November campaigns begin
Incumbents and challengers coasted through the congressional races in Tuesday’s primary, prompting the campaigns to look for positive ways to view the results while they concentrated on a more important number.
There are 47 days until the general election.
In that time span, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell and her GOP challenger, former Safeco CEO Mike McGavick, announced they will debate twice – once in Spokane and once in Seattle. McGavick had asked for as many as nine debates, starting before the primary, but Cantwell had deferred until after the primary, saying they both had party opposition, however marginal.
On Wednesday the Cantwell campaign said it had agreed to the two matchups, which will be televised.
The Spokane debate, on Oct. 12, will be hosted by the Spokane Rotary Club and broadcast by KXLY-TV, with participation from The Spokesman-Review. The Seattle debate, on Oct. 17, will be sponsored by KING-TV, KREM-TV, Northwest Cable News and the Seattle Times.
Vote totals on Wednesday showed Cantwell with some 322,400 votes, or about 91 percent of those cast in the Democrats’ five-way primary. McGavick had about 222,300 votes, or about 85 percent in the six-person Republican primary.
In Spokane and most other Eastern Washington counties, however, McGavick’s total topped Cantwell’s as voters had to pick a single party’s ballot and could not cross over.
Latest tallies in Spokane County showed 41 percent of the ballots cast were for Democrats, while 54 percent were for Republicans. The remainder were cast by voters who refused to pick a party, and voted only in the nonpartisan races for judges and ballot measures.
No one knows how those results will translate into the November general election, when all voters get a single ballot and are free to split their ticket among the major and minor parties and independent candidates.
“I think we will see a turnaround based on everyone being able to vote for anyone” on the ballot, State Rep. Timm Ormsby of Spokane said at a post-primary news conference called by Democrats as they attempted to shift their campaign strategy into a higher gear.
In Spokane County, Ormsby said, he knew Democrats who voted a Republican ballot to be able to have a say in the contentious sheriff’s primary. Other counties had similar situations, where one party had one or more hot races and the other party had none, he added.
It may take several years of partisan primaries with strict limits on the ballots before anyone knows how primary results foreshadow the general election, Ormsby said.
In Eastern Washington’s 5th Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris and Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark, an Okanogan rancher, both ran unopposed in Tuesday’s primary. In the most recent tallies, McMorris has about 51,000 votes to Goldmark’s 37,000. In Spokane County, McMorris collected about 5,000 more votes than Goldmark.
But Jeremiah Levine, Goldmark campaign manager, insisted “more people voted for Goldmark in the primary than expected,” and predicted a shift for the general election.
Goldmark has scheduled a meeting between Democratic congressional challengers from the intermountain West and representatives of Indian tribes on Friday in Spokane, as a way to highlight issues crucial to Native Americans. He’ll also hold a “critical issues forum” on Sept. 28 at the Northeast Community Center.
McMorris, meanwhile, is in Washington, D.C., like Cantwell, where Congress is working to pass appropriations bills and is trying to salvage tax cuts such as the ability of Washington residents to deduct their state sales tax on the federal income tax.
On Wednesday she announced that a special task force she led on possible revisions of the National Environmental Policy Act had come up with a series of recommendations to improve the bill. Any legislation needed to make those recommendations work, however, is likely to wait until a new Congress is formed by the Nov. 7 elections.