Marr, Barlow victories buck 68-year trend

In whatever part of the great beyond where deceased politicians while away eternity, John Happy, Sam Guess and Jim West may be sitting around a table, shaking their heads and calling for a weather report from “the other place” down below.

Hell may have frozen over. Spokane’s 6th Legislative District – which those three Republican politicians represented in the state Senate for more than 50 years total – is sending a Democrat to Olympia.

Two, probably. From a district that was once called the “Silk Stocking Sixth.”

Chris Marr, a former Chamber of Commerce chairman, auto dealer and Washington State University regent, is comfortably ahead – 4,043 votes as of Wednesday afternoon’s count – of incumbent Republican Sen. Brad Benson. Don Barlow, a Spokane School Board member, is also ahead, of Republican Rep. John Serben, although his 1,971 vote lead is not quite as comfortable.

No longer will Democrats who are announcing their candidacy in the 6th face the taunt from reporters that one of their kind hasn’t won since, since … and there was always a search for an appropriate historic milestone.

The year was 1938, which isn’t particularly memorable. Franklin Roosevelt was president, but he’d been president for six years, and would be president for six more. Hitler hadn’t invaded Czechoslovakia or Poland, so World War II hadn’t started. Irving Berlin hadn’t written “White Christmas,” physicists hadn’t split the atom. “Casablanca” hadn’t hit the movie theaters, and nylons hadn’t been invented to replace silk stockings – although all those things would happen by 1942, when Democrats lost all three seats in the 6th and didn’t get them back.

There were some close races over the years. Jack Geraghty, a former Spokane mayor, lost a House seat to Republican John Ahern by 419 votes in 2000. Democrat Jan Polek came within 87 votes of beating John Moyer in 1986.

Like Chicago Cubs fans in April – the Cubs perhaps are the only entity with a longer search for a Holy Grail than Democrats in the 6th – each legislative campaign season started with “this could be the year.”

A few weeks ago during a campaign interview with The Spokesman-Review, Benson said he knew Marr was trying to energize his forces for an uphill battle by talking about how long it had been since a Democratic victory. He thought that was irrelevant, because the district had changed so much in the last 14 years with redistricting. Parts of the old 5th Legislative District, which swung back and forth between the parties, were now part of the 6th, he said.

The boundaries were redrawn in 1992 when Spokane lost a legislative district to faster-growing King County, and again in 2002. But if anything, the district was made more Republican. West, who was in the House first and then the Senate, always said that was the case, and he was a political wonk about such things.

Some of the more conservative Republican precincts from northwest Spokane were grafted onto the 6th when it was redrawn – gerrymandered, said Democrats – to wrap around the city of Spokane’s central core. Many Democratic-leaning precincts that made the old 5th District swing back and forth were added to the 3rd District, a Democratic stronghold.

But even if some of those new northwest precincts did provide some Democratic balance, a computer analysis of the ballots cast thus far shows that Marr, and to a lesser extent Barlow, didn’t win just there.

They built their victories in the traditional parts of the 6th, the heavy-voting South Hill neighborhoods that for decades have been the homes to middle- and upper middle-class professionals. Early this year, Marr signs began to sprout in areas that normally boast GOP signs; some of those yards would later add signs for other Democrats, but others would mix in GOP candidates.

Those were precincts that Guess and West always won, even in tight races. Whether this is a one-time phenomenon or a political trend remains to be seen. It’s probably too early to declare, as Democratic Rep. Alex Wood of north Spokane did on election night, that “the 6th is finally a swing district.”