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Spokane, Wenatchee and Hayden, Idaho, billboards target MAGA supporters having doubts
Billboards across the Inland Northwest urge doubting MAGA supporters to consider leaving the movement, offering a nonpartisan path forward.
By Cassy Benefield | FāVS News Associate Editor
Billboards are popping up across the Inland Northwest with a message for doubting MAGA supporters: You’re not the only one.
The billboards’ text is simple: “Having doubts? You’re not alone,” and includes the website LeavingMAGA.org. Spokane and Wenatchee, Washington, and Hayden, Idaho, have hosted these billboards since the national campaign began in April.
The billboards are a part of Leaving MAGA’s effort to provide a “pathway and an off-ramp” for individuals seeking to leave MAGA extremism, said Rich Logis, founder and executive director of Leaving MAGA, who left the movement in 2022.
“We have more people than ever who are reaching out to us who are telling us that they’re in MAGA, and that they’re feeling afraid and alone right now,” Logis said. “We want to make our organization just like what our billboards read, which is to be friendly, welcoming and inviting to people.”
Timeline and location of the billboards in the Inland Northwest
Logis said the 35 billboards his organization has placed in 20 states offer an “in your face,” yet non-invasive way, to share his nonprofit’s message, adding it helps they can’t “change the channel” as they read them.
Spokane’s first billboard launched in mid-April and ran for a month in North Spokane on Highway 395. The second billboard began on Aug. 17 and will run through mid-September, this time on the corner of South Browne Street and West 2nd Avenue in Spokane’s downtown.
Wenatchee’s first billboard — currently located at North Miller Street and Wenatchee Avenue — began on Aug. 3 and will be there through the end of the month. The second billboard, which will run at the beginning of September for at least two months, will be located in East Wenatchee at the corner of Valley Mall Parkway and Grant Road.
The billboard in Hayden, Idaho, home to the former Aryan Nations Compound in the 70s, finished its campaign north of Coeur d’Alene at the end of May.
Logis’ story
Logis founded Leaving MAGA in 2024 to help continue making amends for his former involvement as a vocal MAGA media writer and pundit. His work was read on popular right-wing media outlets, including FOX News, World Net Daily and The Federalist.
Before joining the MAGA community in 2015, he identified as a “slightly left-leaning political independent” and remembers feeling politically lonely.
“I got seduced into the belief that we needed to tear down the entire system. And the Trump campaign’s ethos was to just obliterate the established political order and start anew, and that’s what I thought we needed,” he explained.
While personal religious beliefs didn’t influence his own decision to join the movement, he said he “fell prey” to the propaganda of the evangelicals he was around. He said these beliefs summarized a “multi-decade coordinated effort” within evangelicalism to dehumanize Democrats by labeling them as “secular godless communists and socialists.”
By sharing that ideology, Logis found a strong sense of “belonging” and “camaraderie” within the MAGA world, identifying its focus on community as a major part of the movement’s appeal.
He created Leaving MAGA to do the same by offering an alternative community around former MAGA followers. He said without a community to move into, it’s harder for doubters to leave. While some members of Leaving MAGA entered through religion, largely Christian nationalism, it is not a “centerpiece” of his organization’s work nor is it intentionally avoided.
He said that influential Christian conservatives view Donald Trump as a “conduit to more power,” whereas rank-and-file members are often driven by the belief that their faith is under threat. He prefers to call MAGA involvement a community, not a cult.
“I think that is how it’s best understood … if we take away people’s agency [by calling it a cult], then we don’t give them the necessary credit that they deserve when they decide to make a change and leave,” he said.
When Logis left MAGA, he said he was able to reclaim his ability to be an individual with agency and empathy.
“What I would say about myself today is I became … a born again human being,” he said.
Funders and their hope for the billboards
Since the billboard campaign began, Logis said they have had 433,000 unique visitors to their site, an uptick he partially credits to the billboards. More placements are planned in Michigan, North and South Carolina and Dallas, Texas, which will coincide with the GOP’s midterm convention in the fall.
Each sign costs about $1,500, and funding for them comes from local grassroots donations and nonpartisan citizen groups, Logis said.
Troy Smith, a retired Wenatchee fire captain and paramedic, sponsored Wenatchee’s first billboard. He identifies as fiscally conservative but socially liberal and finds “the war” on the trans community and immigrants as “sickening.”
He was never involved in the MAGA movement, but he said the majority of his family members and the friends he grew up with are.
“It has saddened me to watch them really just not listen to general reason … and be entrenched in that belief,” Smith said. “[It has] cost me many friendships and certainly fractured relationships inside the family as well.”
Studies have shown that recent political polarization — and especially the highly moralized polarization associated with the Trump era — has destabilized relationships more than in the past. Evidence also suggests liberals/Democrats are substantially more likely than conservatives/Republicans to report cutting off relatives over political differences, while Trump supporters are disproportionately the targets of that distancing.
Instead of cutting off his friends and relations, however, he chose to show them another way forward.
“[This] makes me feel like I’m doing something,” Smith said. “Instead of just sitting around and talking, I’m actually putting something out there to give people a resource.”
The Wenatchee billboard campaign created such a stir locally that Confluence Indivisible began a fundraiser to keep the billboard up. The Wenatchee-based nonprofit, which is a pro-democracy advocacy group, raised about $1,000 from 26 donors to run a new billboard in East Wenatchee at the beginning of September.
Savannah Fields, a representative of Confluence Indivisible who leads its Mutual Aid Action Team, said the billboards could provide an “off-ramp” for people looking for an alternative to the politics of hate she sees in the MAGA movement, including at local politically conservative and Christian nationalist Grace City Church.
“They are using their religion to hurt other people, right? Which to me is kind of antithetical to what I understand a lot of religions to be, which is to spread love and to support your community, to accept everyone and feed the poor and welcome immigrants,” she said.
Fields added that exclusion can leave people feeling as though they don’t belong if they don’t fit a particular worldview.
“If you’re not fitting into their specific worldview, then [you aren’t] American or you’re not Christian or you know you don’t fit within that box,” she said.
By supporting the Leaving MAGA billboards, Fields explained that her organization is “trying to say that everybody is welcome here.”
Spokane’s and Hayden’s billboards were sponsored by anonymous donors.
With Smith’s significant contribution as the sole sponsor of Wenatchee’s first billboard, he said, “If one person changes their mind, then everything has been worth it.”
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