Nany Evans oral history.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Hughes: Barry Goldwater may have been the conscience of the conservatives, but Lyndon
B. Johnson was on a roll. Still, was there any moment in October, despite still trailing in the
polls, when Dan said, “I think we have a shot.”
Evans: Well, he always was positive. He was always very good at understanding what the
numbers meant at that moment in time. So he wasn’t often surprised about things.
Hughes: Who was the Stu Elway of that era who was crunching the numbers for the Evans
campaign?
Evans: Jim Dolliver and Dan.
Hughes: Do you recall any kind of defining moment where Election Day is a week away and
you thought, “My God, we could really win this”?
Evans: Well, I don’t remember the moment because it was too long ago. But Dan didn’t
trail in the polls after the primary so I just know that I had a feeling “this may happen.”
Then I think I began thinking, “But what if it does? What will I do then? What’s going to
happen to us?”
Hughes: That reminds me of the movie called The Candidate where Robert Redford is the
dark horse who just got elected to the U.S. Senate in a huge upset. He’s in the back seat
with his Jim Dolliver and he goes, “What do we do now?”
Evans: Exactly. “What do we do now?” I think it’s sort of that way for everybody who wins.
But the one thing about that campaign that I loved was not just the people we met out in
the communities; it was the people here in Seattle, our friends, and others who became
really good lifelong friends, who just had the passion as well. You could just feel they
were working there because they really wanted to be there. It was sort of like the Obama
campaign – they really wanted to be a part of it. I’m not comparing Dan to Obama in any
way, but this was really a mission that they were on, and they were having fun.
Hughes: Not too far-fetched an analogy, actually, for what Dan represented at that time. It
was a changing of the guard in Washington politics.
Evans: And we had fun. It was really fun. It was so personal. And there were gatherings
where we really were with them a lot – the campaign workers – and you just enjoy being
together. I don’t think those happen anymore. I have really good memories about that.
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