09/23/2006

By DAVID AMMONS  / Associated Press

Apathy, incumbents and bloated ad budgets were big winners in the third running of Washington's unpopular new "pick-a-party" primary.

Some of the state's most powerful political players, including the scrappy Service Employees International Union and the homebuilders, suffered slapdowns.

Supreme Court justices and the Republicans' favorite Democrat, state Sen. Tim Sheldon, managed to avoid getting the hook from the voters following big-budget opposition campaigns that seem to be the new normal.

With little interest generated in congressional primaries and voter pique and confusion over the new "pick-a-party" ballot, the biggest loser seemed to be the election itself. Turnout was about one voter in three, and elections officials reported that voters still are mad about having to limit themselves to one party's ballot.

A lookback:

_SENATE SNORE. The once-expected anti-war backlash against Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., utterly fizzled, with the freshman incumbent annihilating her little-known critics with 91 percent. Her Republican challenger, Mike McGavick, the GOP's hand-picked favorite for a year, stormed past five competitors with 86 percent of the vote. It's been a while since the top-of-ticket primary was this preordained and boring. Both sides have been running their November campaign for months.

_WHO KNOWS? Through force of habit, political junkies were sifting through the returns for clear signs of how key matchups might fare in November. Good luck. Since the system no longer allows head-to-head primaries where voters can split their tickets up and down the ballot, it's impossible to draw much meaning in the results.

Cantwell, for instance, outpolled McGavick by more than 100,000 votes, and Darcy Burner was ahead of Rep. Dave Reichert, hardly surprising when Democrats generally had more interesting primaries and drew more participation. In conservative Mason County, for instance, about 80 percent of voters chose the Democratic ballot.

_GERRY AND THE SUPREMES. The election's best story line was the aggressive campaigns by powerful interests, including the Building Industry Association of Washington and religious conservatives to take out incumbent justices, including the long-serving chief, Gerry Alexander.

The campaigns and unprecedented efforts by independent groups, some as far away as Washington, D.C., plowed over $3 million into a barrage of paint-peeling TV ads and assorted hit pieces. In the end, justices Alexander and Tom Chambers and Susan Owens survived. It seems clear that the once obscure court races will never be the same. First sign could be a big-budget November runoff between Owens and Stephen Johnson.

_NEGATIVE ADS. Insiders and political scientists had a field day watching the attack ads on TV and debating whether they'd backfire. Consensus afterward: maybe they were too relentlessly mean and eventually turned counterproductive. Prime evidence: the targets won. (Although this could be because the challengers failed to turn out their voters and the incumbents had a better "ground game.") Strategists certainly don't suggest that niceness will suddenly replace nastiness: Attack ads are used because they generally work.

_BEST REVENGE. Another marquee race that drew attention far beyond district boundaries was rebel Sheldon's re-election race, interesting both because of the heavy matchup of special interest money and because it was a clear early test of the state's new "pick-a-primary" system. Sheldon's own Democratic Party tried to shun him because of his coziness with known Republicans, and assorted center-left interests dumped more than $260,000 into this single little race. Sheldon and his backers spent heavily, too, $200,000. TV ads — highly unusual for a legislative primary — popped up on both sides.

Last Laugh Dept.: He creamed the party's "real" Democrat and is heavily favored in November to return will be back to haunt his caucus in January.

The SEIU state council gave $37,500 to the opposition campaign, but was less visible than in their previous belly flop, when they went after, but failed to get, House Appropriations Chairwoman Helen Sommers, D-Seattle.

Sheldon, like Sommers before him, said he won't exact revenge.

_THE L WORD. That would be "loser." Diane Tebelius, the sassy Republican chair, hasn't had much opportunity to calls the Democrats "losers" in this blue state. But after Democratic Chairman Dwight Pelz failed his highly publicized bid to oust Sheldon, she called him "the biggest loser" and puckishly offered Sheldon and other Reagan Democrats "asylum" in the GOP, saying "Come on over to our side. We actually believe in diversity."

At last word, Pelz was still sputtering about Sheldon, whom he called "the Joe Lieberman of Washington state politics. He would kiss George Bush if he could."

_INCUMBENTS & FREE RIDES. For all the hand-wringing about the almost unanimous re-election rate for incumbents, this year seems to just underscore that reality and the sense that there is precious little competition in general. For starters, seven of the 25 state senators on the ballot and 28 of the 98 House members have been re-elected without a whiff of opposition from either party. There were only 16 contested legislative primaries statewide and not a single incumbent was defeated. King County's veteran prosecutor, Norm Maleng, was re-elected without competition.

Only two congressmen had primaries. "Baghdad Jim" McDermott won with 92 percent of the Democratic vote in the 7th District and Doc Hastings won with 77 percent in the 4th. The year's best U.S. House race, pitting Republican Rep. Dave Reichert and Democrat Darcy Burner, had no primary on either side. McGavick and Cantwell had Senate primaries in name only.

The home-free court races have been mentioned. The entire congressional delegation, possibly excepting Reichert, are favored for a new term. New faces in the Legislature will mostly be because of natural turnover.

_GAY POL. Homosexuals recently were on the losing end of a 5-4 state Supreme Court opinion that upheld the state ban on same-sex marriage, but could pick up an additional openly gay state legislator. Jamie Pedersen, a Seattle attorney who is a national wheel in the gay-rights movement, leads for the 43rd District House seat being vacated by the state's senior gay legislator, Ed Murray. Murray is headed to the state Senate, where he'll be the only "out" senator. If Democrat Pedersen prevails in the absentees and defeats the Republican nominee in the heavily Democratic district, he'll keep the number of gay House members at four. The state already has one of the largest gay contingents in the country.

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David Ammons is the AP's state political writer and has covered the statehouse since 1971. He may be reached at P.O. Box 607, Olympia, WA 98507, or at dammons@ap.org on the Internet.