The candidate—if that’s what you’d still call him—stood before reporters at his campaign headquarters and spoke only briefly. He took no questions. It was all over, he acknowledged. The only thing now was for his opponent to get a fair chance in office.

“It’s important to the state of Washington that she is successful in implementing her campaign promises,” said Dino Rossi, officially putting an end to the closest gubernatorial race in the history of the United States.

How close was it? Rossi’s concession speech did not happen on Election Night, or even in 2004, the same calendar year. It happened in June 2005, after three counts, numerous lawsuits, and a heated trial before a judge in Wenatchee. By the time it was all officially over, Christine Gregoire had already been in office for six months. 

It’s now been 20 years since the race between Gregoire and Rossi put Washington’s elections apparatus to the ultimate test, straining officials in all of the state’s 39 counties, 20 years since a Republican came this close to winning a job that’s been held by Democrats since 1984. 

And if we squint, we can look back at that race and see both the end of a seemingly ancient political era—moderate-ish candidates, controversies playing out in traditional media like radio and newspapers, in-person voting—and the beginning of the present era—accusations of voter fraud, an increase in partisanship, and ultimately the events that led to Washington becoming a vote-by-mail state. 

“It was the only time in my life when I understood the phrase ‘I need a drink,’” says Chris Vance, who was the head of the Washington State Republican Party at the time. He was not the only one. 

Vance, his colleagues, and his opponents, might have had flashbacks this summer. In the top-two primary for Washington state lands commissioner, Democrat Dave Upthegrove eked out second place by just 51 votes over Republican Sue Kuehl Pederson. After a hand recount, that margin was reduced to just 49 votes. 

Washingtonians now know Gregoire as a former two-term governor and Rossi as a ubiquitous figure who has tried and repeatedly failed in statewide and congressional elections. But the candidates looked different in the moment—and their fates looked anything but inevitable. 

The governorship was open after Gary Locke’s second term. George W. Bush was actually trying to win Washington state, boosting Republicans down ballot. (Bush would fall short against John Kerry, but Republican Rob McKenna would win the race to succeed Gregoire as attorney general.) And the national party was invested heavily in a telegenic former state senator with a knack for minimizing his conservative stances on social issues.

“Dino Rossi was an excellent retail politician who made friends wherever he went and was not afraid to engage with people he didn’t necessarily see eye to eye with,” says Paul Berendt, who ran the Washington State Democratic Party at the time. 

Gregoire, on the other hand, was a career government official, a three-term AG known for winning a historic settlement against tobacco companies. She was an intellectual powerhouse with a more formal bearing than Rossi—a natural successor, it seemed, to the technocratic Locke. But unlike Rossi, she faced a competitive primary opponent in King County Executive Ron Sims.

The candidates were mutually respectful. Gregoire used her opening statement in one of the debates to literally thank Rossi for his civic service. Berendt, the Democratic party chair, recalled Republican Rossi approaching him just to say hello at a gas station after another debate. 

“It was two dynamic candidates and obviously close as hell,” recalls David Postman, who covered politics for the Seattle Times. So close that it took more than two weeks to count all the votes. So close that when they were finally tallied, 15 days after the November 2 election, Rossi’s 261-vote margin of victory was slim enough to trigger an automatic machine recount.  

It’s worth taking a moment to understand how Washingtonians voted in 2004—not just who they voted for. The state was essentially operating two different voting systems. Washington legalized permanent absentee voting back in 1993, but it also still had polling places. By 2004, about 60 percent of the state voted by mail and the other 40 percent in person. 

This made the logistics of counting votes especially challenging. After the machine recount was complete, the margin had thinned even further. Rossi led by just 42 votes out of nearly three million cast. It was November 30, four weeks after the election. But the race was still not over. 

State law granted the losing candidate a chance to request a manual recount if they were willing to pay for it up front. Gregoire’s campaign did exactly that, and over the month of December a series of small dramas played out as counties across the state hand-counted ballots.

“Elections just aren’t pretty when they’re close,” says Postman. “They’re not designed for looking at every single document.”

In one instance, King County Councilmember Larry Phillips, a Democrat, realized that his personal ballot had been mistakenly ruled invalid, leading to the discovery of hundreds of apparently uncounted votes. This caused Washington State Republicans to claim that King County—in particular its elections director, Dean Logan—was trying to steal the race for Gregoire. Even decades later, Logan’s name still invokes scorn among certain Washington conservatives. 

Lawsuits were thrown around like confetti at a nonexistent campaign victory party. The secretary of state at the time, Sam Reed, was a Republican. He was sued by both state parties. “I couldn’t win one way or another,” he said years afterward in a documentary.  

But ultimately, the manual recount found Gregoire ahead by 129 votes. The results were certified. Gregoire was inaugurated on January 12, 2005. “We can build the strength of the center of our political spectrum—that ground where left and right converge and move forward,” she said in her speech. 

But days earlier, Rossi had filed another lawsuit in Chelan County Superior Court seeking to nullify the election results. Gregoire launched her administration with the uneasy knowledge that if Rossi’s suit were successful her tenure would be cut short and a new election would be called. 

In May 2005, the Washington political establishment and media, local and national, descended on Wenatchee. Both parties assembled superstar teams of attorneys; one of Gregoire’s lawyers was future US Attorney and Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan. The candidates, meanwhile, remained in what the Seattle Times described as a “strange limbo,” with Rossi haunting the halls of his empty headquarters, and Gregoire governing—at least for the moment.

At the time, GOP lawyers claimed that they had filed the lawsuit in Chelan County because the electoral problems they were arguing about had been most prevalent in Western Washington. But Democrats said it was clear that the Republicans were just seeking a friendlier, more conservative venue.

 If conservative was what they wanted, they may have been surprised at the first sight of Judge John Bridges, who wore a diamond stud in his left ear. But Bridges was widely considered an independent thinker: quiet, fair, and respectful.

“He is a very thoughtful, very thorough judge,” Clyde Ballard, a former Republican state House speaker from Wenatchee, told the Associated Press before the trial. “He really makes decisions that are generally thought to be good, legal decisions.... He’s right down the line.”

During the trial, Rossi’s team initially threw out bold accusations. “This is not just a case of sloppy,” said attorney Dale Foreman in his opening statement. “This is a case of election fraud.” 

At times, the trial was emotionally charged. At others, it was highly technical. But it was never boring. After all, how often does an entire gubernatorial election come down to a decision in a small-town courtroom?

“I loved it,” says Postman, who was in Wenatchee for the Seattle Times, publishing online dispatches straight from the gallery. “It was just one of the greatest stories ever to cover.”

Bridges allowed a wide breadth of evidence to be admitted, anticipating that, regardless of the outcome, his verdict would be appealed to the state supreme court. The legal arguments came down to questions of incompetence, particularly in King County; individual instances of felons and dead people voting; and a series of technical mathematical claims about whether certain proportions of the vote should be discounted. Each side brought out their own professor from the political science department at the University of Washington for the stats stuff. 

In the end, after each candidate’s team made their argument, county by county, ballot by ballot, Bridges read a long, detailed decision for the court. He sharply criticized the conduct of local elections offices and the state of Washington’s elections administration, but he dismissed Rossi’s case and upheld the election result—in fact, adding four votes to Gregoire’s total margin of victory. To overturn the result based on the evidence presented, Bridges said, “would constitute the ultimate act of judicial egotism and judicial activism which neither the voters for Mr. Rossi or for Ms. Gregoire should condone.”

That same day, Rossi announced his concession. There would be no appeal. 

Rossi and his camp said it was because the liberal makeup of the state supreme court would have made an appeal pointless. Vance, the then-Republican chair, believed that continuing the legal fight also would have hurt Rossi’s chances in a rematch. 

But Vance’s counterpart, the former Democratic chair Berendt, says the Rossi campaign just didn’t have a case. After all, they had gone across the state in search of a more friendly venue for their case, and still come up short. 

“They threw a bunch of cow dung against the wall hoping something would stick,” he says.

Twenty years later, it’s hard to guess at what would be more unfathomable: a candidate who lost by a mere 133 votes, out of millions, giving up on their legal challenge before it reached the US Supreme Court, or a Republican coming that close to winning the governorship in Washington. 

After all, Loren Culp refused to concede his 2020 loss to Jay Inslee, despite a margin of 545,177 votes. Donald Trump refused to concede his loss to Joe Biden in the presidential election that year as well. That kind of behavior didn’t occur to Rossi’s campaign or the party at the time, says Vance, who has since left the GOP. But that didn’t mean people weren’t angry.

“There were people who contacted me saying we are ready to, you know, take to the streets with guns, we are ready to go, we’re ready to fight it, just say the word,” says Vance. “I would never contemplate that. It’s just wrong. I mean, it’s a basic sense of right and wrong here that Trump—that’s what he violated. Al Gore when he lost the court case in 2000, he conceded, as painful as that was, because that’s what you do. And so, you know, I don’t want to pat us on the back and say, we’re so wonderful. Because that’s like, taking credit for getting up in the morning. Back then it was just, that’s what you do.”

Many Democrats, of course, believed that the entire lawsuit was frivolous from the start. 

Despite a couple of relatively close gubernatorial races in 2008 and 2012, the conditions that made it possible for a candidate like Rossi to come so close in 2004 have largely disappeared: in part because of the growth of Seattle relative to the rest of the state, and in part because of the way partisan politics have become so nationalized. 

The era was “the last of the good old days” for the Washington State Republican Party, says Vance.

That year, even as John Kerry defeated George Bush in Washington, Rossi ran to essentially a tie in the governor’s race. McKenna won for AG. Republicans won for land commissioner, secretary of state, and in the open Eighth Congressional District. 

It’s easy to wonder what would have happened had Rossi won—other than four or eight years of a Republican in the governor’s mansion, of course. But it’s hard to envision a world in which a Rossi governorship permanently upended the trends that have turned Washington bluer than ever. 

Even the lands commissioner race this year—in which Democrats were nearly shut out from the general election ballot—was muddied up by a field in which the five Democratic candidates combined to take nearly 60 percent of the total vote.

From a certain perspective, the 2004 race was proof that the system, flawed and ugly as it was, actually worked. Washington’s electoral system and legal system survived the closest race in US history intact. The candidates and state parties acted relatively civilly, within the bounds of the law. Then, in the aftermath, the state made tangible changes to improve its elections going forward—just as Judge Bridges had implored. 

“One of the things we learned in 2004 is that you have to be very accurate,” Kim Wyman, a Republican who served as Washington’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2021, said in a 2020 interview with the New Yorker. “You have to be able to, at the end of the election, account for every single ballot that was returned and be able to tell a voter whether or not it was counted. And if it was rejected, why it was rejected.”

In 2005, the state legislature permitted counties to move to vote-by-mail elections. And by 2011, the entire state had adopted the system. “We realized we couldn’t do both kinds of elections well,” said Wyman in the interview. As Washington goes to the polls for another open governor’s race in 2024, that might be the biggest legacy of the 2004 election—not who we voted for that year, but how we will vote in this one.