On an otherwise strong night for Republicans, voters in Washington state on Tuesday bucked the trend, defeating three of the four conservative initiatives on their ballots.

But Washingtonians do appear to have passed an initiative barring the state and local governments from restricting access to natural gas or gas appliances.

And voters didn’t even have to weigh in on three other popular conservative initiatives because state Democrats preemptively approved them earlier this year as part of a strategy to keep them off the ballot.

The series of conservative initiatives, aimed primarily at protecting taxpayers from Democratic overreach in the deep-blue state, were pushed by the Let’s Go Washington political committee, which collected millions of signatures last year to qualify for them ballot. Brian Heywood, the chief executive of a Kirkland-based investment fund, spent $6 million of his own money to gather the signatures.

National Review first reported on the Let’s Go Washington effort in December.

Heywood said then that his goal was “to put common sense back on the ballot.” When reached for comment on Wednesday, he said he was happy to have gotten four of his measures across the finish line — one approved by voters, three approved by lawmakers. Regarding the losses at the ballot on Tuesday, “I learned how powerful the machine is, I think, last night,” he said.

In the weeks leading up to the election, opponents of the initiatives spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat them. But maybe even more impactful, Heywood said, was the ballot language and financial-impact statements, which were written by the state’s left-wing attorney general, who was an opponent of the measures.

“Just looking at the numbers, that clearly had an impact, probably more than I calculated that it would,” Heywood said.

Heywood and his Let’s Go Washington allies initially worked to get six initiatives on the ballot: a repeal of the state’s cap-and-trade system, which has driven up the cost of gas; a repeal of the state’s new capital-gains tax; a proposal to prevent government bodies from instituting a backdoor income tax; a proposal to allow residents to opt out of a union-backed long-term insurance scheme; an end to state restrictions on police pursuits; and the institution of a parental bill of rights.

The six initiatives initially went to the legislature, meaning state lawmakers had first crack at rejecting or approving them as is. Any initiative the legislature didn’t approve would go on the November ballot.

The Democrats in Olympia weren’t expected to back any of the conservative initiatives. But during this year’s legislative session, lawmakers approved three of them — the state income tax ban, the parental bill of rights, and the police pursuit proposal — with bipartisan majorities, part a strategy to keep the popular measures off the ballot.

That left three others for voters to weigh in on Tuesday: the cap-and-trade repeal, the capital-gains tax repeal, and the long-term care tax opt-out.

However, over the summer, Let’s Go Washington worked to get a fourth initiative on the ballot: the ban on government-imposed natural gas restrictions. They launched the effort after Democratic lawmakers passed a bill in the middle of the night on one of the last days of session to require Puget Sound Energy to begin transitioning its natural-gas customers to electricity. Opponents said the bill would be costly for many residents and its impact on carbon emissions would be barely measurable.

Opponents of the initiatives tried hard but failed to strip them from the ballot.

On Tuesday, 51.2 percent of Washington voters supported the natural gas initiative, according to the Washington Secretary of State’s office, though there are still votes left to be counted.

However, a majority of voters appear to have rejected the initiatives involving cap-and-trade (61.7 percent opposed), the capital-gains tax (63.2 percent opposed), and long-term care tax opt-out (55.5 percent opposed). The opposition appeared to mirror support for Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who had won 58.6 percent of the Washington state vote as of early Wednesday, and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, who won reelection with 59.9 percent of the vote.

Opponents of the initiatives, including unions, left-wing advocacy groups, and prominent left-wing billionaires Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, argued that the measures were spearheaded by greedy Republicans who wanted to line their own pockets while raising costs for families and harming the environment.

Despite Tuesday’s losses at the ballot box, government affairs consultant Tim Punke, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s White House, argued in the Seattle Times last month that Let’s Go Washington had already scored victories before a single vote was counted.

He argued that Let’s Go Washington won earlier this year when Democrats in Olympia pre-emptively passed three of the initial initiatives because they didn’t want the loss in November “and they didn’t want the popularity of these three initiatives to positively impact voting on the other four.”

Second, Punke argued, the initiative leaders showed that targeting moderate voters with initiatives is a better investment than throwing money at Republican candidates who currently have little chance of winning in the overwhelmingly Democratic state.

Punke wrote that “the initiatives are proving to be a check on both one-party Democratic rule and a dysfunctional Republican Party.”

“Both state political parties are increasingly out of touch with the mainstream, and the initiatives underscore that neither seems to reflect the majority of voters,” he wrote. “The state Democratic Party is reflexively pro-tax, weak on public safety and over-indexed on identity politics. The Republican Party is stuck in MAGA world, still litigating Trump’s [2020] loss and hamstrung by their views on abortion.”

“One-party Democratic rule,” he added, “has resulted in Olympia Democrats listening almost exclusively to their far-left activist base.”

Heywood said he was proud that his group figured out how to get seven initiatives qualified for roughly $1 million each, far below the cost of past efforts. He said the next “nut to crack” will be figuring out how to counter tens of millions of dollars in opposition messaging without spending tens of millions of dollars.

Heywood said he’s not sure what his next step will be politically but added that “there’s a lot of space to hold government accountable” in one-party dominated Washington, particularly around spending and transparency.

“I was never like, ‘Oh, you know, what I want to do is initiatives for the rest of my life,” he said, noting that the initiative process wasn’t designed the be Washington’s primary method for writing laws. “But where I do have a huge amount of fight in my soul is against an overbearing and corrupt government.”