REAL ESTATE REMAINS a sore point for Rossi. When I caught up with him in June to interview him for Real Clear Politics, I asked what had caused America's recent recession. (Hint: it rhymes with "mousing rubble.") Rossi stepped past the question to complain about "unbridled spending, uncontrollable spending" of the Obama administration. It's certainly plausible to say that those things have not helped, or even slowed or held back a recovery, but economists would agree that they are not what got us into this mess in the first place.
Another thing Rossi doesn't like to talk about is the person who beat him twice. I asked what I thought was a slow pitch, right over the plate: what did he think of the recent economic performance of Gregoire and fellow local Democrats? They had just hiked taxes and fees by hundreds of millions of dollars to balance the state budget, but Rossi said he was not at all interested in going there. His laser beam-like focus would be "on running for the United States Senate and Patty Murray happens to be in that seat at this point in time."
Rossi's entry into the race for the Senate was late and disorganized because he really didn't want to do it. He said in June that a run for the Senate "wasn't on my radar 10 months ago, but when they passed the health care bill it was clear to me that these folks in D.C. were out of control." That explains why he waited until 2010 to announce his candidacy, but not why he waited until late May. What changed his mind?
WHAT HAPPENED IS THAT he was drafted. National Journal's Hotline reported in March that Rossi was seriously considering running after receiving a visit from National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Sen. John Cornyn and encouraging calls and messages from people all over the country. Moreover, my best good guess is that an astute political observer whispered an important number into Rossi's ear: 1994.
Washington is a Democratic state by default only. Registered Independents far outpace Ds and Rs, which has made elections here unusually volatile. Before the 1994 elections, the state had one Republican in the House of Representatives and eight Democrats. That all changed overnight as voters ushered in a delegation that was 7-2 Republican. They turned sitting House Speaker Tom Foley out of office and elected Republican populist Linda Smith with a hastily organized write-in campaign.
True, the Democrats chipped away at those gains. The current House delegation is 6-3 in the Democrats' favor. Earlier this year, the Cook Political Report rated four of the state's districts as "Solid D," one as "Likely D," and one a "toss up," for a Republican gain of one or two seats at most. That Murray could lose her Senate seat was almost out of the question.
Now it is becoming clear that more races are up for grabs. Cook calls the Rossi-Murray race a "toss up" and my own Real Clear Politics polling experts concur. At press time, the official RCP polling average had Murray at 47.8 percent to Rossi's 46 percent, a razor-thin spread. The polling results put Murray in the sudden death danger zone for incumbents of under 50 percent. Those results were given added heft when Murray came through the August 17 primary with only 46 percent of all voters. (Rossi isn't doing badly in the money race, either. Murray started at a $6 million advantage. Rossi raised $1.4 million in just over a month.)
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