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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Maria Cantwell is a Democrat elected in the closest Senate race of 2000. Cantwell grew up in Indianapolis, where her father, a construction worker, served as county commissioner, city councilman and state legislator. She graduated from Miami University (Ohio) in 1980--the first in her family to graduate from college--and worked in Ohio for 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 Senator Alan Cranston's presidential campaign and went to Seattle to set up a regional campaign office. The Cranston campaign went nowhere, and so did Cantwell: she 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 28, she was elected to the Washington House. In 1992 Cantwell ran for the U.S. House, for the just redrawn 1st District seat being vacated by Republican John Miller. She won a solid 55%-42% victory. In the House she supported the family and medical leave bill and the Clinton economic plan; she did not support the Clinton health care plan and supported NAFTA only at the last minute. She was a strong supporter of abortion rights and of stands backed by environmental advocacy groups. But by fall 1994 some of those positions had become unpopular. In November she lost 52%-48% to Republican nominee Rick White. Back in the Seattle area, she joined a startup 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 Senator Slade Gorton. A brainy and hard-working veteran of Washington politics, Gorton had an increasingly conservative record on environmental and economic issues; he was also Microsoft's leading advocate on Capitol Hill. Cantwell was an answer to Democrats' prayers; their well-known House members had declined to run, and Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn, who was running, was widely considered too liberal to win. The real difference was money. Cantwell, who liquidated more than $5 million of her RealNetworks stock, spent freely, while Senn was on TV only during the last two weeks before the September all-party primary. Cantwell won 37% of the total vote, to only 13% for Senn; Gorton, with 44% of the vote, was ahead but short of a majority. For the general 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 PACs or 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 last-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, Cantwell spent $11.5 million, $10.3 million of it her own money; Gorton spent $6.4 million. Gorton led on election night, but not by much. Washington allows absentee voting, and 54% of the votes were cast absentee; two days after the election, one-quarter of the votes had yet to be counted. During the three weeks of counting, Gorton seemed to have the advantage. But the last two days' absentee ballots from heavily Democratic King County put Cantwell over the top by 1,953. A mandated recount left the margin at 2,229 for Cantwell, out of 2.4 million cast. Cantwell carried only five counties--King, Snohomish, Thurston (which includes the state capital of Olympia) and two small counties in the west. She won King County 59%-39%; she also carried the rest of western Washington 50%-47%. Gorton carried eastern Washington 61%-36%--a lot but not quite enough to win. Cantwell's victory created a tie in the Senate, until James Jeffords became an independent in May 2001 and gave Democrats a razor-thin majority. This race was a very big loss for the Republican Party. In the Senate Cantwell worked hard on campaign finance in the March 2001 two-week session on the issue. After September 11, she put an amendment into the Patriot Act tripling the number of border guards on the Canadian border and another to require the administration to develop a form of biometric identification, perhaps by facial recognition software; she has pursued the subject and in 2004 she and Jeff Sessions sponsored a bill limiting the visa waiver program to countries which provide biometric passports. In June 2004 she criticized FERC for failing to obtain accounting records and tape transcripts that were evidence of Enron's electricity price manipulation. In March 2005 she continued: "The types of manipulation that took place during the Western energy crisis cannot be tolerated, and the performance of the federal agency charged with rooting out these types of market abuses was an abject failure." In October 2002 she voted for the Iraq war resolution, unlike her colleague Patty Murray. In May 2004 she tried to add to the corporate tax bill an extension of unemployment benefits. Republicans agreed to allow the vote on the amendment only if Democrats agreed to limit debate on the bill. Because of budget resolution rules, the amendment required 60 votes, but got only 59; John Kerry, who surely would have voted for it, was out campaigning for president. In March 2005 Cantwell offered the amendment to the budget resolution to bar oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It failed 51-49. Afterwards she said she was "prepared to use every tool at my disposal to stop drilling in the Arctic." In February 2003 Cantwell and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to allow taxpayers to deduct state sales taxes as well as state income taxes on their federal income tax forms; Texas like Washington has a sales tax but no income tax. That became law for two years as part of the corporate tax bill in November 2004; in 2005 she called for making it permanent. In January 2003 she moved off the strife-torn Judiciary Committee to Commerce, where she promised to look after Washington interests. In August 2003 she sponsored a bill to declare 20 miles of the White Salmon River near Mount Adams a wild and scenic river; a Bush administration official endorsed it in 2004. In September 2004 Congress passed the bill proposed by Cantwell and Republican Jennifer Dunn to add 800 acres to Mount Rainier National Park. When the FAA approved funding for research into advanced aircraft materials including composites in October 2003, Cantwell pressed the University of Washington to submit a proposal and said that it might help persuade Boeing to assemble the 7E7 in Washington state. In June 2004, after Lindsey Graham added to the defense authorization an amendment allowing reclassification of nuclear waste so that it could be kept in storage tanks in the Savannah River Site in his state, Cantwell offered a competing amendment. She said that Graham's measure might be a precedent for similar action in Washington, which has nuclear waste stored at the Hanford Site. Cantwell's amendment failed 48-48. In January 2005 she sponsored a bill with $35 million a year for tsunami detection and mapping of areas at risk in tsunamis, including Puget Sound. In September 2004 she held up an Energy Department appointment to try to get the department to continue the Former Hanford Workers Medical Screening Program, scheduled to be discontinued and replaced with a centralized support program accessible through an 800 number. A strong supporter of campaign finance regulation, Cantwell had campaign finance problems of her own. To finance her 2000 campaign she had sold $5.6 million of her RealNetworks stock and had borrowed $3.8 million from a bank with RealNetworks stock as collateral. That enabled her to run the last minute ads that surely were essential to her victory. The FEC ruled in February 2004 that she violated the law by failing to disclose the terms of these decisive loans, but it evidently saw the offense as minor because it took no action against her. Paying off the loans should have been easy; Cantwell's net worth at one point was around $40 million. But RealNetworks, like so many high-tech firms, saw its stock price plummet, from $80 in spring 2000 to $6 in spring 2001. Suddenly she owed far more than the collateral was worth. She negotiated another loan due December 2001, guaranteed by the DSCC, which of course could use soft money to pay it off. And she began raising money, from committed Democrats and from Washington lobbyists. Between 2001 and June 2005, she raised $8.8 million; she broke her pledge on PAC money by accepting contributions from political and members' PACs. By the end of 2004 she had reduced the debt to $2.5 million. With $435,000 in cash she was in position to pay off the remaining $130,000 in bank loans; the rest of the money is owed to her, and she seemed uninterested in being repaid before the 2006 election. Cantwell's narrow victory in 2000 naturally made her high on Republicans' target lists for 2006. Former Congressman George Nethercutt, who lost to Patty Murray 55%-43% in 2004, said he did not rule out a race, but many Washington Republicans seemed convinced a candidate from eastern Washington could not win. In January 2005 former Congressman Rick White, who beat Cantwell in 1994 for the House and lost himself in 1998, was exploring a race; he had been head of TechNet, a high-tech lobbying association, since 2001 and had planned to leave the position in summer 2005. Others mentioned as possible Republican candidates were former state Senator Dino Rossi, who lost to Governor Christine Gregoire by an officially reported 129 votes in 2004; state Senator Linda Evans Parlette; state Republican chairman and former legislator Chris Vance; T-Mobile Wireless President John Stanton; former prosecutor Diane Tebelius, who lost in the primary in the 8th District in 2004; and Safeco executive Mike McGavick.
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