- CROCKER "I am not prepared to cede our state government to cynics and Republicans."
"Working on my bio for my new campaign website, I can't say I'm married," Crocker says. Colloquially, she tells people she's married to her domestic partner of 28 years, who together have raised two college-age daughters in northeast Seattle. If Referendum 74 passes, Crocker explains, "We would really like to get married." But that is beside the point for Crocker, 49, who is all business and smart budgets—two things Democrats in Olympia need in spades.
Crocker is a lawyer.
After two decades of legal practice, including years at the corporate firm Perkins Coie, which she left to start two of her own law firms representing small businesses and individuals, Crocker wants to take her experience to the state house. Today Crocker is announcing that she's running for an open seat in the 46th District that Representative Phyllis Kenney will vacate when she retires this year. Just since announcing her intentions to run in an email sent to friends and family on Friday night, Crocker has raised a stunning $10,000.
The question is, what would Crocker take to Olympia?
Crocker is easily cast as a local version of Elizabeth Warren, the dynamite Democratic attorney running for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts on a platform of bankruptcy expertise, taxation reform, and mortgage advocacy for the underdog. Likewise, Crocker's law practice is in bankruptcy cases—she left her high-paying Perkins Coie job to make considerably less representing insolvency cases for small businesses and homeowners—and she says that gives her an advantage tackling the state's budget problems. "What I bring is a combination of a deep concern about social-safety-net issues and poverty issues, coupled with business sense, and an ability to understand budgets to make them work," she says.
Of course, like Crocker, plenty of Democrats have lamented the annual cuts to the safety net and the gutting of education. But that entails diving into the messy, complicated, unsexy issue of generating new revenue. No one has done it before, so how she can pick that lock?
"Dare I say tax reform?" Crocker asks rhetorically. ("I hoped you would," I replied.) "I think tax reform is the thing that everybody knows is going to have to be done, but how that gets done in the face of remarkable success of Tim Eyman in the state is a problem that has not been solved yet."
"Why would you be any more successful?" I asked. "No other Democrat has."
"That is why I’m tentative about it," Crocker continues. "Does that mean we quit? That is where I am coming from—a lot of people have said, 'I don’t want to do that, it looks too hard. It doesn't look fun at all in Olympia. It is too dysfunctional.' That kind of cynicism has taken over in some circles. And progressives are not less cynical than others. But I am not prepared to cede our state government to cynics and Republicans."
Crocker has a long record of homeless advocacy. Among other posts, she serves currently on the board of Building Change, a brain trust consortium that advised homeless advocacy groups. And she has the early endorsement of City Attorney Pete Holmes.
Crocker faces two Democratic challengers (in a district that is all but certain to elect a Democrat this November), and one is particularity formidable: Jessyn Farrell, the former director of the Transportation Choices Coalition, has strong ties to lawmakers from years of advocacy in Olympia and is taking strategic advice from consultant Christian Sinderman, a man known for picking well-heeled winners. Perhaps less formidably, 46th District activist Sarajane Siegfriedt has also tossed her hat in the ring.
