The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

242 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
John McCain campaigns for Gorton in 1988.
Slade is greeting Henry Chamberlin, like
McCain, a former prisoner of war. Thomas
Donoghue for the Gorton Campaign
into labor with their first
child. He told her he needed
to attend a campaign event
on Whidbey Island. “If you
get on that ferry,” she counseled,
“you’re going to miss
out on things here.” He
stayed, she recalled, but “he
was on the phone as the
baby was being born.” 26
foR A cAMpAign MAnAgeR,
Washington’s open primary
can be like herding cats.
Worried by tracking polls
showing Gorton voters mi-
grating to Bonker, McGavick aired radio and TV spots featuring Slade
urging his supporters to stand pat: “Let’s not start out in a hole.” They
needed a strong showing to convince financial backers he was a likely
winner in November. 27
Gorton finished first, with 36 percent of the total, and Lowry
swamped Bonker in King County to win the De mocratic nomination.
Smith and Goodloe could manage but six percent between them. The
Democrats had 58 percent of the vote but this definitely was not 1986 all
over again. Gorton carried 30 of the state’s 39 counties; Lowry only two.
Bonker swept Southwest Washington, including the smoke-stack counties
where Scoop and Maggie were icons. An Elway poll found that 43
percent of Bonker’s backers would now support Gorton. Lowry’s opposition
to a home port in Everett and the buildup of the Trident nuclear
submarine base at Bangor across Puget Sound cost him two big, traditionally
Democratic counties. When McGavick crunched the numbers
he knew his strategy was a winner: They were running against the
Space Needle. Gorton declared Lowry was “more liberal than Ted Kennedy,
and more liberal than even Seattle can support. . . . I will be a
senator for all the people of the state, not just for a handful of liberals in
downtown Seattle.” 28
On paper, Gorton and Lowry—polar opposites with negatives in the
40s—appeared virtually unelectable statewide. The task was to win the
undecideds, get out the vote and make the other guy look even less palatable.
McGavick and Kapolczynski soon had them surfing snark-infested