The Price of a Gubernatorial Campaign
The Herald alleges that the Republican victory was purchased through the support of the saloon and gambling classes.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is now little reason to doubt but that McGraw has carried this state by a thousand or twelve hundred plurality. It is a great drop from the vote of two and four years ago and showed that the voters of the state had no confidence in their leader, in his manner of campaigning, nor in the principles of which he was the representative. With a great natural plurality in favor of the party of which Mr. McGraw is the leader, he has barely escaped defeat, and even this would have been his fate had he not rallied to his standard by the liberal use of money, the purchasable class of the saloon and gambling element, as well as the more disreputable classes in other walks of life. Wherever you would find a tinhorn gambler there you would find a “booster” for McGraw; and everyone of those things in human shape, who subsist on the “earnings” of women, constituted an especial champion of the republican gubernatorial candidate. This was not alone the case here but in Spokane, Walla Walla, Tacoma, Seattle and all over the state.
“Wherever you would find a tinhorn gambler there you would find a “booster” for McGraw.”
This editorial reflects the fierce partisan polarization and anxieties over money in politics during the 1892 Washington gubernatorial election. Charges of candidates being 'bought' by 'saloon elements' were common tropes of the era’s political discourse, foreshadowing the intense debates over Prohibition and civic morality that would shape Washington politics for decades.
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