Posted on 11/06/2004 2:35:47 PM PST by anniegetyourgun
OLYMPIA — Washington residents will have to wait until at least next week, maybe longer, to find out who their next governor will be. The race between Republican former state Sen. Dino Rossi and Democratic Attorney General Christine Gregoire moved back into a dead heat yesterday after the latest tally of absentee ballots across the state.
Gregoire yesterday saw her lead over Rossi slip from 18,000 to just over 4,000. And the vote counts in several key counties appeared to be trending Rossi's way.
He extended his lead in most of the big-prize counties, including Snohomish, Pierce, Spokane and Clark. Overall, he leads in 31 of 39 counties, and nearly 60 percent of the projected outstanding ballots are in those counties.
Rossi is trying to become the first Republican elected governor in Washington since 1980.
After 30 counties tallied more than 260,000 absentee ballots yesterday, Gregoire's lead was less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the more than 2.4 million votes tallied so far.
State law requires a recount if the difference is less than one-half of 1 percent and less than 2,000 votes.
After yesterday's count, an estimated 362,000 ballots were left to be counted statewide. But that figure is not precise.
Counties still are receiving absentee ballots in the mail. And they still have to wade through a record number of provisional ballots to decide which are valid. Provisional ballots allow voters to vote at precincts outside their normal polling places.
"There's still too many votes out there to know which way this thing is going to go," said Gregoire spokesman Morton Brilliant.
The biggest pile of outstanding ballots is in King County, where Gregoire holds a nearly 120,000-vote advantage. But Rossi's numbers are improving in King County. The first returns on election night showed him getting 38 percent of the vote in King County. But yesterday he got nearly 44 percent of new votes tallied there.
"Those are great numbers," said Rossi spokeswoman Mary Lane. "That's what we want to keep seeing."
Still praying that Rossi will overtake the government interventionist running against him.
King County has already been counted. I think Dino Rossi takes it. I'd love to see Soviet Seattle wind up with a bad case of heartburn for the next four years!
Are the uncounted counties generally GOP or DEM? The election consultants should pretty much know who is going to win based on what is left to count and where the votes are from.
The remaining counties are on the eastern side of WA state and they're conservative. They should have enough votes to ensure Rossi becomes the Evergreen State's first GOP Governor in 16 years.
nice
20 years. John Spellman lost his bid for re-election in 1984 to Booth Gardner.
Snohomish?! Pierce?! This is news, I think. If he is doing well in these two western WA counties, he must be killing her in eastern WA. Am I wrong here, fellow Washingtonians? Don't these counties usually go heavily Dem?
Sorry. Talk about a two decade drought. Washington State isn't called the California Of The Pacific Northwest for nothing. A lot of people never thought another Republican would be elected Governor there in their lifetime.
Western WA is Democratic, Eastern WA is GOP. So yeah, I'll call the election now for Rossi if the numbers end up the way we hope they will.
What was the story in the state legislature? Which party gained seats there?
If Rossi took Sno, Pierce, and esp. San Juan counties to this point, I would assume he is Gov.
This is fantastic news!!! keeping fingers, toes and eyes crossed for good luck!
Bump for bookmark..
He is killing her in most eastern Washington Counties.
The Democrats still control the House. The Democrats took the Senate away from the Republicans, if the numbers hold up.
OK, can the GOP make greater inroads in Snohomish, Skagit and Whatcom counties in the future? I know that there are alot of lefties in Bellingham, but the rest of Whatcom seems to be conservative-to-moderate.
In Skagit, the R's are viable. Island is split between the parties at the midpoint of Whidbey Island.
In Snohomish, the D's are union folks, not the chablis-and-brie crowd. Brian Sullivan is a D who is to the right of many R's.
The key is to understand the "Scoop Jackson" Democrats and the "Dan Evans" Republicans. I had a talk with Dino Rossi where he agreed with my contention that the two groups occupy the same ideological territory. "Scoop Jackson" Democrats tend to be Catholic and Jewish, while "Dan Evans" Republicans tend to be Protestant. Otherwise, they are indistinguishable.
The two R's who were defeated for the Senate were Carlson of Clark County (R in a heavily D district) and Horn of Mercer Island (a Road Ganger in a district that realizes it now needs mass transit). I've dealt with both in my activities as a freight and passenger rail activist. I'll miss Carlson, but I won't miss Horn.
I had to make a devil's bargain with Horn on the Cascade Foothills Corridor, and Horn's insistence on building a 12-lane highway in that corridor played a large part in his defeat. (People in the eastern part of his district didn't want the highway.)
State Senate Democratic leadership tends toward the "Scoop Jackson" side of the fence, so I can deal with these people. Some of them I count among my political allies.
For me the election of Rob McKenna was the best thing to happen. There are 20 years of one-party corruption that need to be cleaned out, and Rob is the man to do it. Rob and I worked hard in a double-team effort to get one very disaffected female Democrat to change parties. She has re-entered politics in a non-partisan role in Shoreline, and I'm hoping her re-entrance into partisan politics will be as an R.
I have a good feeling about Rossi winning, but I have placed my butterflys in God's capable hands :)
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