Weak Tea in Washington

Labor Day is traditionally the time of year when people start to get interested in fall elections; with our all-mail ballot system, it’s not much time until ballots arrive in mid-October. In coming weeks, ETS! will look at the critical ballot measures on November’s ballot. First, let’s look at when people weren’t paying attention: this year’s somnambulent August primary, and what it revealed about the only statewide race for elected office this year, Patty Murray’s run for a fourth term as US Senator against Republican permacandidate Dino Rossi.

With mail-in ballots, there’s never any such thing as a truly final tally, but the percentages aren’t going to change: Murray got 46 percent, Rossi 33, and Tea Party candidate Clint Didier 12. That’s exactly what everyone expected. The big news, then, was the lack of news: the absence in Washington of the strong anti-incumbent fervor whose existence has dominated political Conventional Wisdom in 2010.

Primary votes–especially now that we hold them in August, when the weather is nice and most people are focused on anything other than politics–are low-turnout affairs. As such, they tend to skew more partisan (more highly motivated voters) and more conservative (more older, regular voters, who lean more conservative) than November voters. Both factors should have helped Didier. They obviously didn’t help much. Why?

Rossi, of course, had two huge advantages over Didier: money (much of it from national sources, as with Murray) and name familiarity. It also didn’t help that Didier’s the-federal-government-is-an-inherently-bad-thing message was undercut by the hilarious news that he’d received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies over the years; he wasn’t exactly the most credible messenger for his message.

But that explains why Didier lost–not why he barely cracked double digits, and Rossi nearly tripled his total. For that, we need three other factors, all with implications for Dino’s chances in November.

The first is that Rossi when broke his long-standing policy of avoiding commenting on actual issues (a hallmark of his two gubernatorial runs), it was, ala John McCain, to ditch his image of a moderate and try to out-teabag Didier. Rossi became the first major Republican senatorial candidate in the country to call for outright repeal of the weak Wall Street reforms passed this summer by Congress–fitting for a man still making a living giving lectures on how to profit from real estate foreclosures (which Rossi was doing even this summer), and for one getting huge money contributions from Wall Street (ditto), but an odd political choice in this Year of Bashing Wall Street. He also copped, after years of avoiding the subject, to opposing reproductive freedom for women for “anything other than maybe rape, incest or life of the mother.” (“Maybe”??)

Rossi’s strategy, of course, will be to forget all that and run to the center now that it worked and he’s survived the primary. That’s normal strategy, but it’s underscored this year by the fact that there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of passion to this year’s rumored Big Red Wave. August’s turnout was average for all-mail primaries, off two percent from 2008, when there was a governor but no US senator race on the primary ballot. No great crest of enthusiasm in our state this time, teabagging or otherwise.

Among those who did vote this year, however, the biggest other race on the ballot suggests problems for Rossi. Conservative State Supreme Court justice Jim Johnson won reelection with a whopping 62 percent of the vote over a strong challenger, Stan Rumbaugh.

That vote suggests the power of money and incumbency in judicial elections, but also that the primary skewed about as conservative as a statewide race in Washington will ever get. Didier’s crash-and-burn routine suggests that the Tea Party simply doesn’t have the impact among conservatives here that it does in, say, Alaska, where last week a little-known Palin endorsee upset incumbent Republican senator Lisa Murkowski in a primary.

To the extent it does thrive, teabaggers aren’t going to like Rossi’s tack to the middle in the next two months. But even if we assume that Didier’s 12 percent will almost all go to Rossi, Murray got more votes than both of them combined; how does Dino make up more votes among a more moderate November electorate? Rossi’s got a problem. All other things being equal, he’ll lose.

But Rossi has a secret weapon: he’s running against a Democrat, and Democrats have a long, storied history of being idiots. (In basketball, it’s called making “unforced errors.”) Enter Patty Murray.

On election day, there was Patty, hosting President Obama for a Seattle fundraiser for her campaign and wearing tennis shoes? When her companion and guest is the single most powerful man in the world. Why?

Because some clever Democratic consultant told her there’s an anti-incumbent mood afoot, so a woman who’s used her entire 18-year DC career to climb the party and Senate ladders and use her seniority to funnel money home–the insider’s insider–is reviving the “Mom in Tennis Shoes” schtick from her initial 1992 run for Senate.

Then, she was an obscure state senator from Shoreline, running to replace an incumbent (Brock Adams) accused of very nasty crimes against women. It made sense. And it worked. Now, two decades on, implying that Murray is still an outsider goes well beyond insulting the intelligence of voters. Given that Murray has produced little legislation (unlike her junior colleague, Maria Cantwell), and has with few exceptions voted as a party-line Democrat, it also undermines her only real achievements in her entire, long term in office.

If the election were today, Rossi would lose, and he’s a known quantity–few additional people will decide to vote for him during the coming weeks. But plenty could still be persuaded to vote against Murray. If she keeps up with the self-inflicting wounds, it’s going to be close. –Geov Parrish