‘Of course I’m looking at it:’ Walsh eyes a run for governor

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, June 2, 2026

State Rep. Jim Walsh has not announced a gubernatorial campaign, but he is not pretending the question is hypothetical. The Aberdeen Republican and Washington State Republican Party chairman confirmed that he has been actively talking to people about a 2028 run and wants to start building the infrastructure now, according to a conservative Seattle radio station.

The conversation came up during a discussion about the income tax fight on The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red 770 AM, when a listener texted in asking whether Walsh would throw his hat in the ring.

“Of course I’m looking at it,” Walsh said. “I’ve been talking with people about it for a while.”

Gov. Bob Ferguson dared the Aberdeen Republican to come after him.

“Jim, you’re a big talker, but we all know you won’t have the guts to actually take me on,” Ferguson posted on X.

Walsh replied, also on X, “Bob: November 2028 is 29 months away. In the meantime, I challenge you to a series of monthly debates, each focused on a single public policy topic relevant to Washington state. One hour. Once a month, through November 2028. No notes. No staff. A different Washington-based journalist can moderate each debate. The journalist picks the single topic. No advanced notice to either of us. Not just a one-and-run event. A steady, regular debate series about fixing what’s broken in our state. Let’s give the people of Washington the chance to hear how two very different people approach issues that affect their lives. Do you have the guts to accept?” Walsh wrote in his reply on X.

Walsh as the state GOP chair, is tasked with getting Republicans voted into the state Legislature.

“We’ve got to build our ground game as conservatives in Washington State, so we can get out the vote,” Walsh told the radio show. “The challenge in the statewide elections has been voter turnout. Too many conservative and even moderate voters in Washington are discouraged and disheartened, and they don’t believe the system is trustworthy, and they don’t vote. So what I’m working on for the next year or two is restoring at least some of that confidence in the system that it’s worth voting, so that we can, so your vote will get counted, and maybe we can get a better person, so sure I’m talking about it. Other people are looking at it too.”

Walsh said his first step is to convince voters their ballots count, and is focusing on election integrity.

In mid-April Walsh turned in a box of ballots to the Bellevue headquarters of the state party. They were found next to a dumpster behind a strip mall in Renton, then handed over to the Washington State Republican Party leader this week.

Roughly 400 ballots, most unopened and unvoted, for primary and general elections from 2022 to 2025, Walsh said.

“This is proof that Washington state elections are not secure,” Walsh said in a video posted to social media, in which he appeared seated at a table with stacks of the ballots. “This is the reason we need to do better by election integrity and election security in Washington state.”

Walsh has backed the idea of ending mail-in voting and is pushing an initiative this year to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in Washington state.

Elaborating in an interview, he said the discovery occurred in mid-February and the man who found the ballots tried to reach county and state election officials several days later.

The vast majority of ballots were mailed to people who rent boxes at a private mail handling center in Renton, according to Walsh. They were “largely unvoted and unopened” but Walsh said he found one ballot addressed to a person who records show did vote in the same election.

Walsh, in the video, cautioned that “a bad actor” could have got one of the ballots and used the information to request a replacement ballot.

Walsh told the radio station he does not want to have a contested race by Republicans in the run in 2028 for the governor’s post.

“We’re not going to have like a bloody primary in 2028, but there’ll be some talks, there’ll be some people interested. We’ll have a few people with their hat in the ring, but my goal is to get it cleared up early enough in the 2028 election cycle that we don’t, we’re not divided, we can unite behind the best slate,” Walsh told the radio show. “And it’s not just governor. It’s state attorney general, it’s commissioner of public lands, it’s insurance commissioner, there are elected positions in the state, and we need good people in all of them, so I’d like to be able to work it so that we could put together a good slate, a group of people who can run together, and then get out the vote. The get out the vote part is the key part.”

MyNorthwest noted as early as last year that Walsh was openly discussing the governor’s race and had begun mapping what a campaign might look like, making last week’s comments the clearest signal yet that those conversations have been getting more serious.

Walsh closed the conversation on the show, saying “We’re gonna turn this ship around.”

— Washington State Standard, MyNorthwest and SeattleRed 770 AM contributed to this report.