On November 12, 10 days after the final ballots were cast in one of the closest state supreme court races in Washington history, Justice Richard B. Sanders all but conceded defeat. His opponent, former appeals court judge Charlie Wiggins, had pulled ahead by about 5,000 votes, and the math—not to mention tens of thousands of still-to-be-tallied ballots in liberal King County—appeared to be solidly against him. "It looks like we're coming to the end of the campaign trail," Justice Sanders said in a statement to supporters.

How did a 15-year incumbent manage to lose this race?

It bears close examination, considering that sitting high court justices rarely lose their seats in Washington State. In fact, the last time this happened was in 1995, when Sanders got onto the high court by defeating the then justice Rosselle Pekelis—by campaigning on, among other things, cases that he said showed her opposing gun rights and supporting the rights of gay adoptive parents. (He won that race by 10 points, despite the fact that 12 out of 13 newspapers in the state endorsed Pekelis that year, while the King County Bar Association rated her highly and found Sanders "not qualified.")

Before looking at why Sanders went down, however, a quick step back for some perspective. Nationally, the dominant story about state supreme court races this election cycle has concerned Iowa voters removing three state supreme court justices who backed same-sex marriage in that state. Here in Washington, in a year that saw a conservative resurgence elsewhere, voters ousted Justice Sanders, who in 2006 sided with the conservative wing of our state court by ruling that Washington's ban on same-sex marriage is justified, and should continue, because of "the unique and binary biological nature of marriage and its exclusive link with procreation and responsible child rearing." He was, by his campaign's own description, "the deciding vote" in that case.

That controversial vote is certainly one reason Justice Sanders lost, and it was clearly a big issue in liberal, gay-friendly King County, where more than 58 percent of voters have backed Wiggins in returns so far. However, it took more than just dissatisfaction with that one ruling for Wiggins to beat Justice Sanders.

Based on his status as a self-described libertarian, Justice Sanders this year campaigned at both the Republican and Democratic state conventions, spoke about marijuana-law reform at a meeting of the ultraliberal 43rd District Democrats, and was one of the main draws at a Tea Party rally in Spokane. He had Seattle lefties, Tea Partyers, Republicans, Democrats—that is, to put it mildly, a hard-to-beat constituency. Justice Sanders, in a September interview with The Stranger, said he sees it this way: "Any reason to vote for me is a good reason."

So what caused that huge coalition of voters to crack? Increased attention to Justice Sanders, plain and simple.

In a contest that received virtually zero television coverage (and involved zero television advertising, because both of the candidates raised only around $275,000 each and therefore couldn't afford any), it's easy to figure out where that increased attention came from.

It first came in a lengthy profile in The Stranger ("High Court Hypocrite," Oct 7) that compared Justice Sanders's public record to his private conduct—conduct that involves two divorces and multiple simultaneous girlfriends, even though the opinion he signed in Washington's same-sex-marriage case praised heterosexual couples as being uniquely suited to monogamous, long-term relationships. Later, it came from the Seattle Times ("Two state Supreme Court justices stun some listeners with race comments," Oct 22), which paid huge attention to recent statements Justice Sanders made suggesting racism plays no role at all in the high African-American incarceration rates in this state. The Times withdrew its endorsement of Sanders as a result.

In all of that, the key word is attention.

State supreme court races usually get almost no attention. The rulings that form the basis of campaigns for the high court are complicated and hard to explain in sound bites, the candidates themselves generally have muted personalities, and the overwhelming belief among the political class is that voters really don't care about these races.

Clearly that last assumption is wrong.