Democrat Maria Cantwell, Washington’s junior senator, was elected in 2000. She is active on energy, technology and tax matters, often working with Republicans, and is known for her persistence on issues. Read More

Democrat Maria Cantwell, Washington’s junior senator, was elected in 2000. She is active on energy, technology and tax matters, often working with Republicans, and is known for her persistence on issues.

Cantwell grew up in Indianapolis, where her father, Paul Cantwell, a construction worker, served as county commissioner, a city councilman and a state legislator. As a child, Cantwell observed politics firsthand as her father dispensed advice to the union members, laborers and politicians who stopped by to talk politics. During her father’s stint as an aide to U.S. Rep. Andrew Jacobs, she awoke one morning to the distinctive Boston accent of Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts downstairs. Cantwell graduated from Miami University of Ohio in 1980, the first in her family to graduate from college. She worked in Ohio for television personality Jerry Springer’s 1982 campaign for governor. (In 2003, when Springer was considering running for senator in Ohio, she said, “I think people will be surprised by his intellect. There’s much more to him than his TV show.”) Then she worked for Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston’s presidential campaign, going to Seattle to set up a regional campaign office. The Cranston campaign went nowhere, but Cantwell loved the Pacific Northwest and decided to stay. She moved to Mountlake Terrace, a suburb in Snohomish County just north of Seattle, where she organized a coalition to build a new library. In 1986, at age 28, she was elected to the Washington state House.

In 1992 Cantwell ran for an open U.S. House seat and won a solid 55%-42% victory. In the House, she did not support President Bill Clinton’s health care plan, and she was a strong supporter of abortion rights and of stands backed by environmental advocacy groups. But she lost her 1994 bid for re-election to Republican Rick White, 52%-48%.

Back in the Seattle area, she joined a start-up firm called Progressive Networks in 1995. Five years later, it had become RealNetworks, a leader in Internet-based audio and visual software. In late 1999, her stock was worth about $40 million, and she decided to run against Republican Sen. Slade Gorton. Gorton, Microsoft’s leading advocate on Capitol Hill, had an increasingly conservative record on environmental and economic issues. Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn, who also was running, was widely considered too liberal to win. The real difference was money. Cantwell, who liquidated more than $5 million in stock, spent freely, while Senn was on television only during the last two weeks before the September all-party primary. In the first round of balloting, Gorton got the most votes, 44% of the total, but short of a majority. Cantwell got 37%, and Senn got only 13%. As a result, Gorton and Cantwell faced off in the general election.

Cantwell said she would spend “whatever it takes” to win. At the same time, she made her support of McCain-Feingold-type campaign finance regulation a major issue and refused to take contributions from political action committees or large donations known as “soft money” from the Democratic Party (though it put $640,000 into the state before Cantwell won the primary). She charged that Gorton was beholden to special interest contributors, singling out his late-night amendment to open a cyanide-leach gold mine in Okanogan County. Gorton called Cantwell an old-style liberal Democrat who would have government meddling in health care, education and local environmental issues. Cantwell highlighted her experience in the high-tech private sector. Overall, she spent $11.5 million, $10.3 million of it her own money, to Gorton’s $6.4 million.

Gorton led on election night, but not by much. That year, 54% of the votes were cast absentee, and it took three weeks to count them all. The last two days’ worth of absentee ballots from heavily Democratic King County put Cantwell over the top by 1,953 votes. A mandated recount left the margin at 2,229 for Cantwell, out of 2.4 million cast, the closest Senate contest of 2000. Cantwell carried only five counties: King, Snohomish, Thurston, which includes the state capital of Olympia, and two small counties in the west. Gorton carried eastern Washington 61%-36%, not quite enough to win. Cantwell’s victory created a tie in the Senate, until Vermont’s James Jeffords became an independent in May 2001 and gave Democrats a razor-thin majority.

Cantwell is known for being intense, though some aides say she is as demanding of herself as she is of them. She generally takes her party’s side, though she can show her independence. She was one of just nine Senate Democrats to oppose the 2008 law creating the Troubled Asset Relief Fund for ailing financial institutions, saying the government had no business getting so deeply involved with the private sector. She also showed distance from her party on the financial services issues that dominated the 111th Congress (2009-10). During the debate on overhauling the banking and financial services regulatory system, she pushed for more radical reforms. She co-sponsored a bill with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. that would have reinstated the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, which created a wall between commercial and investment banking. She also wanted to close loopholes on unregulated derivatives trading. Cantwell was one of only two Democrats to vote against the White House-backed banking reform bill in May 2010. However, she joined her party in July in voting for the final conference report version of the reform bill, reasoning that the updated bill offered at least tougher regulation and greater transparency of the derivatives market.

Cantwell chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources’ Energy Subcommittee, and has been particularly active on those issues. When the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress pushed for legislation aimed at curbing greenhouse gases, Cantwell jumped into the debate. The Obama White House bill, which allowed energy efficient companies to trade credits to larger greenhouse gas emitters as a way to reduce overall levels of carbon dioxide emissions, proved a hard sell and by mid-2010, Cantwell and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine stepped up efforts to push their “cap-and-dividend” bill that skirted the idea of a carbon trading market. Instead, the bill would cap emissions from sources such as coal mines and oil refineries, and those emitters would be required to purchase carbon permits. The Senate failed to take final action on climate change bill before the November election. There was more political momentum for curbing offshore drilling in the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Cantwell offered a bill in July 2010 requiring the oil drilling industry to continually integrate the latest technology into efforts at spill prevention. “We’ve seen over the past 20 years that the industry will not do it on its own,” she said. She also joined Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. and the other four senators from Oregon and California in signing onto legislation that would permanently ban oil drilling off the West Coast.

An energy bill passed by Congress in December 2008 contained her provision giving the Federal Trade Commission authority to fine companies or individuals that manipulate petroleum markets. She has backed extending tax credits for wind, solar and other sources of renewable energy and told the Tri-City Herald in November 2010 that green energy could be a $6 trillion sector of the economy that is “bigger than the Internet.” She brokered a land swap in 2011 to protect her state’s Quileute Indian tribe from floods. A few years earlier, in 2005, Cantwell waged a series of floor fights with then-Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that antagonized the powerful Alaska senator. Republicans narrowly rebuffed attempts by Cantwell to remove ANWR drilling from a budget bill. Stevens retaliated by introducing a bill that would expand oil-tanker traffic in the environmentally sensitive Puget Sound. Washington politicians of both parties protested the move, and the Senate ultimately failed to pass the ANWR measure that year.

Cantwell also has a seat on the powerful Finance Committee, which she got in 2006. In that role, she secured passage of a 2008 measure to temporarily extend the deductibility of state sales taxes, a popular tax break in Washington. Cantwell had helped pass the original legislation in 2003 with Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. It allows taxpayers to deduct state sales taxes as well as state income taxes on their federal income-tax forms. Washington, like Texas, has a sales tax but no income tax.

Although a strong supporter of campaign finance regulation, Cantwell has had campaign finance problems of her own. To fund her 2000 campaign, she had sold $5.6 million of her RealNetworks stock and had borrowed $3.8 million from a bank using the company’s stock as collateral. That enabled her to run the last-minute ads that surely were essential to her victory. The Federal Election Commission ruled in January 2004 that she had violated the law by failing to disclose the terms of the loans, but it evidently saw the offense as minor because it took no punitive action. Paying off the loans should have been easy; Cantwell’s net worth at one point was around $40 million. But RealNetworks, like other high-tech firms, saw its stock price plummet, from $80 per share in spring 2000 to $6 in spring 2001. Suddenly she owed far more than the collateral was worth. She negotiated another loan that would come due December 2001, guaranteed by the DSCC. By the end of 2004, she had reduced the debt to $2.5 million. With $435,000 in cash, she was able to pay off the remaining $130,000 in bank loans. Cantwell’s top campaign contributor over the course of her career has been Microsoft.

Cantwell’s narrow victory in 2000 placed her high on the Republicans target list for 2006. National Republicans recruited Mike McGavick, chairman and chief executive officer at Safeco insurance. He was a smart, successful businessman, with moderate positions, personal wealth and speaking ability. He also had political smarts, having managed Gorton’s 1988 campaign and served as his chief of staff. But McGavick also acknowledged that he had been charged with drunken driving in 1993. Cantwell faced lingering discontent from liberals in the party for her 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution. But the earlier, well-publicized dustup with Stevens helped the reserved and cautious Cantwell, allowing her to show she could stand up to Stevens and the oil lobby in defense of Washington’s environment. Stevens withdrew his tanker bill in March 2006, saying McGavick had persuaded him to pull the bill.

McGavick poured $2.5 million of own money into the race, but in the end, Cantwell outspent him $14 million to $10.8 million. In a Democratic year in a Democratic-leaning state, she won 57%-40%. Though her fundraising for 2012 was slow at the end of 2010, she was still regarded as a formidable opponent for Republicans in a year in which President Obama will also be on the ballot.