Former Republican State Party Chair Susan Hutchison files to run against Maria Cantwell

With less than an hour and a half to go until the close of Fil­ing Week 2018, for­mer Repub­li­can State Par­ty Chair Susan Hutchi­son has filed to run against incum­bent Demo­c­ra­t­ic Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor Maria Cantwell — we pre­sume with the back­ing of the state par­ty orga­ni­za­tion she was pre­vi­ous­ly in charge of.

Hutchi­son joins an extreme­ly crowd­ed field that includes a whop­ping twen­ty-eight oth­er chal­lengers to Cantwell… more than a dozen of whom iden­ti­fy as Republicans.

Cantwell is seek­ing a fourth term in the Unit­ed States Sen­ate this autumn. She was first elect­ed to that posi­tion in 2000, when she nar­row­ly defeat­ed entrenched Repub­li­can incum­bent Slade Gor­ton. She eas­i­ly won reelec­tion in 2006 and 2012 over Repub­li­can chal­lengers Mike McGav­ick and Michael Baumgartner.

Repub­li­cans have had plen­ty of time to find a cred­i­ble can­di­date to chal­lenge Cantwell and car­ry their stan­dard in 2018, but they’ve squan­dered it.

That could explain why more than a dozen dif­fer­ent peo­ple had filed to take on Cantwell as Repub­li­cans pri­or to Hutchison’s fil­ing a few min­utes ago.

It does not look like Hutchi­son has been under­tak­ing any prepa­ra­tions to enter the race, which promis­es to be extreme­ly daunt­ing. (Wash­ing­ton State has­n’t elect­ed a Repub­li­can to the U.S. Sen­ate since 1994, and 2018 looks like it’ll be a Demo­c­ra­t­ic year). Her web­site is not oper­a­tional, and she has­n’t even tweet­ed about her can­di­da­cy yet. Her Twit­ter biog­ra­phy still refers to her as the “Chair­man” of the Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­cans, a posi­tion she gave up months ago.

Hutchi­son became noto­ri­ous last cycle for her deep embrace of Don­ald Trump. When it became appar­ent that Trump was on his way to the nom­i­na­tion, Hutchi­son enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly hitched her wag­on up to his, and became a high­ly loy­al, fawn­ing sur­ro­gate. In fact, she became so devot­ed to Trump that she clashed with Ted Cruz over his fail­ure to fall into line and endorse the nom­i­nee at the 2016 RNC.

Pri­or to becom­ing Repub­li­can State Par­ty Chair, Hutchi­son ran for King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive in 2009 against Dow Con­stan­tine. She was trounced, soundly.

(Con­stan­tine has since been reelect­ed twice and remains at the helm of the county.)

Hutchi­son, a for­mer tele­vi­sion news anchor, like­ly has enough name recog­ni­tion and will prob­a­bly have enough mon­ey by August to beat the oth­er twen­ty-eight peo­ple (so far) who have an ambi­tion to take on Maria Cantwell.

But even if she man­ages that, Hutchi­son will head into the Novem­ber gen­er­al elec­tion at a seri­ous dis­ad­van­tage. As men­tioned, Repub­li­cans have not won a U.S. Sen­ate race in Wash­ing­ton State in twen­ty-four years.

(And that’s not all. They haven’t won a guber­na­to­r­i­al race or secured Wash­ing­ton’s Elec­toral Col­lege votes in almost forty years.)

Are there any Repub­li­cans who could take on Cantwell and win in 2018?

Our research sug­gests not.

Last year, we sur­veyed over eight hun­dred like­ly 2018 Wash­ing­ton vot­ers and asked them whether they would pre­fer Maria Cantwell or for­mer Attor­ney Gen­er­al Rob McKen­na in a hypo­thet­i­cal matchup. 53% said they would back Cantwell, while only 40% said they would vote for McKen­na. McKen­na, in our view, would make a much stronger chal­lenger to Cantwell; he would be a top tier recruit.

But even he trails Cantwell by dou­ble dig­its accord­ing to our polling. And he does­n’t have the bag­gage that Susan Hutchi­son has.

Hutchison’s asso­ci­a­tion with Trump ought to help her push those oth­er Repub­li­cans aside — espe­cial­ly if Trump tweets on her behalf from the oth­er coast. But that same asso­ci­a­tion also makes her une­lec­table in Wash­ing­ton State. It’s hard to imag­ine an eas­i­er mark for the Democ­rats than the for­mer Repub­li­can state par­ty chair.