Some people collect coins. Some run marathons. A few spend tens of millions of dollars to influence politicians or political parties.
Brian Heywood, a hedge fund founder in the Seattle suburbs, is using his fortune to take his causes straight to the voters of his adopted state, and to try to make a very blue state more conservative — or at least make Democratic legislators squirm.
Since 2022, when he formed a political action committee, Let’s Go Washington, Mr. Heywood has spent $11 million trying to put 20 conservative policy proposals in front of Washington lawmakers or voters. He appears poised to force either legislative action or a public vote this year on two: a parents’ rights measure and a proposal to ban transgender athletes from girls’ scholastic sports by requiring potential student athletes to prove they were born biologically female.
“My intention with the initiatives always is to do as little intrusive damage as possible — to fix stupid stuff that’s happening,” insisted Mr. Heywood, who attended President Trump’s inauguration last year and named his Redmond, Wash., ranch after the libertarian literary hero John Galt. “Forcing girls to compete against biological boys is stupid.”
His opponents, of which there are many, see his free-spending ways differently.
“He’s an oligarch,” said Danni Askini, executive director of Washington’s Gender Justice League. “He’s spending millions and millions of his own money backing these measures about trans people, but a year ago, he was pushing something else. He’s a political opportunist.”
Mr. Heywood, 58, described himself as an “uptight, poor, redneck Mormon kid,” who made his way to Harvard, then helped found a hedge fund, Taiyo Pacific Partners. The firm was based in California until 2010, when Mr. Heywood moved north in search of lower taxes — Washington lacks an income tax and, at the time, had no capital gains tax — and a less restrictive regulatory environment.
“It was more liberal than I am, but I saw it as a sort of libertarian left, a very livable kind of liberalism,” he said.
Washington, which last went for a Republican presidential candidate when Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984, has moved further left under the watch of Gov. Jay Inslee. Mr. Inslee served three terms, from 2013 to 2025, and pushed through a capital-gains tax, major expansions of education and health care funding, and regulations aimed at curbing climate change.
The murder of George Floyd in 2020 set off months of protest in Washington state, including the brief creation of a “police free” demonstration zone on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, and spurred police accountability laws in Seattle and statewide. Those changes capped what Mr. Heywood viewed as an “uber progressive” shift in the state.
“I’d just had enough,” he said.
Washington’s initiative system, designed in the 1910s as a check on the growing power of railroad companies and political machines, allows petitioners to send proposals directly to voters or to the Legislature, which can adopt them or send them to the ballot. Mr. Heywood has done both.
“He’s playing a kind of chess with it,” said Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University. “He’s flooding the system in a way no one has tried before.”
In 2023, Let’s Go Washington tried to gather enough signatures for 11 proposals, including rolling back police oversight laws, repealing the capital gains tax and withdrawing Washington from the National Popular Vote compact, an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once enough states join.
“I did all 11 with volunteers and just failed miserably,” Mr. Heywood said. “But you learn.”
The following year, using paid signature gatherers, the PAC succeeded in sending six initiatives to the Legislature.
Lawmakers adopted three measures outright: a ban on any future local or state income tax, expanded authority for police vehicle pursuits and a “parents’ bill of rights” that gave guardians broader access to student records and curricula and the right to opt children out of school activities, surveys or assignments involving questions about sexual attraction, morality, politics, religion or mental health challenges.
The Legislature sent the other three to the ballot, where voters rejected them, refusing to dismantle the state’s climate change program, repeal the capital gains tax or make voluntary a now-mandatory payroll tax that funds long-term care.
Mr. Heywood’s legislative victories proved fragile. After the Legislature approved the parents’ bill of rights in 2024, state lawmakers a year later “gutted it,” in Mr. Heywood’s words, by removing or reducing notification requirements, access to school records and the parental ability to opt out of programs or surveys.
One of the two initiatives he is backing this year seeks to restore the original list of parental rights. The second would require any girl who wants to play scholastic sports in Washington to prove she was born female.
That measure, Mr. Heywood said, was written by State Representative Jim Walsh, who also chairs the Washington Republican Party. That connection sheds some light on how closely aligned the state G.O.P. is with Mr. Heywood. The agency that regulates interscholastic sports in Washington estimates that of the 75,000 girls who competed last year, 10 were transgender. But those few cases included a runner from Spokane who won a state high school 400-meter title two years in a row.
Mr. Heywood said the proposal is not a radical departure from existing norms; students who want to play school sports already need a physical exam. Opponents — including some civil-rights groups, Planned Parenthood and the state’s largest teachers union — say the physicals currently required of Washington athletes focus on cardiovascular and orthopedic health.
Mr. Heywood’s proposal would require health-care professionals to verify a student athlete’s “biological sex” based on “reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”
“It would potentially force all girls who want to play a team sport with their friends to undergo an invasive medical exam,” said Vanessa Hernandez of the Washington A.C.L.U. “That is beyond extreme.”
Such social issues have not been at the forefront of Washington politics recently. In November, voters in the Seattle and Tacoma area — the most populous and politically influential part of the state — elected a slate of progressive candidates who campaigned on affordability. Gov. Bob Ferguson and Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, have emphasized the need for new revenue sources, potentially including taxes on the wealthiest residents.
Mr. Heywood’s efforts could force progressive organizers and Democratic lawmakers to refocus on an issue that has proved better for Republicans — transgender rights — during the upcoming midterm elections. Mr. Trump this week encouraged House Republicans to sharpen their messaging on culture-war issues such as transgender rights as they prepare for the 2026 elections.
Last week, Let’s Go Washington filed 445,187 signatures for the transgender sports measure, about 50,000 more than required, indicating that it has a strong chance of passing the secretary of state’s review, then going to the Legislature.
“If the Legislature passes them, that’s fantastic,” Mr. Heywood said. “If they put them on the ballot, then that’s a campaign issue from now until November.”
And he vowed not to let up. “I can afford to do this for a long time,” he said.
The buying of ballot initiatives is less common than the bankrolling of politicians, but it is becoming more common with the rich. Liberal billionaires across the country have underwritten campaigns to legalize marijuana, restore voting rights to people with felony convictions and tighten gun laws. Conservative donors have backed efforts to cap property taxes, repeal gun regulations and restrict abortion access.
“There’s no such thing as pure grassroots anymore,” Mr. Donovan said. “Anybody who wants to get something passed needs a wealthy patron.”
Let’s Go Washington was fined $20,000 by the Washington Public Disclosure Commission in 2024 for failing to adequately report records related to signature-gathering expenditures, including subcontractor costs. Next on Mr. Heywood’s agenda is his own transparency effort: he’s talking about an initiative next year that would force nonprofits and other nongovernmental organizations to disclose their donors, board members and how they spend public funds.
“I’m not some villain,” he said. “I just want government here to work well.”
He said he would rather pursue this strategy than the alternative: Moving, again.
Anna Griffin the Pacific Northwest bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Washington, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Oregon.
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