Progressive hopes for state Senate shift dwindle in late vote count
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Progressive hopes for state Senate shift dwindle in late vote count
Mullet now surviving by 88 votes in 5th; Muzzall pulling away in 10th
The enormously expensive, many-fronted battle over the composition of the Washington State Senate may ultimately turn out to be a push.
In the 10th District, which is mostly Island County, Democrat Helen Price Johnson is now trailing recently appointed incumbent state Sen. Ron Muzzall by more Thant 1,200 votes. In the 5th District in east King County, progressive challenger Ingrid Anderson is behind by just 88 votes in her intra-party bid to unseat business-friendly incumbent Democrat Mark Mullet. Price Johnson and Anderson were both slightly ahead after early returns last week..
These subtle shifts in vote totals could dramatically flip the narrative that was emerging on Election Night: a substantially more progressive Senate that would have pushed for a capital gains tax, a carbon tax and other new sources of tax dollars.
Now it’s looking more like the status quo. Out in Southwest Washington’s 19th District, Democratic incumbent Dean Takko is losing by more than 7,000 votes to Republican Jeff Wilson in territory where President Donald Trump and GOP gubernatorial long shot Loren Culp won by wide margins. That loss will be offset if Democratic challenger T’Wina Nobles holds onto her lead over GOP incumbent Steve O’Ban in Pierce County’s 28th District. She’s ahead by more than 1,000 votes.
If all these results hold up, the size of the Democrats majority in the Senate will be unchanged, and the ideological shift will be the difference between Takko, a rural moderate, and Nobles, the president and CEO of the Tacoma Urban League.
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It also flips the narrative on how well the money was spent. Washington Cares, the main anti-Mullet committee, spent more than $1.3 million on the race, while the Washington Education Association, the state’s powerful teachers union, separately spent more than $500,000. Here’s where Washington Cares’ money comes from:
On the other side, the million-dollar campaign on Mullet’s behalf waged by the Committee for Proven Leadership, a lobbyist-driven political action committee fueled by a who’s-who of business players, starts to look like money well spent to preserve the business community’s best champion among majority Democrats. Here’s where that money came from:
New Direction PAC, the more conventional committee supporting Democratic candidates for the Legislature, poured more than $6 million into campaigns around the state. Here’s a look at New Direction’s top contributors. Note that the Harry Truman Fund and the Kennedy Fund are the soft-money PACs controlled by House and Senate Democrats, respectively. They get most of their money from the same set of labor interests you see listed here. For more about how this works, check out our earlier coverage.
They spent more than $1 million on the Nobles-O’Ban race, and more than $250,000 on Price Johnson. vs. Muzzall.
Seven different independent political committees funded by business interests or the Washington State Republican Party spent nearly $200,000 combined to defend Muzzall. Much of the money came from the network of PACs under the umbrella of Enterprise Washington, which we reported on last month.
One of the takeaways from the election nationally is that antipathy for Donald Trump didn’t drive a massive blue wave up and down the ballot. In Washington, heavy spending on the left to take advantage of that wave is looking to come up short, while the right, looking mostly to defend the turf it holds, is looking better.
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