On July 8, 2024, I wondered if Dave Reichert could get 45% in the 2024 Washington gubernatorial election (see my post here). We’re in the homestretch now, so let’s take an updated look at this race.
Reichert knows he isn’t going to win, and probably has already written his concession speech. Now 74 years old, he’s undoubtedly thinking this election is his last hurrah in politics.
As I’ve frequently written in this blog, any Republican running statewide in Washington is almost guaranteed to get 42% of the votes, but it’s awfully tough to get to 45%, although a couple of recent GOP candidates for governor have done it (details in the post linked above).
When Tiffany Smiley, who has a heartwarming personal biography, ran for U.S. Senate in 2022 against Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), she got 42.63% of the vote (see my post here), which means she persuaded almost no one outside Washington’s GOP base voters to vote for her.
Now let’s fast-forward to Oct. 9-14, 2024, the dates of the most recent survey in the 2024 Washington governor’s race. How is Reichert doing with the election three weeks away? Is he living up to his statewide name recognition? (He was a congressman from the Seattle area; and before that, he was the detective who caught the Green River Killer.)
This poll (see it here) has Ferguson (D) at 50% and Reichert (R) at 34%, with 16% up in the air (which doesn’t necessarily mean undecided). If those voters split 50-50, then Reichert gets — eureka! — 42% of the vote.
Look, I don’t have a crystal ball, I’ve just watched a lot of Washington elections go by, that’s all. It’s nearly always 42% for the Republican candidate in a statewide race, give or take. Give, if the candidate is well known and projects a moderate image; take, if the candidate is a dud. Curious how Trump did in 2020? He got 38.77% in Washington, underperforming nearly all the other GOP statewide candidates that year, most of whom were in the 41%-43% range.
I won’t go into how we got here; I’m not sure I fully understand it myself, but I recall the Washington State Republican Party (WSRP) was taken over by extremists in the 1980s, who purged the party of centrists, which is not how you build a majority coalition. Washington hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate or elected a Republican governor since then, and last elected a GOP senator in the early 1990s.
You’d think there’s a lesson in this for Republicans, but either they’re incapable of learning from experience, or they value ideology above office. It’s not like their election losses sneak up on them; defeat roars down on them like a train coming through a tunnel. Maybe they just don’t want to responsibility of governing; it is, after all, a lot of work.
Just ask Bob Ferguson a year from now, after he presides over his first legislative session as governor. By the way, there’s talk that the Democrats may win supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature this year, too.
As far as Reichert goes, as a former congressman and high-profile law enforcement officer, he should have some electoral heft; but the man is something of a dud. He’s a weasel. Seattle Times writer Danny Westneat says (here) he skirts Trump’s unpopularity by picking “three different lanes, depending on the audience.”
In the debate with Ferguson, he told viewers he’s not supporting either Trump or Harris. But earlier this year, he privately told a GOP group he’ll vote for Trump. Then, last week, he did it again: In thinly-coded language, he told a GOP gathering “we can make America great again.”
If the man won’t publicly admit he’s supporting his party’s (albeit unpopular) presidential nominee, why should any Democratic or independent voters whose votes he needs to get elected governor trust him to run our state?