Pridemore regrouping after loss in state auditor race

One week after getting eliminated in the state auditor race, state Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver, said he wasn’t sure yet what his future will hold.

The senator’s term is up at the end of this year. Rather than run for re-election, he decided to file to run for state auditor, but he lost in the Aug. 7 top-two primary election. He faced one Republican and two Democratic opponents.

“I’ve intentionally avoided thinking about it the past week,” Pridemore told me in an email on Tuesday after I asked him what his future plans might be. “I’m still moving out of my Seattle apartment and getting my life back together.”

One of the first things Pridemore plans to do is take a break to regroup.

“I haven’t had any real time off since November and am planning to take the rest of this month to get caught up with things,” he wrote, adding that he didn’t have any future plans yet.

Prior to becoming a politician, Pridemore was an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army and a finance manager for the Clark County Department of Public Works.

Pridemore was elected to the Washington state Senate in 2004, and he served as a Clark County commissioner from 1999 to 2004. He chairs the Senate’s Government Operations, Tribal Relations and Elections Committee and the Joint Legislative Audit Review Committee.

Had it been up to Clark County, Pridemore would have advanced to the Nov. 6 general election. In the county alone, he received 36 percent of the vote, while Republican James Watkins got nearly 49 percent, state Rep. Troy Kelley, D-Tacoma, got more than 10 percent, and state Rep. Mark Miloscia, D-Federal Way, got more than 4 percent.

Statewide, however, Watkins and Kelley were the top two vote getters, squeezing Pridemore and Miloscia out of the race.

“While I’ll abide by the time-honored profession of never saying ‘never,’ at the present time I can’t imagine a time when I would consider running for public office again,” Pridemore said.