WA-08: America’s Swing District
By REID WILSON
WRITING On REAL CLEAR POLITICS
From the shores of Lake Washington, just a dozen feet or so above sea level, to the 14,410-foot peak of Mt. Rainier, from the high-tech nerve center of the Microsoft campus in the north to the rural farmlands in the south, few Congressional Districts embody the range of extremes of Washington's 8th.
The district includes Medina, where Bill Gates owns a home visible from miles away, and Mercer Island, where Paul Allen's eight contiguous plots of land comes with a floating helipad. It houses Enumclaw and Buckley, where few visit save to fill up on gas on the way to the base of the mountain, and Snoqualmie, home of the 268-foot waterfall made famous on television's Twin Peaks. The ensuing diversity, along economic, generational, class and racial lines, makes certain that no politician, Democrat or Republican, will have an easy race for years to come.
The district has never elected a Democrat to Congress. It has, however, become decidedly more blue of late. Al Gore and John Kerry carried the district, and Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, both Democrats, won it in their most recent races.
Congressman Dave Reichert has learned that lesson well. The two-term Republican has won twice, though by the skin of his teeth, with less than 52% of the vote. Republicans on a national level, say observers, have only Reichert to thank for keeping the seat in GOP hands. It is no accident the incumbent won re-election: Reichert's campaign contacted more than 500,000 voters in 2006, more than any other campaign in the country, and as many as 43,000 on Election Day alone, running what some consider the best Republican race of the year.
Of the thirty state legislative seats elected from the district, twenty-one are Democrats. That's a massive shift from just a decade ago, when fewer than half a dozen Democrats occupied those same seats.
