Johnson, Wilson ahead in commission race
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 11:23 PM PDT
By Tony Lystra
Printable version
E-mail this articleVoters in Tuesday’s primary appeared to be giving Democrat Kathleen Johnson a chance to defend her District 1 Cowlitz County commissioner seat in November’s general election. According to unofficial returns, she will face Republican Tom Wilson, who was beating a crowded field of four candidates with 33 percent of the vote.
With roughly half the ballots counted Tuesday night, 30 percent of District 1 voters were supporting Johnson.
Democrat Todd McDaniel had 21 percent, and Steve Madsen, also a Democrat, had just 10 percent. The election, the state’s first “top two” primary, advances the two candidates who receive the most votes, regardless of his or her party affiliation.
As of Tuesday evening, voter turnout was at 38 percent, far higher than the 26 percent turnout that had been recorded just a day earlier, Cowlitz County auditor Kris Swanson said. The number was still far lower than Swanson’s prediction that 61 percent of the county’s voters would cast ballots in the primary. Still, she said, her office had been swamped with last-minute ballots Tuesday. A ballot drop box in Longview’s Civic Center was overflowing Tuesday morning, Swanson said, and officials had to empty it six times throughout the day.
Tuesday’s results had clearly left Johnson ebullient after a rocky year. Johnson, 62, had considered not running for a second term earlier this year, saying she wondered if it was time to make way for a younger candidate. But she beamed Tuesday night as she reviewed the results at the county elections office.
The race, she said, had “attracted candidates that thought I was vulnerable.”
“Obviously,” she said with a grin, “I wasn’t.”
Johnson has proved a firebrand during her first term. She drew the scorn of her fellow Democrats when she endorsed her colleague, Republican incumbent Jeff Rasmussen in 2006 over his Democratic challenger Axel Swanson. (Swanson ended up winning the race.) Earlier this year, the party snubbed Johnson and endorsed McDaniel as its favored candidate in Tuesday’s primary.
In January, her fellow commissioners — Swanson and George Raiter — removed her from the chairwoman’s position a year earlier than usual and installed Raiter as chairman.
But none of that appeared to be hurting Johnson’s chances Tuesday.
“When you work in a community for 43 years, people begin to trust you,” she said. “I think this was trust today, and I appreciate it.”
Johnson, who has long contended that local politics should be nonpartisan, said she was unfazed that her party hadn’t endorsed her and suggested the party’s influence in races like hers might be waning.
“I think you’re seeing the edge of a change where people want to vote on the candidate” instead of his or her party, she said. “The majority of people want to know you’re thinking about them. Saying it from the heart, not what’s on some script.”
Wilson, a 57-year-old general manager for Cascade Natural Gas, has centered his campaign on expanding the county’s economy. On Tuesday, the Woodland Republican said he was reluctant to comment until all the ballots are counted. “It’s close,” he said.
Still, he said, “I think the voters are saying they want economic development. I think they want to see a stable economy here.”
McDaniel, a Cowlitz County Sheriff’s deputy and Kelso City Councilman, checked the results on a laptop during a council meeting Tuesday night. When McDaniel saw that he’d lost, he gave a big thumbs down to his fellow councilman and campaign manager John Karnofski, who sat at the end of the dais. Karnofski leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes in dismay.
Earlier in the campaign, Johnson had questioned McDaniel’s eligibility to challenge her, saying the Hatch Act, a federal law barring certain government employees from seeking office, might preclude him from running. The county’s attorney disagreed, but Johnson’s contention reportedly led to an intense exchange between the candidates at a Democratic Party event.
In an interview Tuesday, McDaniel, who based his campaign on reducing crime and bringing fair-paying jobs to the county, said he was unsure why voters were favoring Johnson and Wilson over him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not happy with where the numbers are, but I’m just going to wait and see what happens.”
Madsen, who lives in Cougar and serves as a government affairs coordinator for the Clark County Building Industry Association, has led a campaign to reform the Cowlitz County Building and Planning Department, which has been accused of processing permits too slowly and arbitrarily standing in the way of building projects.
Winning a commissioner seat would have put him in a position to push such reforms — including overhauling the county’s outdated comprehensive plan — from the inside. But Madsen said Tuesday that voters may have gravitated toward less-nuanced issues, such as jobs and the economy.
“I ran may campaign on a lot of technical issues,” he said, which “most people don’t pay a lot of attention to on a day-to-day basis.”
Independent Blayden Wall, of Woodland, dropped out of the race last month because he is being deployed to Iraq. He received 4 percent of the vote.
The county’s elections office is expected to continue counting votes throughout Wednesday and release updated tallies Wednesday evening.
Daily News Reporter Amy M.E. Fischer contributed to this story.
Old Bag wrote on Aug 20, 2008 9:05 AM:
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