Washington Gov. Jay Inslee joins 2020 Democratic field

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Friday became the latest Democrat to launch a 2020 presidential bid, asserting that he is the only candidate who will make combating climate change the nation’s top priority.

“We have one chance to defeat climate change, and it is right now,” Inslee said at an event staged at a solar installation company in Seattle. “It is my belief when you have one chance in life, you take it.”

Inslee, 68, is the first governor to enter the crowded Democratic contest and has the longest political resume of anyone in the race.

In 1992, after two terms as a state legislator, he was elected to represent a largely rural, Republican-leaning congressional district in central Washington. In Congress, Inslee attracted Republican ire by voting for the 1994 assault weapons ban.

Inslee lost in that year’s Republican wave, but he mounted a comeback in a neighboring district four years later.

Back in Congress, Inslee was a reliable liberal vote and a member of the center-left New Democrats.

He also kept one eye on Washington state, running for governor in 2012 and winning a narrow victory over a popular Republican attorney general. Inslee spent his first term presiding over a divided state government, cutting budget deals with a Republican state Senate and instating a moratorium on the state’s death penalty.

Inslee was comfortably re-elected in 2016 and joined the loud resistance to President Donald Trump, bringing the state into lawsuits to stop a ban on refugees and immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries.