The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

332 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
Gorton and Maria Cantwell square off in a televised debate on Oct. 10, 2000.
Both candidates said the debate may have come too late in the race for some
voters. Jimi Lott/The Seattle Times
Gorton finished first in the primary, with nearly 44 percent of the
votes cast. Cantwell was the runner-up with 37 percent, crushing Senn by
300,000 votes. The Libertarian’s 1.3 percent advanced him to November.
Cantwell had momentum, and Gorton had a problem. “With the general
election seven weeks away we only had enough money in our budget to do
five weeks of TV,” Williams recalls. “We figured that since Maria had
been on TV all summer, she wouldn’t let up. But if we stayed dark for the
first two weeks of the general we’d be toast. So we gambled.”
They launched their TV ads immediately, hoping they could raise the
money they’d need for the last two weeks. Then they caught two breaks:
Surmising that Williams was winging it, Dotzauer held fire. When the
National Republican Senatorial Committee jumped in with a $1.5 million
anti-Cantwell blitz of its own, Dotzauer made a course correction. But
Maria had been pounded for 10 days on her votes for higher taxes. “If we
had won,” Williams says, “I would be telling you that the key to victory
was those two weeks.”
At Mid-octoBeR, eLwAy’s poLL had Gorton up 3 percent. Given the margin
of sampling error, the race was too close to call, although Slade was
ahead everywhere except greater Seattle. Surprisingly, Cantwell led only