The Dropping Dow

It used to be a political given, something close to a mathematical
certainty. Democrat Dow Constantine would beat Republican Susan
Hutchison in the race for King County ex-ecutive because, in this
liberal county, the numbers were firmly on Constantine’s side.

Just look at the returns from the 2008 presidential election: Barack
Obama, whom Constantine supported, won 70 percent of the vote here.
Mike Huckabee, the strident conservative whom Hutchison backed with a
$500 donation, was too hard-line to even make it through the Republican
primaries. Or look at the returns from the 2008 governor’s race:
Democrat Christine Gregoire, whom Constantine supported, got 64 percent
of the King County vote. Republican Dino Rossi, whom Hutchison
supported with over $1,000 in contributions, got just 36 percent.

More to the point, look at the returns from this year’s primary.

With no other serious Republicans in the race for King County
executive, Hutchison had the county’s conservative voters all to
herself. She got 33 percent of the countywide primary vote—no
doubt due in large part to name recognition from her years sitting
behind a TV news desk, since she was otherwise a political unknown.

The Democratic primary field was much more crowded. State legislator
Ross Hunter got 11 percent of the vote, state legislator Fred Jarrett
got 12 percent of the vote, and King County Council member Larry
Phillips got 12 percent of the vote. Constantine, also a King County
Council member, came in first among the Democrats with 27 percent. It
was fewer primary votes than Hutchison received, sure, but if you added
all the primary votes for Democrats together, it was possible to see
the old King County that liberals know so well. About 62 percent of the
total vote went Democratic.

But something odd has happened on the way to this year’s general
election. Beginning in early September, according to three tracking
polls conducted by SurveyUSA, Constantine hit a ceiling of 44 percent
of the general-election vote (with the most recent poll, released on
October 13, showing him dropping to 42 percent). Hutchison, meanwhile,
has pulled a consistent 47 percent in every poll.

She’s in the lead? In King County? How does that math
work?

“First of all,” said Constantine spokesman Sandeep Kaushik, “we’re
now in the general election. We’ve got nearly twice as many voters.
It’s not like we just re-vote with the primary election voters. If that
were the case, it would be very different.”

But why isn’t Constantine doing better with the general election
pool? They’re mostly Democrats, after all.

“We just initiated our voter-contact efforts late last week,”
Kaushik said on October 19. “We saw the exact same pattern during the
primary, where, in the last two weeks of the primary race, Constantine
more than doubled his share of the vote. We went from like 12 percent
to 27 percent.” True, if Constantine more than doubles his support in
the next two weeks—or merely increases it by a quarter—he
wins. But can he? His SurveyUSA polling trend is downward, not
upward.

Jordan McCarren, Hutchison’s spokesman, explained the situation this
way: “As the Seattle Times noted in their endorsement of
Susan, ‘This election is about change.’… Our county’s many problems
will not be solved by the same career politicians who created
them.”

Part of Constantine’s problem, of course, is that county executive
is now officially a nonpartisan position, making this a “nonpartisan”
race. (Hutchison, no surprise, helped pay for the 2008 ballot measure
that made it nonpartisan.) But Constantine has been trying for months
to make sure the county’s huge Democratic base knows that Hutchison is
anti-­choice, bad on the environment, a donor to conservatives such
as Huckabee and George W. Bush, and alarmingly inexperienced.

So far, it’s not working.

“This is one of the jobs we have between now and the
election—to make sure voters understand where these two
candidates stand on these issues and which one has the qualifications,”
Kaushik said.

The candidates’ four televised debates would be a good venue for
doing this. But in the first debate, Constantine struggled to puncture
Hutchison’s powerfully telegenic aura. He seemed stiff, nervous, and
small in his suit, while Hutchison, commanding in a yellow jacket that
only a former anchorwoman would wear, successfully turned Constantine’s
Democratic cred against him. “My opponent is a foreigner to the
marketplace of ideas,” she said. “He can’t accept anything that isn’t
in his narrow area.”

By the second debate, Constantine had found the right tone and
message. He put some bite into his voice and aggressively countered
Hutchison’s “nonpartisan” claims, repeating over and over that she’s
anti-choice, bad on the environment, a backer of the likes of Huckabee
and Bush, and inexperienced. He also went after her tenure running the
Seattle Symphony, saying it wasn’t as smooth as she contends and
undercutting her central claim to past executive leadership
experience.

But by then, Constantine had more than just debate presentation to
worry about. He was facing an attack ad, put out by an independent
coalition of conservatives with more than $150,000 to spend, showing
him as a cartoon marionette drowning in his own mistakes. A
liberal-leaning coalition countered within days with an ad attacking
Hutchison as a Sarah Palin clone, but they have only $100,000 behind
their effort.

The focus of these ads? The roughly 10 percent of registered voters
still undecided about who should be the next county executive,
according to the SurveyUSA polling. Most of them should be
low-information Democratic voters who presumably can be pulled to
Constantine’s side, provided they receive the right information.

“We expect, over the next two weeks, to see voters move in our
direction once they learn about Susan Hutchison’s repeated efforts to
hide where she really stands on core issues,” Kaushik said. “I’m
feeling pretty good.”