We in Washington state "get our business done", says Lisa Brown, a Democrat who leads the state's Senate and may be a future candidate for governor. In contrast to California, say, Washington passes its budgets on time. Districts are drawn in a neutral process. Party machines are weak, heresy condoned. Ms Brown's own Senate caucus recently grew by two Republican defections.rnRob McKenna, the state's boyish attorney-general and a likely Republican candidate for governor, also declares himself proudly centrist. Like everybody he knows, he never votes a straight ticket: "I always voted for a state auditor who is a Democrat, because he's good," he says.rnAnd so it goes. Stuart Elway, a leading pollster, says that moderation runs deep in a state that voted twice for Ronald Reagan and then for Michael Dukakis. Washington leans left to the west of the Cascade mountains, right to their east, but very few of its political outcomes are extreme.
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