Well, Can’t Cantwell Be Beat?

It gets worse. Washington has none of the attributes of a red state. Traditional values are not a primary concern. Political correctness is. Washington is the most secular state in the country, as measured by regular church attendance. So the political network of evangelical Christians here is relatively small. And it is well-off, a problem because upper middle class voters here tend to be liberal. In 2004, John Kerry beat President Bush among Washington voters with more than $100,000 in income. Last, a statewide candidate had better care about the environment. “Everybody here is an environmentalist,” says Chris Vance, who recently stepped down as Republican state chairman.

Yet despite these obstacles, Republicans have a realistic chance of capturing the Senate seat now held by Democrat Maria Cantwell, 47, who ousted Gorton six years ago. The reason is the Republican candidate, Mike McGavick, a former insurance executive and titan of the Seattle business and civic community. To be successful in Washington, Vance says, a Republican candidate must be “conservative enough to unite the base, moderate enough to win.” And McGavick, 48, “fits perfectly.” The McGavick election strategy, says his campaign manager, Ian Goodnow, is simple: “It’s him.”

McGavick is a protégé of Gorton, having served as a foreign policy adviser, then as chief of staff in Gorton’s Senate office. In the 1990s, he worked in the insurance industry in Chicago, which led to his becoming a widely respected figure in Seattle when he turned around Safeco, the insurance giant headquartered here.

Safeco lost $1 billion in 2001, and McGavick was summoned to revive the company. He cut the payroll, slashed administrative expenses, and trimmed the lines of insurance the company offered. Safeco made a profit of $300 million the next year. McGavick announced his plans to leave Safeco and run for the Senate last year. This is his first race for public office.

He quickly managed to clear the Republican field, impressing Republican national chairman Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, with his political skill. First, state Republican chair Diane Tebelius decided not to run. Then a popular former TV news anchor in Seattle, Susan Hutchison, announced she wouldn’t take on McGavick in a primary battle.

The primary in Washington comes in mid-September. This puts a challenger at a distinct disadvantage with only weeks to focus on an incumbent in the general election. “If we’d had a primary challenge, we’d have won, but it would have hurt us,” says Goodnow. With McGavick as the party’s lone candidate, the state Republican central committee was able to endorse him last month, making him eligible to receive party funds immediately.

McGavick is hard to pigeonhole ideologically. “I refuse to self-label,” he told me. “I certainly come from a conservative tradition.” But his models in the Senate are Republican John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, both mavericks. “They demonstrate that the go-along, get-along mentality is not what makes you a leader,” he said.

A moderate on social issues, McGavick would back the federal marriage amendment as a last resort to block same-sex marriage. He’s a conventional Republican in his support of tax cuts and in his wariness of creating government programs. He agrees with Bush’s approach to fighting terrorism and supports the president on Iraq. He also talks up early childhood education, poverty, and other issues not viewed as Republican staples.

McGavick has taken one position that is normal for a Republican but odd for an environmentalist and is sure to stir a fierce debate with Cantwell. (He does consider himself an environmentalist. “You only live here because it’s pretty,” he told me. “It’s too wet in the west and too dry in the east.”) He favors oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a position anathema to the environmental lobby.

Cantwell has clashed noisily with Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska over ANWR and declared that she’s “willing to use every tool at my disposal to stop drilling in the Arctic.” After losing the battle over ANWR drilling last December, Stevens vowed to “visit Washington many, many times” in 2006 to campaign against her. Gorton lauds McGavick’s position on ANWR as “courageous.” It’s also politically risky.

Unlike McGavick, Cantwell is not a Washington native. She came to the state in 1983 to work for the Democratic presidential campaign of then-Senator Alan Cranston of California. He lost, but she stayed and in 1992 was elected to a single term in the U.S. House. In 1995, she joined a software startup, RealNetworks, and by 1999 her stock portfolio was worth $40 million. In 2000, she spent more than $10 million of her own money to oust Gorton. She nearly doubled his campaign’s expenditures and bombarded the state with TV ads in the final weeks. She won by 2,200 votes.

Is Cantwell vulnerable? Her personal fortune is gone, along with the dot-com bubble. She’s irritated some liberals by voting for the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, and cloture to shut off a filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito. But she’s held a double-digit lead over McGavick in the polls for months.

Vance, the ex-Republican chairman, insists Washington is not a knee-jerk Democratic state. “If both sides have good candidates that are well financed, you end up with a dead heat,” he says. That’s what happened in the governor’s race in 2004, the contest for secretary of state in 2002, and the Cantwell-Gorton election in 2000. All three wound up with recounts. The best guess is the Cantwell-McGavick race will be tight as well.

McGavick’s problem is Seattle, where the Republican vote has been steadily dwindling in recent years and is now below 20 percent. Gorton describes the city, in political terms, as “San Francisco north or Boston west. In everything but geography, it’s an eastern city.” But trashing Seattle doesn’t work for Republicans as a campaign tactic. Rather, the key is to concentrate on the crescent of suburbs around Seattle. The eastern part of the state is solidly Republican and, as Vance put it, “as conservative as Idaho.” But it is far less populous than the Seattle area.

Once the campaign is fully engaged later this year, it’s bound to get rough. Cantwell is a tough and experienced political operator. Democrats have already begun attacking McGavick as a cruel and insensitive corporate chief. When he toured the state last month, protesters showed up wearing yellow T-shirts with “Abramoff-McGavick 2006” on the back. McGavick says he’s never met Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist, much less had dealings with him. Chances are, that won’t stop Democrats from invoking Abramoff’s name again and again.

Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, is author of Rebel-in-Chief, published by Crown Forum.