By Tim Klass , JTNews Correspondent
Concern for minority representation in Congress has had a peculiar effect on Washington State’s political map.
In redrawing congressional districts and adding a tenth to conform with the 2010 census, the state redistricting commission deliberately made the 9th District the first in Washington in which more than half the population is non-white. This “majority minority” district, which runs from Southeast Seattle through Renton, Kent, Federal Way, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and the Port of Tacoma, includes areas with heavy Jewish populations: Mercer Island, Bellevue and Seattle’s Seward Park neighborhood.
At the same time, but without any indication of intent, the bipartisan commission made it significantly harder for at least two Jewish candidates — or any other Democrat — to win an open seat this year in the drastically reshaped 1st District, which has far fewer Jews.
Either former state Rep. Laura Ruderman, D-45th, or her successor in the legislature, Roger Goodman, who live blocks apart in Kirkland, would be only the second known Jew to be elected to Congress from Washington.
The first, representing a more compact but still overwhelmingly non-Jewish 1st District, was Republican John R. Miller, formerly a Seattle City Council member and KIRO television commentator. He served four terms, then opted not to run for a fifth in 1992. He later served as director of the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
The 1st District race became open when Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat who won increasingly lopsided majorities after ousting Republican Rick White in 1998, announced last year he would run instead for governor.
“I think there were a lot of people who were expecting the 1st to be a solidly Democratic district, and now it is up for grabs,” Ruderman said.
“It is now the most evenly divided district in the United States,” Goodman said.
In 2010, voters in what is set to become the 1st District favored Republican Dino Rossi by 51 percent against Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, who carried the state 52-48. Two years earlier, though, when Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire handily beat Rossi in their gubernatorial rematch, she had significantly greater support in the same geographic area.
In Miller’s time the district ran from North Seattle into southern Snohomish County and encompassed the northern part of the suburbs east of Lake Washington. Redistricting in 1992 dropped most of Seattle and added Bainbridge Island and the northern Kitsap Peninsula. Few changes were made in 2002.
The new 1st appears as an ungainly blob extending east from Kirkland and Redmond to the crest of the Cascades and north 90 miles through suburbs, towns, farms and forests to the Canadian border, including Mount Vernon, while skirting Everett and Bellingham.
Barring contrary action by the legislature, widely viewed as unlikely, the new district lines take effect in elections this year.
Zach Carstensen, director of government relations and public affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, said that as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization the Federation is barred from endorsing political candidates, but in his view Ruderman and Goodman have “phenomenal track records,” he said. “With either one, we would be proud.”
The new district does not include the home of Andrew Hughes, a Jewish tax attorney in North Seattle and political newcomer who also filed for the 1st District seat last fall. Candidates are not legally required to be residents of the district in which they run, but Hughes is reconsidering nonetheless.
He reported more than $140,000 in receipts in his first three months of fundraising, including $57,000 from his own pockets.
Goodman says he has raised about $220,000 and expects $650,000 will get him through the primary election in August. Ruderman says she has collected more than $250,000 and anticipates needing a total of $3 million to win in November.
Both present themselves as pragmatic, mainstream Democrats with similar positions, from pro-choice on abortion to support for President Obama’s health care program.
“We’re falling all over each other,” Goodman said.
Both express strong support for Israel on their websites. In an interview, Goodman added that the White House should be “more aggressive and more innovative” in pushing for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“It’s a lost opportunity if the United States does not enter into a new kind of relationship-building,” he said. “I think the Obama administration needs to be much more proactive now. I think the Clinton administration did a much better job.”
Their political backgrounds and the nature of their Jewish identity are more varied.
Ruderman said she had little direct connection with Jewish institutions growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but with about 70 percent of the population in the area Jewish, she said, “it was easy to feel Jewish.”
She said she became more engaged with her heritage while earning a drama degree at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and after moving to the Seattle area, “it became increasingly difficult to maintain a Jewish identity without some affiliation.”
In her first bid for office, after five years working at Microsoft, she won election in 1998 to the first of three terms in the state House from what had been a Republican stronghold. She went on to start what has become a tradition of a legislative Passover seder.
A few years later she began attending Kol HaNeshamah in West Seattle. Then-Rabbi Michael Latz introduced her to the man she later married, she had an adult Bat Mitzvah in 2007, and she regularly sings in the congregation’s choral ensemble.
She left the legislature to run unsuccessfully for secretary of state against incumbent Republican Sam Reed in 2004, then ran for state Democratic party chair and lost to Dwight Pelz.
Goodman said he has always been “proud of my Jewish heritage…of the long tradition of philanthropy and the transmission of ethics.” After he became Bar Mitzvah, he taught in his synagogue’s religious school but now has no Jewish institutional involvement or affiliation.
“There are very few Jews out here,” he said. “When I grew up in Rhode Island it was one-third Jewish, one-third Catholic and one-third WASP.”
His government experience dates from 1988, when he was on the legal staff of the Democratic National Committee. He later held congressional staff positions with Reps. Bob Wise of West Virginia and Rick Boucher of Virginia, then married, moved west and was executive director of the Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission from 1998-2000.
Goodman was sworn in as a state legislator in 2007, 100 years after one of his great-grandfathers became the first Jewish member of Massachusetts’ state Senate.
Both he and Ruderman are energetic campaigners.
Ruderman has extensive fundraising experience and says she knocked or rang doorbells at 12,000 homes in 1998, 15,000 in 2000 and more than 20,000 in 2002.
“She taught me to go door to door,” Goodman said, then added jokingly, “Maybe she created a monster.”
Other prominent Democrats who have filed for the race include Darcy Burner, who lost two campaigns against Republican Rep. Dave Reichert in the neighboring 8th District, and state Rep. Steve Hobbs, D-44th. Suzan DelBene, director of the state revenue department, who lost to Reichert in 2010, reportedly is considering a 1st District run as well.
Likely Republican candidates include James Watkins, who lost to Inslee in 2010, and Snohomish County Council member John Koster, who nearly upset incumbent Rep. Rick Larsen in the 2nd Congressional District the same year.
Pelz describes the latest incarnation of the district as “ugly but lovable” — lovable because he thinks it is within the Democrats’ reach, especially if voter sentiment turns more Democratic nationwide.
Still, he said, too many strong Democrats splitting the vote in the primary election could put the seat in jeopardy. With the state’s Top Two primary system, the top two vote-getters could end up being Republicans who then would appear without Democratic opposition on the general election ballot.
Pelz, Carstensen, Goodman and Ruderman all downplayed any chance that being Jewish would be a liability to a 1st-District candidate.
The Washington Legislature includes eight Jews, two in the 49-seat Senate and six in the 98-seat House, including one, Rep. Andy Billig, from Spokane.
“In this state Jewish candidates have proven themselves in getting elected in a whole variety of districts,” Carstensen said. “Relative to the size of the Jewish community in Washington, I think that’s pretty darn impressive.”