Back in September I speculated about whether Tiffany Smiley could get 44% of the Senate vote in blue Washington (see posting here).
As I observed then, Republicans gave up seriously trying to dislodge Sen. Patty Murray. This opened a door for ambitious novices like Smiley (photo, left).
She has a compelling personal story, and I gave her credit for not being a crank like Loren Culp, the gadfly who ran for governor in 2020.
But my sense was “the importance of personal biography, like character, has withered in politics, which is much more ideology-driven now.” This blunts her personal appeal outside the GOP base.
How did I size up her prospects? I described her as “a sacrificial candidate who has no chance of winning” and wrote, “The only question for speculation is whether she can get 44% of the vote.”
As for the strategic lay of the land, I explained,
“This is a significant number in Washington politics, because any idiot running in a statewide race is almost guaranteed 42% of the vote simply by having an “R” after their name. We can take the 38.77% that Trump got in 2020 as an absolute floor on the Republican vote in this state, which is comparable to the 38.23% a nobody named Richard Pope got against state attorney general Christine Gregoire in 2000 …. Being an established GOP politician without Trump’s liabilities usually gets you to 42%.”
Where did the 44% number come from? It wasn’t wholly arbitrary. I said,
“Culp, despite being a loony, outperformed by getting 43%, setting a marker Smiley needs to beat to not look silly by underperforming Culp. That’s how and why I chose 44% as her goal.”
Actually, Culp got 43.12%; so that’s the number Smiley must beat to not look like a goat. I then assessed the tactical situation as follows:
“So now let’s consider whether she can get there. On a national level, Republicans probably won’t invest a lot of money in this hopeless race, so Smiley is largely on her own. Trump being toxic in this state, she doesn’t want him to campaign for her, but she avoids alienating his supporters by dancing around the question of whether Biden won the 2020 election (see story here). Stuck with these givens, can she break above 42%?”
I thought at the time, “to make our best educated guess let’s look at the polls.” Which I did, and came up with the following:
“Of course polls are just polls, and only November’s vote totals can tell the real story, but until then polling is the best and only information we have to go on. There’s always variation among polls, but only Trafalger (a GOP-leaning poll which tends to overstate GOP support) rates her above 43% (giving her 46%), and only 2 other polls (of 10 total) have her matching Culp’s 43% result. So it’s not looking good for her. This can’t be explained by her lack of name familiarity, because Culp was an unknown, too.”
Where are we? As of today, Smiley has 43.0% against Sen. Murray. If 42% is a given, then she earned 1% by her efforts. It shows no special ability to get votes by her own efforts, despite the race having gotten plenty of press attention.
There are still votes to count, and I expect to revise this post again, but the results so far don’t establish Smiley as a rising star in Washington GOP politics. If a plumber could get 42%, there’s little reason to nominate her instead of the plumber. There’s no practical difference between losing with 43% of the vote, or losing with 42% of the vote.
This showing gives potential backers little incentive to back her. She needed to get into the high 40%s to have a political future, and even though there are still votes to be counted, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen..
Quite frankly, doing worse than Culp is a liability. And right now, that’s still where she sits.