WOW. I guess the Washington punditocracy was completely wrong about McGavick. Seriously, Cantwell shouldn't have won in 2000 and is lucky that her strong opponent made a mistake with the DUI issue. Without the kerfuffle over the DUI, McGavick could've been within 3-4 points of Cantwell.
McGavick is not a particularly strong candidate. He is a respectable candidate, and the importance of that in Washington cannot be underscored. Politically, it's all about the east side of Lake Washington. Rossi was competitive because he pulled big margins in the area, which is known as the eastside. It's affluent, well-educated, and will vote for the Democrat unless there's a reason. In many ways, George W. Bush was the perfect awful candidate for the east side. He was just socially conservative enough, just unpolished enough, just everything enough, to make the area strongly Democratic.
But the area could flip back very easily. Rossi racked up decent margins there. Outside of the Seattle metro, Rossi didn't actually do much better than Bush. In many counties, he did worse. That's because he was a distinctly suburban candidate. And McGavick, a Seattle businessman, has the same problem. He needs to appeal to the suburbs, and the polls indicate he isn't. Gregoire was able to be pegged as establishment Olympia. It's harder to make Cantwell seem like anything but a suburban liberal (not a bad thing on the eastside, really). Rossi also was a lot more polished than McGavick is.
What's happening to McGavick is that he lost his fundamental suburban base, and then gained it back. But he hasn't gained the suburban swing voters. He briefly had some of them when he was down by only 3 or 4, but he may have permanently lost that possibility with the DUI issue. He isn't really all that likeable.
McGavick needs to make himself look personable and Cantwell unpersonable for this to even come close. At the moment, he's managed to save face. But making Cantwell look as bad as Rossi made Gregoire look is going to be difficult. McGavick would have to run a near-perfect campaign. Somehow, I have difficulties believing he will.
(For what it's worth, Cantwell has run not so much a bad campaign as a non-campaign. Her ads have been unspectacular and general. It's not that the campaign is awful, it's that it is bland. I don't expect this to last, although it's certainly doing her no favours now.)
