State Rep. Michelle Caldier retains lead in rematch with challenger Joy Stanford
State Rep. Michelle Caldier (R-Port Orchard, retains a substantial lead over her challenger, community organizer Joy Stanford, in election results posted Friday.
With 548 precincts out of 555 reporting at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Caldier had 55.2 percent of the vote and Stanford had 44.6 percent.
The vote totals were 25,070 for Caldier and 20,248 for Stanford.
The Pierce County Elections Bureau reported a voter turnout of 80 percent.
“The 26th district has said they won’t listen to the negativity put out there,” Caldier told the Gateway shortly after the polls closed. “In my race there was around $950,000 total spent on independent expenditures and many of those were attack ads. My opponent went negative as well as her supporters, and I’m grateful people saw through the negativity.”
Stanford said she campaigned hard.
“We talked to almost 60,000 people, we sent 30,000 texts, I am really excited about what we generated in this district and I am going to wait and see mood.”
The election contest for the second position in the state’s 26th Legislative District was a rematch between two energetic, activist Peninsula women.
Caldier is a three-term Republican legislator seeking a fourth term. A dentist and foster mother who lives in Port Orchard, she’s made her name in the Legislature with laser-focused oversight of the foster care system. She’s considered a moderate Republican, though some constituents grumble that she’s too liberal on social issues.
Stanford is a Gig Harbor substitute teacher who has spent many years working on affordable housing and health care access for low-income people. It’s her second try at unseating Caldier — she was defeated soundly in 2018, when Caldier won by 55% of the vote.
Both women are passionate about issues they care about: For Caldier, raised as a foster child, it’s improving state foster care. For Stanford, who worked for a shared-housing non-profit for many years, it’s affordable housing.
Stanford has the biggest war chest: $277,831 as of last week, according to the state Public Disclosure Commission, but Caldier is not far behind, with $224,278.
Work not done
Michelle Caldier was elected in 2014, narrowly defeating incumbent Democrat Larry Seaquist, and has been handily re-elected every two years since.
In an interview with The Gateway last week, Caldier said she is seeking a fourth term because “I think my work isn’t done.”
Because of the pandemic, she said, the state is “facing one of the largest revenue shortfalls we’ve ever faced, and that means we are going to have to make tough decisions about what can and cannot be funded.”
Caldier notes that she’ll have something to say about that, as she sits on three critical committees: Appropriations, Health and Wellness, and Education.
“If the pandemic continues for much longer, we may find ourselves having to redo the entire structure of education,” she said. “We’ll need to build schools that keep kids out the hallways. We’ll need to find ways to do remote learning that actually work.”
And, she said, “We need to figure out how to turn the economy around. Amazon and Microsoft are doing fine, nut hotels and restaurants are dying on the vine. We cannot sustain the unemployment we currently have. Not only do we have unemployment compensation, but increased food stamp use, there’s an uptick in mental health problems, we see an increase in case loads — all this winds up costing our state.”
Caldier said she’d like to see some kind of tax relief, maybe a targeted rebate aimed at sectors hurting the most.
Silver tsunami
Other priorities: “Making sure we are safeguarding the nursing home populations. We have a silver tsunami coming, and we have to be prepared for it. Nursing homes are closing because Medicaid is not reimbursing them adequately. Even before the pandemic, I know of 14 or 15 nursing homes that closed.”
And then there’s foster care. Caldier has raised 23 foster children, the latest of whom just graduated high school. Caldier herself grew up as a foster child, and says she only found her footing because she was able to attend the same high school — Central Kitsap — all four years. Many foster kids are not that lucky, she said.
“Graduation rates for foster kids are even lower than for children with disabilities or children who are homeless,” she said, because they so often bounce around from school to school. She’d like to see a system that guarantees a foster child a stable school life, even if they change foster parents.
‘I’m Goldilocks’
Caldier is a reliable Republican on issues like low taxes and small government. But she sometimes takes flak because she is more flexible on social issues. She took a lot of criticism when she voted for a bill to ban “conversion therapy,” touted by some as a “cure” for homosexuality.
“I was told by some members of my party that this should be a parental right,” she said. “But it looked like child abuse to me, and that’s the way I voted.”
As a moderate Republican, “I’m like Goldilocks,” she said, laughing. “I’m just right.”
A dentist who practiced for many years among elderly in nursing homes, Caldier also taught dentistry as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington for over a decade. She still volunteers at the Key Free Clinic. She jokes that’s she’s currently the only member of the Legislature licensed to write prescriptions.
And the name? Never mind the fancy French pronunciation, she says. Its Call-DEER.
Caldier has received contributions of $2,000 from political action committees representing Realtors, the Puyallup and Muckelshoot Tribes, Chevron, dairy farmers, builders and contractors, Altria (the former Philip Morris) and fellow dentists. She has no big contributions from state or local Republican committees.
Joy Stanford
Joy Stanford got a late start in her 2018 campaign, and wound up on the losing end. She’s learned from that, she said, and this year she started early with a good staff, and “it’s going great.”
“The support and momentum are absolutely phenomenal,” she said in an interview with The Gateway last week. “I have spent hours on the phone talking to voters — I try to talk to a couple hundred a day.”
What she hears from voters is pretty consistent, she says: “COVID-19, small business survival, and opening the schools.”
Stanford is a substitute teacher, and her proudest boast is that she’s “taught every grade” in the Peninsula School District. She lives in the Rosedale area of Gig Harbor with her husband, David, and has three grown children and a 7-month-old grandson.
She has also worked as an administrative specialist at Group Health, now known as Kaiser Permanente, and as a housing specialist at Shared Housing Services in Tacoma, a nonprofit that matches people in need of shelter with others who have spare rooms.
Coalition builder
Those experiences have given her a ground-level view of people struggling with the system, she said.
“Sometimes you have to process and improve the system, sometimes you have to rebuild the system,” she said.
Stanford sees herself as a coalition builder, someone who could reach across the aisle.
“I think there are some great people in the other party,” said said. “To me, it’s not about party, but what kind of passion you have. As I was just telling a gentleman on the phone, none of the issues we are dealing with — COVID-19, the economy, health care — have anything to do with party politics.”
“I’m a great collaborator, a great listener, and I’m open to new and fresh and innovative ideas.” He goal as a legislator, she said, would be to “pass good legislation that helps a lot of people.”
Locally, she sees opening up small businesses in the wake of the pandemic as a big issue. She was shocked to learn that a friend in Gig Harbor recently closed her mail and copy shop. Government help was available, but the paperwork proved too daunting, and the acquaintance gave up.
“We’re losing our small businesses, and we don’t have to,” she said. “There ought to be a way of streamlining the process.”
A ‘moment’ at game
As a person of color, Stanford “absolutely” identifies with the Black Lives Matter movement, she said, although she condemns destruction and violence. “Our kids have done a great job” keeping the focus on peaceful protest, she said.
Stanford was raised in San Mateo, Calif., a very diverse community, and much different than Gig Harbor, she said. She’s had her share of “moments,” here, including the time a school district employee tried to seat her in the “visiting team” bleachers when Peninsula was playing an urban high school from Tacoma.
“She took one look at me and said, ‘Oh, your team is over there,’ “ Stanford recalls. “I said, ‘Pardon me, my son plays for Peninsula, and I belong here.’”
Stanford can laugh about it now — and the mortified employee later “sent me the nicest note,” she said — but she was steamed at the time.
Nevertheless, “I’m not going anywhere.,” she said. “I love it here. Gig Harbor is my home.”
Stanford has received $92,750 from state and local Democratic committees, and $2,000 contributions from unions, including the Washington Education Association, and women’s organizations, including the South Sound Women’s Leadership Pact, Persist Pact, Win with Women, and NARAL.
Michelle Caldier’s website is: https://michellecaldier.houserepublicans.wa.gov
Joy Stanford’s website is: www.joyforwashington.com
Jake Gregg contributed to this story.
This story was originally published November 3, 2020 at 8:49 PM.