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Daniel Walters photo
Independent candidate for the Fifth District Eric Agnew is still a little uncomfortable having his name on a big button on his chest
It's a bad time to be a moderate. The difference between the Republican and Democratic parties has diverged ever more sharply. Both parties have been playing to their furious bases.
In most districts, you're more likely to lose a primary by being too moderate than to win crossover votes to succeed in a general election. It seems like nobody, these days, is clamoring for Kumbaya.
Except, perhaps, for Eric Agnew,
third-party candidate running against Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Democrat Lisa Brown for Washington state's 5th District House seat. He
hates that things have gotten this way.
At a small gathering at Perry Street Brewing Wednesday night, Agnew, a 39-year-old manager at Itron, takes a defiant stand in favor of moderation. And he does it with a little object lesson.
He holds up red and blue strips of cloth tied together, asking volunteers to pull back and forth, showing how the slight shifts in power allow either red or blue to dominate completely.
"It's just
this, playing out every day," Agnew says. "People are fed up. They're saying, I don't want to play this extremist game anymore."
Republicans dominate. Democrats dominate. Back and forth.
"Every day for months, I was
so frustrated with this tug of war. I felt helpless," Agnew says. "It was always going to be this way. Then I realized, that if you just changed the game..."