Having tried and failed last year to hold the 26th District Senate seat with a union stooge, Democrats will respond this time around with a candidate who makes no pretense about who pulls her strings.
Judy Arbogast, former teachers’ union president in the South Kitsap School District, has notified the state’s campaign finance agency of her intention to challenge Sen. Jan Angel, a former three-term member of the House of Representatives who handily defeated interim Democratic Sen. Nathan Schlicher in a special election last November.
Because the seat was originally won in 2010 by Democrat Derek Kilmer — who was subsequently elected to Congress in 2012 — Angel must run again in the 2014 general election, presumably against Arbogast. Unless the Democrats come up with someone remotely qualified before the filing deadline in May, that is.
With majority control potentially up for grabs in a closely divided Washington State Senate, Angel and Schlicher waged the most expensive legislative race in Washington history in 2013, with just over $3 million spent by the two candidates and the assorted political action committees on their behalf.
Of the $700,000 donated to Schlicher, something like 75 individual contributions at the maximum $900 level came from what could be described as labor organizations. And there were a lot more at lesser levels, to say nothing of what the labor PACs spent on their own.
But although Schlicher gladly cashed their checks, he was careful not to make too much hay from his association with the unions, lest anyone guess he’d been bought and paid for. As an emergency room physician in his full-time job, Schlicher was a willing tool for the socialized medicine interests, but for the most part downplayed his allegiance to labor.
Arbogast, on the other hand, is a former teacher and president of the South Kitsap Education Association. She was the union spokeswoman last year when it considered whether to strike over class sizes.
Unlike Schlicher, she owns her union ties and won’t fool anyone on the question of whether the WEA’s lips move every time she talks.
Having spent 16 years either living in Port Orchard or covering politics for the community newspaper, I can pretty much promise you her resumé will hurt her more than it helps in that market.
The 26th District is the prototypical swing district, having sent a bipartisan legislative delegation to Olympia every year I can remember going back to at least 1995. And while Tacoma Sen. Steve Conway and Seattle Sen. Bob Hasegawa, to name just two, aren’t hampered by having worked directly for labor unions in their own deep-blue legislative districts, my suspicion is that a bunch of otherwise-persuadable voters in Port Orchard and Gig Harbor are going to be turned off this fall by the idea of being represented in the Senate by labor’s sock puppet.
Simply put, anyone who isn’t completely repulsed by the knowledge that their elected senator would be a wholly owned subsidiary of the WEA was already a lock to vote for someone other than Angel anyway. But there are probably still a few folks up there who didn’t realize that’s what they were getting already with Schlicher, and they’re either going to be offended by Arbogast’s brazen concession to her true agenda or her disingenuous retreat from it — depending on which tactic she resorts to.
One way or the other, it’s hard to take her seriously. Most likely, Arbogast’s candidacy is nothing more than a desperate plea on the part of 26th District Democrats for labor to throw hundreds of thousands more of the membership’s dollars down the rat hole by recruiting a candidate who’d be at home in one.
In other words, one of their own.
