Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)

U.S. Senator (since January 2001)

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Getty Images)

Why She Matters

Cantwell arrived on Capitol Hill as a U.S. Representative serving Washington state's 1st district; she was the first Democrat in 40 years to do so. Her time there, however, was short-lived when she was defeated in 1994, after just one term, by Republican Rick White. Returning to Washington state, she entered the private sector where she joined an Internet start-up called Progressive Networks, which later became RealNetworks.

Aided by the Dotcom bubble, Cantwell's earnings during this period were significant, with some estimates of her wealth at the time reaching $40 million. But that largesse has been significantly diminished since the Internet bubble burst around the time of Cantwell's first Senate campaign in 2000.

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Background

At a Glance

Career History: Washington State House, (1986-1992); U.S. Representative (1992-1994); Entrepreneur and businesswoman at RealNetworks (1995-1999)
Birthday: Oct. 13, 1958
Hometown: Indianapolis, Ind.
Alma Mater: Miami University (Ohio), B.A. 1980
Spouse: Single
Religion: Roman Catholic
Committees: Commerce; Energy and Natural Resources; Finance; Indian Affairs; Small Business and Entrepreneurship

DC Office: 511 Dirksen Senate Office Building ,a(R)202-224-3441
State/District Office: State/Disctrict Office...
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Path to Power

Cantwell grew up in Indianapolis, Ind. Her father, Paul Cantwell, was active in local politics working as county commissioner, city councilman and state legislator.

The first in her family to graduate from college, Cantwell graduated from Miami University (Ohio) in 1980 and went to work for Jerry Springer's (D) 1982 gubernatorial campaign. When the controversial TV-host Springer mulled a run for Ohio senator in 2003, Cantwell went on record supporting Springer: "I think people will be surprised by his intellect. There's much more to him than his TV show."

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After working for Springer in 1982, Cantwell moved on to Sen. Alan Cranston's (D-Calif.) 1984 presidential campaign where she was sent to Seattle to set up a regional campaign office. While Cranston's political aspirations fizzled, Cantwell's were just taking off. Taken with the Pacific Northwest, she decided to make it home, moving to a suburb north of Seattle. After dabbling in community involvement, she was elected to the Washington House in 1986, at just 28 years old.

U.S. House

Cantwell served just six years in the state House before running for the U.S. Congress. In 1992, she ran for the 1st Congressional district, an area in the northwest part of the state separated through the middle by the Puget Sound.

Though Republicans held the seat for over 40 years, Cantwell defeated her opponent by a wide 55% to 42% margin. While in the House, she often parted ways with Democrats, failing to support then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's health-care initiative, but strongly supported abortion rights and environmental causes. Cantwell's positions were unpopular by the end of her first term and she narrowly lost re-election by 4% of the vote to White in a year when Republicans retook the House for the first time in four decades.

Real Networks

After her 1994 House defeat, Cantwell moved back to Washington state and joined a burgeoning new start-up that would become RealNetworks, an Internet company that specialized in audio and visual software. Riding the Dotcom boom in the early 1990s, Cantwell's net worth soared. By 1999, her stock was estimated to be worth $40 million, and she was in a new position to return to politics.

U.S. Senate

In the fall of 1999, Cantwell decided to square off against the Republican incumbent in the Washington Senate, Slade Gorton. Liquidating more than $5.6 million of RealNetwork stock and borrowing against $3.8 million more, she faced off with Deborah Senn, her main competition in the Democratic primary. Senn, who had a reputation as liberal, was no match for the more moderate Cantwell and her fiscal advantage. Cantwell won the primary, and went on to face Gorton in the general.

In a year infamous for a close election for the presidency, Cantwell and Gorton's contest was the equivalent Senate nail-biter. Though Gorton led on election night, his edge was slim and 54% of the votes came from absentee ballots. After three weeks of counting, Gorton held the lead, but the late votes from the liberal- leaning King County put Cantwell over the top. A recount was mandated by state law and confirmed Cantwell's victory by a margin of just 1,953 votes out of 2.5 million cast. The loss was a major blow for national Republicans as it made the Senate evenly divided at 50-50 with the vice-president as the tie-breaking vote.

During the campaign, however, the Dotcom bubble started to burst. In 2000 alone, Cantwell saw her RealNetwork stock drop from $96 to $10-a-share. By spring 2001, RealNetworks stock was worth $6- a- share, and Cantwell was forced to negotiate another loan to pay down her campaign debt.

She also came under fire from the Federal Election Commission for failing to disclose lines of credit during her campaign. A fervent advocate of campaign-finance reform, Cantwell continued to refuse political-action committee donations, but still managed to raise $16.8 million from Democrats and lobbyists by the end of 2004.

The Issues

Though she has occasionally carved out conservative stances on some foreign policy (her vote for the Iraq war in 2002) and economics issues (her attempts to allow Washington residents to deduct their state sales tax from their income tax), Cantwell's stance on social issues has been overwhelmingly liberal.

In the 109th Congress, she voted to fund stem-cell research, raise the minimum wage and provide rights for alleged terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay. She voted against the Supreme Court appointment of Justice Samuel Alito, against the ban on same-sex marriage and against limits to women traveling across state lines to receive abortions. Like other Democrats who had initially voted for the Iraq war, by 2006 Cantwell had altered her position and voted to urge U.S. troop withdrawal.

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Though she won election to the Senate by a narrow margin in 2000, her positions during her freshman term seem to largely reflect those of her constituents. In the 111th Congress, she voted with her fellow Democrats 93.7% of the time.

The Environment

Cantwell had always focused on environmental issues. But in 2005, she stepped up her activities after attaching a measure to the Surface Transportation Act to require the Environmental Protection Agency to update its fuel-economy testing. But Cantwell's biggest recent environmental battle was over opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling.

It was over ANWR that Cantwell first went head- to-head with powerful former Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), a staunch supporter of drilling in the refuge. With much of Alaska's raw materials -- fish, crude oil and ore -- sent to Washington for processing, the two states often had competing, but complimentary interests. When Cantwell attempted to eliminate language about ANWR from the 2005 budget reconciliation bill, Stevens struck back with a bill to expand oil-tanker traffic in Seattle's Puget Sound -- a move that was undone when it was revealed that Stevens had been in cahoots with British Petroleum, one of his contributors, to expand its market in the Sound. ANWR is still a controversial issue, with many Republicans, and some Democrats, still pushing to allow oil drilling there, especially in the face of record energy prices in summer 2008.

In December 2005, Cantwell staged a second battle against the GOP's most senior senator when she narrowly blocked Republicans from attaching an ANWR drilling measure to a defense-spending bill. As Cantwell approached re-election in 2006, her conflicts with Stevens gave her high-credibility among the green-minded Democrats in the Pacific Northwest. "Cantwell never had it so good until she had it so bad with Stevens," quipped a local Seattle columnist in January of 2006.

Campaign Finance

Cantwell has a long history supporting campaign finance reform, stretching back to her initial run for the Senate. Her support for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that banned soft money was a major platform of her 2000 campaign, when she refused to accept PAC or soft money. But instead, Cantwell spent several millions out of her own pocket to fund her bid.

The Federal Election Commission, however, didn't look as favorably on how Cantwell funded her PAC-free candidacy. In 2004, the FEC ruled that Cantwell violated campaign-finance law by failing to disclose the terms of the loans negotiated in her 2000 Senate campaign that used her RealNetwork stock as collateral -- a value that plummeted along with the Dotcom economy. With her net worth severely diminished, Cantwell re-negotiated her loans and accepted contributions from individual lobbyists and Democratic donors -- though still turned down PAC money. The majority of Cantwell's debt was paid off by her run for re-election in 2006.

The Economy

In February 2009, Cantwell voted for Obama's stimulus plan, encouraged that the plan would invest in green technology and energy. "I look at it as a big, big, big opportunity," Cantwell said to a Washington state paper in early April. "Energy is a $6 trillion market. By comparison, the Internet was $1 trillion."

In fall 2008, Cantwell voted against the financial bailout formulated by the Bush administration.

Health Care Reform

Cantwell supports reform with a public option that is included in the initial legislation without a trigger.

The Network

Cantwell occasionally teams with her fellow Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), like in 2006 when they worked together to reject a permanent estate-tax repeal.

In 2009, the two worked together to propose an amendment to the Senate's 2010 budget that would give Washingtonians a state sales tax deduction -- an issue Cantwell has been working on since 2003. Cantwell's positions on the environment put her at odds with former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska),who she battled with to prevent drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

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