Spin Control: Walter Mondale was the last visitor to the 1984 Spokane season. Here’s who else in town was dull

The death of former Vice President Walter Mondale last week marked the last page of a time when Spokane seemed a must on the way to the presidential campaign. He was the last of the seven top candidates, or their proxies, to walk through town ahead of the 1984 elections, and he was the last surviving visitor to that busy campaign.

Washington’s 10 votes for the electoral college appeared to be winning. West Washington had enough Republican votes and East Washington enough Democratic votes that both presidential campaigns had reason to draw a circle around the state.

Joan Mondale, the nation’s former second lady, stopped at a Democratic fundraising dinner and sat down for an interview with a reporter for the Spokesman Review earlier this year, though not so early that it wasn’t already clear that her husband was the almost man was. specific candidate. The paper featured an artistic black and white profile of Joan Mondale, which was criticized by Democrats who found it less than flattering.

Shortly after the Democratic National Convention, which nominated Walter Mondale and was the first to select the first vice-presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro came to Spokane to gather in the lobby of the Davenport Hotel. It was early September but it was hot and the lobby and mezzanine were crowded. Someone in the crowd picked up a sign that said, “Dump Reagan. Jane Wyman did it. “Ferraro read it and laughed.

On the sidewalks in front of the hotel, a Democratic group from Montana sold posters of a remake of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” which replaced Lady Liberty with Ferraro, showing Mondale with an ERA sign on the musket’s bayonet. The national media grabbed them.

She stayed at the Sheraton Hotel and noticed during an interview the next morning that the poster showed significantly less cleavage than the original.

Two days later, First Lady Nancy Reagan was in town to cut the ribbon at the opening of a new drug treatment facility for teenagers at Deaconess Medical Center, named after her. She spoke to some young patients and gave a non-political speech about her concern for young victims of substance abuse.

In a later interview on her way back to the airport for a brief appearance at a fundraiser, she only spoke about politics when she asked a question. At the suggestion that her visit was some kind of counterprogram to Ferraros, she looked really surprised and asked when Ferraro had been in town. Her visit was strictly tied to the treatment center, she stressed.

Three weeks later, the first daughter Maureen Reagan came to Spokane, which was a clear counter-programming to Ferraro and a proposal that Democrats should be superior to Republicans on women’s issues. It blamed the Democrats for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, noting that of the 15 states that had not yet ratified the amendment, 13 were led by Democrats.

Vice President George Bush stopped in Spokane for a rally in mid-October – again at Davenport. It was between the presidential debates and he assured the assembled Republicans that Ronald Reagan, who seemed seriously straying from his game in the first debate, would do better in the second. Reagan is actually a good debater, Bush said in a later interview, adding that Reagan won when they debated four years earlier.

Reagan stopped in Seattle that year but didn’t make it to Spokane. He came in 1986 to campaign for the re-election of Senator Slade Gorton with a rally in the old Coliseum.

Ferraro made several more trips to Washington with stops on the West Side before election day.

Joan Mondale returned to Spokane twice in the fall, and Walter Mondale ended the city’s season in the campaign spotlight with another rally in Davenport, just eight days before the election. He was trying to convince a full house that the polls would turn and he would claim victory from behind.

What else could he tell them? Many people in the hotel lobby probably had their doubts, and Ronald Reagan won Washington and 48 other states in a major landslide the next week.

On the weekend leading up to the election, Spokane police estimated the total cost of security for the various visits to be around $ 40,000 in overtime.

But 1984 marked the end of an era in Washington’s presidential policy. Republican candidates won the state for the fourth year in a row. You haven’t won it since.

Spokane has become a less frequent stop on the campaign trail with each successive campaign season. Candidates are more likely to show up looking for delegates in the spring if the state uses the caucus system or voting margins after going to the primaries.

Until the fall, none of the candidates in a party spends much time outside a handful of “swing states”. If they get to Washington at all, it will primarily be about reaching the campaign ATM that Seattle has become.