Deborah Wang

Stories

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  John Koster Plans To Concede 1st District Congressional Race

  The battle for Jay Inslee’s old seat in Congress now appears to be over.Republican John Koster sent a letter to supporters Thursday night informing them that he plans to officially concede the race today.That leaves Democrat Suzan DelBene the winner of the costliest and most hard-fought Congressional race in the state this year.As of Thursday night, DelBene was leading Koster by more than 6 percentage points. She was winning in three of the four counties that make up the 1st Congressional District.“We Were On Our Own”In an email sent last night, Koster thanked his supporters and said he planned to call DelBene Friday  to congratulate her and officially concede the race.He blamed his loss on DelBene’s “punishing multi-million dollar attack ads,” and he referred to his campaign as a people-powered grassroots effort that was outspent 5 to 1.  Koster also blamed both the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee and the Washington State Republican Party for not adequately supporting his campaign. He said they failed to provide more than “token” support.“To be frank, we were on our own, yet thanks to people like you, we nearly overcame the odds,” he wrote.State Republican leaders have said the 1st District race was their best chance of picking up a Congressional seat. The formerly Democratic district’s boundaries were re-drawn this year to make it more of a swing district.But throughout the campaign, Democrat DelBene pounded Koster for his conservative views on social issues, including his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.In recent weeks, Koster’s off-the-cuff comments about abortion went viral when he referred to rape as “the rape thing.”DelBene also had the money advantage. She is a wealthy former Microsoft executive who put close to $3 million of her own money into her campaign.“Continue The Battle For Truth”This was Koster's third try for a seat in Congress. He ran twice before against Democrat Rick Larsen in the 2nd Congressional District.Koster still holds his seat on the Snohomish County Council, where he is serving his third term.In his email to supporters, Koster said he was stunned by Barack Obama’s re-election and by the legalization of same-sex marriage and marijuana possession in Washington state.He warned that "society will suffer the consequences inherent with bad law and liberal representation."He ended the message by asking his supporters to pray for leaders at all levels of government “as commanded in the Holy Scriptures” and to continue the battle for truth wherever possible.In the meantime, it appears DelBene will be heading to Washington, DC, to take her seat in Congress as early as next week.In addition to winning a four-year term, she also won a second race to serve the final month of Jay Inslee’s term of office.

  Nov 09, 2012 at 8:03 am
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  Washington State GOP Searching Its Soul Over Losses

  As the vote count continues, Washington Republicans are preparing for possible losses in several key state races.Democratic attorney general hopeful Bob Ferguson leads Republican Reagan Dunn. The two are vying for the seat left open by Republican Rob McKenna, who stepped down to run for governor. McKenna has held the office since 2005.Democrats also appear poised to add one more member of Congress to their ranks. As expected, Democrat Denny Heck is leading Dick Muri in the new 10th Congressional District. In the 1st Congressional District, which was redrawn this year to be a swing district, Democrat Suzan DelBene holds a decisive lead over Republican John Koster. Republicans had considered the 1st District their best chance for a GOP victory.In a close race for secretary of state, Democrat Kathleen Drew and Republican Kim Wyman are neck and neck, with Wyman just slightly ahead at the end of election night. A Democratic victory in this race would be significant, since Republicans have held the seat since 1964.Chris Vance is a public affairs consultant and former chair of the state Republican party. “Losing the attorney general’s race is disappointing. Not being competitive in the US Senate race at all is disappointing,” he said. But the probable loss of the 1st District Congressional seat, according to Vance, stings the most. "That district was drawn to be a 50-50 district, and we’re gonna end up losing it by nearly 10 points."But Vance says if Republicans win the governor’s race, they will feel a whole lot better about their other losses. He believes McKenna can still pull off a win, by a very narrow margin.Republicans will be searching their souls about what went wrong this election, Vance said. While the GOP appeals to older, white voters, the country is changing and the party needs to find a way to reach younger, non-white constituents, according to Vance. Those are people who now vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.If McKenna wins the governorship, Vance said, the party can start rebuilding itself from the top down.If McKenna doesn’t win, then there is always the option proposed by current state GOP chair Kirby Wilbur. He joked to the election night crowd that if Rob McKenna can’t get elected in this state, it might be time to move to Texas.

  Nov 07, 2012 at 6:45 pm
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  WA Democrats Make Final Push to Get Out The Vote

  Democratic Party activists in the state of Washington were in high gear this weekend conducting a massive get-out-the-vote campaign. Hundreds of volunteers manned phone banks and fanned out across neighborhoods to encourage people who hadn’t voted to turn in their ballots.At the Obama for America campaign headquarters in South Seattle, about 100 people gathered for a final get-out-the-vote rally featuring Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Congressman Jim McDermott, and gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee.The candidates posed for pictures with campaign staff and volunteers and encouraged them to keep working hard until election day.“How many votes you guys going to get? About 150 a piece? Good. OK, I’m counting on you!” Inslee told a group of excited high school students who were preparing to go door-to-door.  “One hundred and fifty votes could make a difference.”The event was the final stop in what has been billed as the “Jobs for Washington” bus tour, a multi-day event that featured various Democratic candidates talking about their plans for economic recovery.But this weekend, the focus of their efforts shifted to preparing volunteers for the final days ahead.“[The] goal here, I think, is to just fire up some of these volunteers who have been working tireless hours to help get these folks elected,” said Benton Strong, spokesman for the state’s Democratic Party. He says at this point, many campaign workers haven’t seen their families in days.The Democrats are known for their well-organized get-out-the-vote operation. As of last week, the party had made more than three million phone calls and knocked on more than one million doors.According to Strong, the party is not just targeting likely Democrats, but a wide variety of voters who have yet to cast their ballots.“We know that Washington state is a blue state, and so we think a significant number of those people are going to vote for Jay Inslee, they are going to vote for Barack Obama, they are going to vote for Maria Cantwell,” said Strong. “So we are going to talk with as many of those folks as we can and get them to turn their ballots in.”At Sunday’s get-out-the-vote-rally, Democratic leaders reminded volunteers just how important every vote is in the state. Congressman Jim McDermott, who is running for his 13th term, reflected back on the close and controversial gubernatorial race in 2004.  “Christine Gregoire won by 127 votes, the governorship, now that’s about one vote for every 20 precincts in this state,” he told the crowd. “So you don’t know which one of those phone calls is going to make the difference.”With this year’s governor’s race in a virtual dead heat, party activists say the final push for voters could make the difference between winning and losing on Election Day.   

  Nov 05, 2012 at 8:08 am

• Political Donations From 3 Big Washington Employers Favor GOP

  Businesses have poured millions of dollars into political contributions this election season. But you may be surprised to learn that in Democratic-leaning Washington, the state’s three largest employers tend to favor Republican candidates.

  Oct 31, 2012 at 12:00 am
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  Suzan DelBene Brings Business Experience, Money To Congressional Race

  On the campaign trail, Suzan DelBene tells the story of how her family struggled when she was a kid. Her father was laid off from his job when she was nine, and the family moved all over the country as her parents looked for work. “They never got back to a situation where they were financially stable,” she explains.She recounts that despite her family's financial difficulties, she was able to go to college on student loans. “I was in a position to take care of my family,” she says. “I’m not sure I could tell that story today.”It’s a tightly drawn personal narrative, and DelBene repeats it often in conversations, interviews and debates as she tries to introduce herself to voters in the sprawling 1st Congressional District.Moving Up The Corporate LadderDelBene has spent much of her life in the business world, and is not well-known on the political stage. She started her career as a research associate at Seattle-based ZymoGenetics. In the late 1980s, after earning an MBA from the University of Washington, she went to work for Microsoft.State Representative Ross Hunter is a former Microsoft program manager and a friend of DelBene’s. He describes that era in the company’s history as rough and tumble. It wasn’t unusual for people to shout at each other.“The only way you thrive in that culture is by being smart and having people respect your ideas,” he says.But Hunter describes DelBene as someone who did not shout or pound the table. “Suzan is someone who can get a bunch of people in a room and figure out how to move forward and how to make something happen in a more collaborative way.”In 1998, DelBene left Microsoft to become vice president of marketing for drugstore.com. Two years later, she was recruited to be the CEO of Nimble Technology, a company spun off from research being done at the computer science department of the University of Washington.Nimble survived the dot-com bust of 2001, but it was not a success. The company was sold in 2003 to a California firm for less than its initial investment. Still, DelBene’s performance as CEO earned praise from several of the company’s original investors.“I think what she really did is not panic and just, in a systematic way, try to figure out, OK, what can we could do to save the company,” says Robert Nelsen, head of Arch Venture Partners. “In our business, that’s the kind of thing that we say, yeah, we would back that person again.”Nelsen says he is a life-long Republican, and he doesn’t always agree with DelBene’s politics. But he is a major contributor to her campaign. "I support candidates on both sides of the aisle who understand innovation," he says.A Latecomer To PoliticsAfter Nimble was sold, DelBene returned to Microsoft as vice president of the mobile division. She spent another three years at the company.DelBene says it wasn’t until about 2008 that she started to consider running for political office. “A couple of people had suggested that I run for office,” she says. “My first response was, you know, I guess.”At the time, DelBene was consulting with Global Partnerships, a nonprofit that provides micro-financing to poor people in developing countries. But she began to focus on helping closer to home “because more and more families were struggling right here in the United States,” she explains.Before she decided to enter politics, DelBene had a spotty voting record.  From 2004 to 2008, she missed voting in nine separate elections. “I should have become an absentee voter earlier,” she says. “But I think it’s a mistake of my past, not a mistake of my future.”Campaign Cash In her first run for public office, DelBene challenged Republican Dave Reichert in the 8th Congressional District. She put more than $2 million dollars of her own money into that race, but lost.She then spent a year heading the state’s Department of Revenue before jumping into this race, in the new 1st Congressional District.DelBene has also spent heavily on this campaign, contributing more than $2.3 million of her own money thus far. During the primary, two of her Democratic opponents criticized her, saying she was trying to buy the race.DelBene’s opponent in the general election, Republican John Koster, is also making an issue of Delbene’s wealth, even though he had said earlier that he was opposed to “class warfare” in campaigns.Koster is currently running an ad on cable TV that refers to DelBene as a multimillionaire and features photographs of her waterfront home, which is currently assessed at $4.8 million.According to DelBene's financial disclosure reports (PDF), she and her husband have a net worth of between $23 and $83 million (candidates are not required to report the exact amount of their assets). DelBene’s husband Kurt DelBene is president of Microsoft’s Office division. Securities and Exchange Commission filings show Kurt DelBene owns 635,693 shares of Microsoft stock.Suzan DelBene and her supporters insist that her personal wealth has not been an issue for voters in this campaign.“Every single one of our members, including me, would love to be a millionaire,” says Heather Weiner, state political director for the Teamsters Union, which has endorsed DelBene. “Congratulations to Suzan for working really hard and living that American dream.”A Close RaceIn terms of her politics, DelBene says she doesn’t like labels, although her campaign literature describes her as “the progressive choice.”She generally supports the policies of the Obama administration, although she differs on the issue of financial reform. She wants to see tighter regulation of Wall Street.On the campaign trail, DelBene comes across as earnest and soft-spoken. Some Democrats complain that she is not particularly charismatic. But according to state Representative Ross Hunter, that’s not such a bad thing.“She’s not a fist pumper, and if all we are going to elect to Congress is fist pumpers, you get people who can only shout at each other, and you get people who aren’t as smart,” he says. “Let’s send someone to DC who can put a good idea up on the whiteboard and convince other people it’s a good idea.”But Hunter says DelBene’s biggest challenge is that she is not as well known as John Koster, a conservative Republican who has been in politics in the region for more than two decades. DelBene has been more visible on television, with two separate SuperPAC's running negative ads against Koster, mostly attacking his opposition to abortion.The latest KING 5/SurveyUSA poll shows DelBene now leading in the race, by a slender 47 to 44 percent. That is a reversal from the last KING 5 poll in September, which showed Koster with a narrow lead. Both results are within the poll’s margin of error, so it continues to be a very close race.

  Oct 23, 2012 at 6:03 pm
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  Kent Mayor Proposes Layoffs, New Taxes In City Budget

  The Mayor of Kent, Washington is proposing another round of layoffs and new taxes to bridge a $2 million budget shortfall. Mayor Suzette Cooke presented her 2013-2014 budget to the City Council Tuesday. In her opening speech, Mayor Cooke called her budget “as ugly as the economic times we face.”Cooke says the city has seen a 30 percent drop in sales tax since the financial crisis hit. The city's real estate market hasn’t yet recovered. And the city' s public debt burden is high, in large part due to the city's new arena. The $84.5 million ShoWare Center opened its doors in January 2009, just in time for the recession. "How to describe how much our revenues are hurting? I would say we are just scraping by," Mayor Cooke said in an interview.In her budget proposal, Mayor Cooke is calling for the elimination of 20 city positions, including eight layoffs. Two vacant police positions would remain unfilled. The city has already laid off 82 people since the beginning of the financial crisis. In addition, the mayor is proposing a new business and occupancy, or B & O tax that would bring in close to $7 million a year. She is also calling for a six percent tax on cable TV bills.Mayor Cooke says the city needs the new revenue to avoid what she calls “unacceptable” budget cuts. City Council President Dennis Higgins says the size of the current budget shortfall has taken council members by surprise. “Certainly we’ve cut a lot in the past four years and I can’t believe we still haven’t hit bottom,” he said. Higgins says he expects significant push back to the mayor’s proposed new B & O tax. The City Council will begin holding hearings on the proposed budget next week, and is scheduled to enact a new budget by the end of the year.

  Oct 10, 2012 at 5:54 pm

• Boeing Engineers Reject Contract Offer, Return To Bargaining Table

  Negotiators for the Boeing Company and its engineering and technical union are back at the negotiating table today. That’s after union members soundly rejected the company’s latest contract offer.

  Oct 02, 2012 at 12:00 am

• Proposed Tacoma City Budget Includes Big Layoffs

  Tacoma officials are proposing slashing 217 city jobs over the next two years in order to bridge a looming budget gap of $63 million.

  Oct 02, 2012 at 12:00 am