OLYMPIA – Christine Gregoire, gunning to become Washington’s second woman governor, trounced King County Executive Ron Sims in the Democratic primary for governor on Tuesday.
Gregoire, the three-term attorney general who was a prime architect of the landmark $206 billion settlement with America’s tobacco industry, dispatched Sims, the state’s leading black politician, with surprising ease.
With 21 percent of precincts reporting, she had 72 percent to Sims’ 23 percent. Four other Democrats trailed in single digits.
The sometimes contentious showdown was the main drawing card for Washington’s new, much-criticized primary system.
Republican Dino Rossi, the former state Senate budget leader, easily won the Republican gubernatorial nomination. He cautioned against reading the raw numbers Tuesday night as a “beauty contest” to predict the November result. Many voters took a Democratic ballot because the Democrats offered the hotter primaries, he said.
Rossi, 44, a self-made millionaire and real estate investment broker, said he will announce his “Forward Washington” plan on Thursday at his alma mater, Seattle University. He said the six-point plan includes ways to bolster the economy, increase opportunities for the average citizen and improve the quality of life.
He said the November election will be about change.
“We’ve been traveling for 20 years in the wrong direction, and it’s time to get Washington moving forward again,” he said in a statement Tuesday night.
Hours before the polls closed, Gregoire announced a three-city campaign swing today. She planned visits to Spokane, the Tri-Cities and Seattle.
Like Rossi, she has been talking about bringing change to Olympia – moving in the “right direction,” she calls it. She is endorsed by outgoing Democratic Gov. Gary Locke, but said the state is lagging in economic recovery and needs major improvements in education and health care.
Republicans last won the governor’s mansion in the GOP landslide of 1980.
Gregoire, 57, has led in the polls and fund-raising from the start. Besides winning statewide election three times as attorney general, she enjoyed strong backing from state and national women’s groups and from anti-smoking activists who credited her with landing the tobacco settlement.
Gregoire also touted her success in forcing the government to clean up nuclear waste at Hanford, landing a Navy home port for Everett, negotiating a comparable-worth pay settlement, and numerous consumer protection victories. She served as Gov. Booth Gardner’s Department of Ecology director.
The one major blot on her record occurred four years ago when her staff missed an appeal deadline, and the state and its insurer had pay an $18 million judgment.
Sims, 56, the Democrats’ unsuccessful U.S. Senate nominee in 1994, had hoped that the state’s closed partisan primary would help him catch Gregoire.
He hitched his dreams to an unlikely and controversial issue, a call for a state income tax coupled with elimination of the business and state sales tax.
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