For a face-off between two moderates, the general election race in the 3rd Congressional District is already shaping up as quite the slugfest.
The contest between Democrat Denny Heck and Republican Jaime Herrera for the job of representing Southwest Washington’s 3rd District has been on the radar of both political parties for months. One of 10 House races in the nation ranked as toss-ups, it promises to be both expensive and rancorous.
Republican and Democratic campaign committees began lobbing charges and countercharges in the race Wednesday morning, even as ballot were still being counted.
On Thursday, the conservative pro-business group Americans for Prosperity began running TV attack ads against Heck in a $180,000 ad buy. And the party campaign committees are expected to dump buckets of money into both campaigns over the next 70 days.
“We’ll see a large investment on both sides, even though we haven’t seen the Republicans put money on this race quite yet,” said David Wasserman, who tracks and handicaps House races as an editor at Cook Political Reports in Washington, D.C. “They’re focusing on cheaper districts right now. They can’t necessarily afford to buy media in the Portland and Seattle markets.”
The national attention the race has grabbed isn’t surprising. It’s been a dozen years since the Southwest Washington House seat has been open, with no incumbent running.
Plus, Rep. Brian Baird’s announcement in December that he would not run for a seventh term came just as Republicans, bent on taking control of Congress next year, began mounting an all-out election-year offensive.
Washington’s 3rd, which swung from Republican to Democratic in the past two presidential elections, looked ripe for the picking.
A herd of hopefuls — six Republicans and four Democrats — announced plans to run. But the field shrank quickly as the demands of fundraising sank in. One who dropped out was Democrat Craig Pridemore, a liberal state senator from Vancouver.
The primary itself eliminated two Tea Party-affiliated Republicans, David Castillo and David Hedrick, and Democrat Cheryl Crist, a progressive peace activist, as well as political novice Norma Jean Stevens, an independent.
That left Heck, 58, a former state legislator from Clark County and semi-retired Olympia businessman, who won 31.5 percent of the vote, and Herrera, 31, a state legislator and former congressional staffer, who came in second with 27.7 percent.
Both candidates are campaigning on the need to revive the district’s struggling economy and create jobs. Heck cites his experience at actually creating jobs in the private sector. Herrera, who has a background in health care policy, has adopted the Republican party line and is calling for steep reductions in federal spending. Nothing radical there.
“They are both establishment candidates,” said David Ammons, communications director for Secretary of State Sam Reed and former longtime Associated Press political writer. “There is a great comfort level for Denny among Democrats in the district. He is very tight with the Gregoire Democrats. And Jaime Herrera is clearly well-liked by moderates and establishment Republicans like Sen. (Slade) Gorton and my boss and others, who feel she has the ability to reach across the aisle for votes. She has a very pleasant, nonbombastic style about her.”
“I would say they are in the political center,” Ammons said. “They will be trying to consolidate their own bases. Many voters are in the middle. Party allegiance is always tenuous in the 3rd. We saw the same district voting for (George W.) Bush and then Obama. People are looking for candidates who share their concerns. Their party label means less than the attributes to they bring to the table.”
Neither candidate has obvious skeletons in the closet. As a legislator, Heck focused on educational policy. He founded TVW, a public affairs station that has contributed to civic involvement in state government. He’s been a successful business developer since leaving the public realm a decade ago.
Herrera has a three-year voting record as an elected official, during which she consistently voted with the Republican caucus in opposition to new taxes.
That gives the national party campaign organizations little to work with.
Republicans have sought to tie Heck to the Obama administration and the voting record of a Congress controlled by Democrats. Democrats, meanwhile, have parsed Herrera’s voting record.
For example, on Friday, the National Republican Campaign Committee put out a hit piece blaming Heck for Washington’s 8.9 percent unemployment rate. “Denny Heck has stood by his Democrat(ic) friends in Washington and continues to support their partisan spending addiction,” the NRCC said.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hit Herrera for her support last year of spending $141 million in federal stimulus money on transportation projects to help create jobs.
It’s possible that Democrats will exploit Herrera’s youth and relative inexperience. Republican have already tagged Heck as an “Olympia insider” — a label that could be an asset or a liability, depending on one’s point of view.
Handicapping the race
As the general election campaign gears up, pundits are still trying to read the tea leaves in the primary results.
The most obvious predictor is in the numbers that show Republicans’ enthusiasm edge. Taken together, Herrera, Hedrick and Castillo won 53.6 percent of the vote, to 42.6 percent for Heck and Crist. That’s an 11 percentage-point advantage for Republicans going into the general election. (It’s not clear whom the 3.8 percent who voted for Stevens might support.)
Again, that’s not surprising. The three Republicans drew most of the media coverage. Democrats might have been less motivated to return their ballots.
Seattle pollster Stuart Elway cautioned last week that the primary election does not necessarily predict what will happen in the general. Primary voters tend to be older, more established and more partisan, Elway said.
Ammons said the November ballot will attract far more interest than the primary.
It’s clear that Heck, despite his fundraising prowess (he’s raised $1 million, counting the $350,000 he contributed to his own campaign), faces an uphill race. He’s unlikely to attract many votes from the right. He’ll need to count on a larger voter base in the general election.
Several controversial initiatives will be on the ballot, including measures to impose an income tax on the wealthy, repeal taxes on soda and candy, and reinstate a rule that requires a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to raise taxes.
“All those initiatives will drive voter turnout in the general election,” Ammons predicted. “The final showdown for the U.S. Senate will draw people out. The total pie will be much larger. We’ll have about 60 percent (turnout) in the general election.” The statewide ballot return rate in the primary was about 35 percent.
Wasserman of Cook’s Political Report called the 3rd District race “one of the most competitive in the nation.”
“This is a Republican year, and this is the kind of district Republicans need to pick up,” he said.
But he wasn’t writing Heck off.
“Denny Heck has more experience than Jaime Herrera, and he knows where the votes are,” Wasserman said. “He’s had experience in both Olympia and Vancouver, he knows the district, he’s had time to build lasting and long-term relationships with influential figures in both parts of the district.”
Herrera, like Heck, grew up in Clark County and has done her time in Olympia. A protégé of Republican U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’, she also spent time working in the George W. Bush administration’s Office of Political Affairs. “That might encourage Democrats to call her a partisan operative and frame her as a pawn of the national Republican Party,” Wasserman said.
Senior analyst Sean Trende of the Chicago-based national political blog Real Clear Politic appears ready to call the race for Herrera.
In an analysis this week titled, “As goes Washington, so goes the nation,” Trende noted the wide margin between Republican and Democratic votes cast in the 3rd District and wrote, “There hasn’t been a single instance in Washington state in the past two decades where the Democrats won in the fall after receiving such a low share of the vote in the primary … In the swing 3rd District, it looks like the Democrats will lose.”
Wasserman disagrees.
“If Democrats didn’t have as strong a candidate as Denny Heck they would lose this seat easily,” he said. “But Denny Heck gives them a shot.”
Kathie Durbin: 360-735-4523 or kathie.durbin@columbian.com.
