SEATTLE — Twenty years ago this month, Dave Reichert spun his popularity as King County sheriff into a seat in Congress, winning a swing district that included Bellevue and other Seattle suburbs.
For 14 years, Reichert held on to the 8th Congressional District as a Republican in a blue-trending state, beating back aggressive Democratic challengers in his early reelection campaigns. His retirement in 2018 led to the GOP losing the seat for the first time.
As he runs for governor against Democratic Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Democrats have spent millions of dollars hammering his record as being too extreme on abortion.
But Reichert points to his time in the House as evidence that he’d be a centrist state executive, able to work with all sides in Olympia.
“I am not an ideologue. I don’t make decisions based on ideology. People get stuck in their ideology and they’re not focused on the facts to solve problems,” Reichert said in an interview.
During his congressional career, Reichert was rated by nonpartisan journals as a relative moderate. He bucked GOP leaders on some hot-button issues and won praise for his yearslong campaign to expand the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. In 2014, Congress approved a bipartisan measure adding the strongest federal protections to 22,000 acres in the Middle Fork Snoqualmie Valley.
“That’s got to be the biggest accomplishment, at least for me personally,” Reichert said of the preservation work, which also included designating 1.5 million acres along the Interstate 5 corridor, known as the Mountains to Sound Greenway, as a national heritage area.
But it’s other, more conservative pieces of Reichert’s congressional record that voters are getting inundated with as the Nov. 5 election draws to a close.
Democratic groups have saturated TV screens and social media with ads condemning his votes for bills to ban most abortions after 20 weeks and to defund Planned Parenthood.
“Dave Reichert cannot be trusted to protect abortion rights in Washington — especially if his buddy Donald Trump is elected and passes a nationwide abortion ban,” blares a state Democratic Party-funded website dedicated to attacking Reichert.
Ferguson also has pointed repeatedly to an analysis showing Reichert voted with the Trump agenda 92.5% of the time when the two overlapped during his final two years in office.
Before entering federal politics, Reichert spent three decades with the King County Sheriff’s Office, working as a beat cop and lead detective before getting appointed to sheriff in 1997 and then winning election to the office.
When six-term U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn retired before the 2004 election, Republicans turned to Reichert as their best bet to keep the 8th District seat.
In his first speech on the floor of the U.S. House, Reichert gave an hourlong recounting of his role in capturing Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who killed nearly 50 young women and teens before his 2001 arrest.
Mike Shields, Reichert’s chief of staff during his first two terms, said Reichert came into office with the instincts of a cop, not a congressman.
“He’s not really a politician. There was a lot of ‘Mr. Smith goes to Washington,’ “ Shields said, recalling his boss spending many hours listening to all sides on issues, including groups who were steadfastly opposed to Republicans. “It was sort of at times frustrating to the hardened Hill staff.”
Gary Brown, a retired Tacoma longshoreman, credits Reichert with pushing for port security measures after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Brown, who represented the dockworkers union on security concerns, said he got blown off after seeking meetings on the subject with some local members of Congress.
But he said Reichert, despite the longshoreman union’s well-established support of Democrats, immediately set up a three-hour talk with him, and as a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, went on to push for advanced screening at ports to detect explosives and other threats. “He was like a dog with a bone,” Brown said.
While largely voting with the House GOP caucus, Reichert staked out independent positions on high-profile controversies. In his first term, he was one of five Republicans to vote against a measure seeking to block the removal of a feeding tube from Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for 15 years and whose case briefly became a culture war flashpoint.
Reichert also earned conservative wrath in 2009 for voting for a bill to create a cap-and-trade system limiting carbon emissions to fight climate change. He and seven other House members joined Democrats, including then-U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, in support of the measure.
This year, however, Reichert supports Initiative 2117 to repeal Washington’s new-cap-and trade system, siding with critics who say it has unacceptably driven up gas and energy prices.
He has further muddled his climate views during the gubernatorial race by telling some conservative groups that God, not humans, controls the weather and climate.
In an interview, Reichert said Democrats are twisting his comments. “Yes, I agree humans have impact on climate, but you can’t erase the fact that I have a Christian belief that there is a higher power,” he said.
Abortion votes get the spotlight
Reichert’s abortion record has become the central focus for Democrats in the race.
He voted for three bills that would have imposed a national ban on abortions after 20 weeks, with some exceptions.
The most recent vote, in 2017, was on a bill called the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” It would have made it a federal crime to perform an abortion at 20 weeks or later, with doctors subject to up to five years in prison. There were exceptions if an abortion was necessary to save “the life of the pregnant woman” or in cases of rape or incest.
The Democratic TV ads assailing Reichert simply refer to his votes as for a “national ban” on abortion without specifying the 20 weeks or exceptions. That’s led Reichert to denounce them as lies and ask TV stations to remove them from the air.
Reichert has repeatedly promised he wouldn’t roll back abortion rights if elected governor, and is running a TV ad featuring his sister, who says he supported her decision to have an abortion years ago.
But Ferguson and Democrats are not sympathetic, noting the bills he supported would have gone beyond Washington’s law, which allows abortion up to the point of fetal viability as determined by a medical provider. That’s generally considered to be around 24 weeks.
Reichert’s other high-profile votes
During his campaign, Reichert vowed to oppose new taxes, and his campaign biography notes he served as a senior member of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, “where he worked to keep taxes low as chairman of the Tax Subcommittee.”
In 2017, he voted along party lines for the $1.5 trillion tax cut bill backed by the Trump administration and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan. He hailed the cuts as a “great Christmas present” for taxpayers. The sweeping measure, which critics warned would balloon the national debt, gave steep tax cuts to businesses and the wealthy, with more modest cuts for middle- and low-income families.
A major study released earlier this year found the tax cuts delivered wage gains of about $750 per year for the average worker, an amount substantially less than the $4,000 to $9,000 promised by Trump, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, the law has added more than $100 billion a year to the national debt.
During his final term in Congress, Reichert took another high-profile vote that went against his party. He was among 20 House Republicans who opposed a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act — a longstanding goal for the GOP and one that Reichert had supported in dozens of previous votes.
Reichert said he opposed the GOP measure that year because it failed to adequately replace protections for poor children and people with preexisting medical conditions.
His “no” vote came despite personal lobbying by House GOP leaders and then-Vice President Mike Pence.
“I don’t care. I have to do what I think is right,” he said at the time.
During his final term, Reichert faced loud protests in his district, with crowds galvanized against the Trump agenda demanding he show up to a town hall to take questions. He refused, saying such meetings wound up dominated by grandstanding and “rude” people.
As challengers started filing to run against him, Reichert bowed out of running for reelection in 2018. His decision opened the door for Democrats, who won the seat for the first time that November. U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Sammamish, the pediatrician who won, is favored to win a fourth term in the seat against Republican challenger Carmen Goers.
In the gubernatorial race, Reichert has emphasized crime and counted on picking up some Democratic and independent voters, as he did in winning his congressional seat, surviving Democratic wave elections in 2006 and 2012.
“There is a certain type of voter in Western Washington who was a Reichert- Obama voter. Not just a few of them,” Shields said.
Polls have Reichert substantially trailing Ferguson, and Democrats have vastly outspent Republicans in the race.
Still, Reichert hopes there are enough voters who will split the ticket, voting for Kamala Harris for president while also giving him the nod.
He’s pitched the potential upside of a GOP governor contending with a Democratic-majority Legislature — an echo of the divided balance of power he faced at times in Washington, D.C.
“That’s what I want to do as the governor. … I want to get to a point where there is an opportunity to have a balanced government,” he said.
