Washington certified its 2022 U.S. Senate election, and other elections, on December 8, 2022 (see story here).
Slightly under two-thirds of the state’s eligible voters cast ballots. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), running for a 5th term, defeated GOP challenger Tiffany Smiley (photo, left) by 57.15% to 42.63%, with 0.22% going to write-ins (see results here).
Smiley underperformed Loren Culp, who got 43.12% in the 2020 governor’s race, yet she’s very clearly a better quality candidate and a better person than he is (see my posting here), so what went wrong?
It wasn’t necessarily her fault. Not directly, anyway. Murray is popular, and the Republican Party isn’t; the GOP didn’t flip a single Senate seat in 2022, let alone one in a blue state. Of course, Smiley never had a chance to unseat Murray in any election, let alone one in which democracy and abortion rights were on the ballot. But why didn’t she make a better showing than Culp, a crank?
Higher turnout, for one thing. If you look at the 2020 results (here), over a million more people voted, not least because Trump was on the ballot. That right there explains why Culp got 449,744 more votes than Smiley did two years later.
Culp actually got more votes in 2020 than Murray did in 2022 (1,749,066 versus 1,741,827), a sobering thought, although it certainly doesn’t mean Culp could’ve beat Murray in 2022; he would’ve had a million fewer votes to scrap that number from. But why?
I think it’s all about Trump; Culp embraced him, while Smiley didn’t, and it seems obvious that Washington’s Trumpers didn’t turn out for her.
I really want to do right by Tiffany Smiley, because she doesn’t deserve the humiliation of being compared to Culp. The problem isn’t her, it’s Republican voters. She’s too good for them — they’ve made that clear — and it’s as simple as that.
If she tweaked her positions, and stopped acting like a Republican, she might have a future in Washington politics as a Democrat. If she stays a Republican, like the Ancient Mariner, she’ll always be stuck with an albatross around her neck.