly pissed, and has been for a while. But the road to defeating him may be harder than you'd hope—even with his power-hungry back and forth across the aisle, he's not without support. As a commenter on my rant pointed out, the state Dems have started a "Rodney Tom Retirement Project," to which you can donate here. Maybe that's where some of our pissed-off energy goes?

Obviously, I'm just going to keep typing swears on the internet.