Maria Cantwell was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000 by the narrowest of margins, less than 0.1% of the vote. Since then, she has never had a close election.
Cantwell faces 10 opponents in the August primary who seek to buck that trend but only one with a plausible chance of doing so.
The leading Republican running against Cantwell, and the only challenger to raise a significant amount of money, is Raul Garcia, an emergency room doctor who mounted a brief run for governor in 2020 before losing in the primary.
Cantwell, a Democrat, will have served 30 years in the Senate if she wins reelection this fall and serves her full term. She begins the campaign with the advantages of a longtime incumbent, including a significant financial edge. She has $6.5 million in her campaign account, compared with $150,000 for Garcia, as of the last filing, in March.
With partisan control of the Senate likely to come down to just one or two seats, Garcia offers Republicans a longshot opportunity to pick up a seat in a traditionally solid-blue state. Republicans are currently shut out of statewide office, and no Republican has won a U.S. Senate seat in Washington since Slade Gorton (who was later defeated by Cantwell) in 1994.
Garcia has diverged from his Donald Trump-dominated party in several ways. He refuses to say for whom he'll vote for president, doesn't question the 2020 election and says he would vote to reestablish abortion rights as they existed under Roe v. Wade.
Cantwell says she wants a fifth term to help implement what she called the three landmark pieces of legislation of President Joe Biden: the infrastructure law, the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act to spur domestic semiconductor work.
"That's a huge opportunity to help us do something, which is grow the middle class," Cantwell said.
Garcia, who initially launched another campaign for governor before pivoting to the Senate when Dave Reichert entered the gubernatorial race, said his interest in public service dates to 1990 when he interned for then-U.S. Sen. Bob Dole. He would talk about it, over the years, as he worked in medicine, until one night in 2020, when he was sitting at a campfire with his wife.
She "turned to me and said, 'You know, I'm tired of you talking about a one-party system and how the government nowadays is turning into what you experienced in Cuba. Why don't you run for office?'"
Garcia, 53, was born in Cuba and emigrated with his mother when he was 11, first to Spain and then to Miami. He went to college at the University of Miami, attended medical school in New York and since then has worked at hospitals or medical schools in New York, North Carolina, Kentucky and Washington.
During med school, he was featured in one episode of a short-lived reality TV show, "911: The Bronx." Garcia, who lives in Yakima, is currently the chief medical officer at Astria Toppenish Hospital, where he said he still works about eight ER shifts a month.
In February, Garcia legally changed his name from Raul Garcia to Dr Raul Garcia, which is how he will appear on the ballot. He said that when he ran for governor in 2020, "a lot of people knew me as the doctor from Eastern Washington that ran for governor, but when they got to the ballot, they didn’t remember my name."
"It's just to make it easier for people to recognize me on the ballot," Garcia said.
Cantwell, 65, who lives in Edmonds, was born in Indianapolis and went to Miami University in Ohio. After college, she volunteered on the gubernatorial campaign of Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer (of television fame), and work on another campaign brought her to Washington in 1983. She stayed and in 1986, ran for the state House of Representatives where she would serve three terms. She won an open U.S. House seat in 1992, lost in the Republican wave of 1994 and went to work for RealNetworks, a pioneer in early internet streaming audio and video.
In 2000, she ran for Senate, funded by nearly $10 million from her RealNetworks stock, and knocked off Gorton, who had been in the Senate for 18 years.
She chairs the Senate Commerce Committee and has to a large extent focused on technical issues, often far from headlines: the CHIPS Act, Federal Aviation Administration regulation, apple exports to India, Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon fishery.
"I don't think people sent me back there to sit there and argue in political debates," Cantwell said. "They want to see results."
Arguably the most important difference between Cantwell and Garcia is the most obvious — their parties. Each would be a vote for their respective party to set the agenda in the Senate.
But they also clash on how best to approach several significant issues facing Washington and the nation.
Fentanyl
As fentanyl deaths continue to rise in King County and the state of Washington, overall, Garcia wants stricter criminal charges for drug dealers, while Cantwell wants more access to treatment.
Garcia wants to charge fentanyl dealers with manslaughter, although he is unclear on where exactly the line for charging manslaughter should be.
"We have to think of the addict that is selling drugs just to make it that day," Garcia said. "Is he a real dealer that is purposely killing people, conniving, or is this an addict that needs our help?"
He wants to make rehab mandatory, with incarceration as the alternative, for people dealing with addiction.
Cantwell has co-sponsored and passed legislation to increase funding to combat international drug trafficking. She has proposed creating health hubs that would offer addiction treatment and other services without an appointment. The legislation would provide funding to grow existing health centers so they could provide those services.
"What's really clear is that you have to have a system where people can go and get treatment on a daily basis," Cantwell said.
Abortion
Cantwell is a reliable vote for abortion rights and wants to reinstate the protections of Roe v. Wade, which Democrats have pledged to do if they control both houses of Congress and the White House (and have a majority of senators willing to toss aside the filibuster).
"We need to have people in the United States Senate who are going to fight to get that codified," she said.
Garcia said he would not vote for any kind of national abortion restriction, saying "I cannot get behind something that would bring morbidity and mortality to women."
Asked if he would support reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade nationally, he hesitated.
"That's hard," he said. "This is the first time that I've been asked that, let me think on that."
Ultimately, Garcia said he would vote for nationwide protections for abortion because "I'm going to represent Washington state, and if the state had to vote in Congress, it would say yes."
Inflation
Cantwell pointed to recently passed Democratic-led legislation as helping to lower costs as inflation spiked in the wake of the pandemic.
The CHIPS Act, she said, helped address shortfalls in computer chips that were driving up the cost of used cars by thousands of dollars. The Inflation Reduction Act included capped monthly insulin costs at $35 for Medicare users and allowed Medicare to negotiate down the prices of prescription drugs for the first time.
Garcia blames inflation on a national debt that has grown to "dangerous levels" and said he will "take a stand against the reckless federal overspending."
But pressed to give an example of what he would cut, Garcia declined to name a single thing.
He said he would like to "do an audit on every department of government," before identifying any cuts.
Guns
Cantwell wants stricter gun laws nationwide. Garcia does not.
Cantwell would like to change the nation's gun laws to match the ones in Washington. That would mean a national ban on assault weapons and high- capacity magazines. It would also mean a national red-flag law, which in Washington allows a judge to bar someone from possessing guns if a family member or law enforcement testifies that they're a danger to themselves or others.
"These are things that are good policy that should be implemented at the federal level," Cantwell said.
Garcia said the "low-hanging fruit" is making sure that gun laws already on the books are enforced. He would not support a national ban on high-powered semiautomatic weapons commonly known as assault weapons.
"I make a joke, why would you take an assault rifle to kill birds, you know, they'd probably die of a heart attack," he said. "But yeah, it is your right to have those guns. I just want to make sure that the guns are in the right hands."
President of the United States
Cantwell is voting for Biden for president. Garcia may know whom he's voting for, but he's unwilling to say.
Biden, she said, "has put us on a track to really revitalize investment across the United States."
"He has to talk more about how these working families are impacted by these costs and how we're fighting to reduce them," Cantwell said.
Garcia calls the presidential race "the most divisive subject in America" and says he is staying out of it.
He called Trump's threats of criminal retribution against his opponents, "really, really unfortunate" and "not something that is promoting unity."
"Whoever gets elected," Garcia said, "I hope wants to work with me to unite the country."
