Christine Gregoire
Christine Gregoire is an American attorney and politician who served as the 22nd governor of Washington, from 2005 to 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, she defeated Republican candidate Dino Rossi in 2004 and 2008, the first of which was the closest gubernatorial election in the history of Washington. She was Washington’s second female governor. Gregoire served as chair of the National Governors Association from 2010 to 2011. She also served on the governors' council of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Gregoire was also the Attorney General of Washington from 1993 until 2005, and is the first and only woman to serve in that role. As of April 2025, she is also the oldest living former Governor of Washington, following the death of Daniel Evans in September of 2024.
Early life, education, and legal career
Gregoire was born in Adrian, Michigan but was raised in Auburn, Washington, by her mother, Sybil Grace Jacobs, who worked as a short-order cook. After graduating from Auburn Senior High School, she attended the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts in speech and sociology. At UW, she became a member of the Sigma Iota chapter of the Kappa Delta sorority. She then attended Gonzaga University School of Law in Spokane, receiving her Juris Doctor in 1977.Gregoire went to work as an assistant attorney general in the office of State Attorney General Slade Gorton, a Republican. As an assistant attorney general, Gregoire concentrated on child-abuse cases, coordinating with social workers to get children removed from abusive family situations and placed with relatives or foster homes, and was later appointed as the first female Deputy Attorney General. In 1988, at the end of his first term as governor of Washington, Booth Gardner appointed Gregoire director of the Washington Department of Ecology. During her tenure, Gregoire worked with Gardner to reach an agreement with the federal government to clean up nuclear waste at the Hanford nuclear site.
Director of the Department of Ecology
Gregoire served four years as director before running for attorney general in 1992. During her tenure, she oversaw the creation of the Pacific States/British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force. Following an oil spill off the coast of Washington and British Columbia involving the barge Nestucca, Gregoire coordinated with the Canadian government to form a task force to handle concerns West Coast citizens had surrounding oil transportation.Hanford Cleanup
While at the Department of Ecology, Gregoire worked with Gardner and representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy to coordinate efforts on the Hanford Site cleanup. Known by many names, including the Hanford Project, Hanford Works, Hanford Engineer Works, and Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the nuclear facility along the Columbia River in Benton County produced plutonium. The site, established in 1943 to provide support for the Manhattan Project, operated from World War II through the Cold War. Decades of production of plutonium resulted in millions of gallons of high-level radioactive waste.In 1989, the Washington State Department of Ecology along with the EPA and the US Department of Energy entered into the Tri-Party Agreement, which sets targets, or milestones, for cleanup.
Centennial Accord
Following the contentious US v Washington case related to Native American fishing rights, commonly known as the “Boldt Decision,” Gardner undertook to build more lasting, friendly relationships with Washington's Native American tribes. The Accord served to bring parties to the table to negotiate their shared interests. Gregoire played a principal role in helping reach agreements about the natural resource distribution between the tribes and the state.Attorney General of Washington
Gregoire was elected attorney general in 1992 by 11 percentage points over her opponent, Norm Maleng, an attorney who served and was reelected seven times as King County prosecutor. She was Washington's first and only female attorney general. Gregoire was reelected in 1996 and 2000, both times over Richard Pope, by about 25 and 18 percentage points respectively.As attorney general, Gregoire worked on children's issues, helped reform the juvenile system, passed a new ethics law for state government, strengthened rights for victims of identity theft, and worked to find alternatives to litigation in resolving legal disputes.
Tobacco master settlement agreement
During Gregoire's second term as attorney general, the tobacco industry was under fire for alleged fraudulent marketing, negligent advertising, and violation of several state consumer protection statutes. Multiple private suits stemming from a 1950s study in the British Medical Journal linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. Attorneys General on June 20, 1997, led by Gregoire negotiated a settlement that required tobacco companies to pay more than $206 billion over 25 years in reimbursements to the states for tax dollars spent to treat Medicaid patients for smoking-related illnesses. The companies also agreed to pay $50 million to national attorneys general for enforcement.These payments funded children's health services and programs and a $25 billion trust for health-related issues. For her leading role in the litigation, Gregoire won the state of Washington a $4.5 billion share of the settlement over the next 25 years with the payments continuing in perpetuity. Gregoire and Governor Gary Locke asked the legislature to reserve portions of the settlement for restitution to the state and to establish a special account to finance a long-term tobacco prevention and control program. The account would be used to pay for anti-tobacco advertising and education, accessible cessation programs, and other activities.
In March 1999, Gregoire announced that Washington would receive at least an additional $394.9 million in settlement payments from the major tobacco companies.
Other portions of the agreement included enforcement of laws against tobacco sales to children, broad-based smoking prevention strategies, smoking cessation programs, full disclosure of tobacco's health effects, and preservation of an individual's right to sue the tobacco companies.
Governor of Washington (2005–2013)
2004 gubernatorial election
Gregoire defeated Ron Sims and four other minor candidates in the Democratic primary election on September 14, 2004. She had come under fire during the primary for her membership in Kappa Delta because of its nonwhite membership policy in the late 1960s. She clashed with Sims over her position at the sorority, but Sims dropped the issue and dismissed any claims of racism. Sims campaigned on tax reform and the institution of a statewide income tax. Gregoire won the primary with over 60% of the vote.During the general election against former state senator and real estate agent Dino Rossi, Gregoire proposed a major initiative in life sciences, especially by increasing state funding for embryonic stem cell research. In debates, she tried to counter voter unease about the state government by saying she would "blow past the bureaucracy" and bring change herself. Gregoire won the backing of the legislature within six months after pushing through a number of important measures on car emission standards and unemployment benefits.
The election was held on November 2, 2004, with the initial count showing Gregoire trailing Rossi by 261 votes. A legally mandated machine recount reduced that lead to only 42 votes, then a hand count requested and funded by the state's Democratic Party gave Gregoire a 10-vote lead. Following a State Supreme Court ruling that allowed several hundred ballots from King County to be included, her lead further increased to 130 votes, but when the vote was certified by the state's Secretary of State, Sam Reed, at the end of December, one vote that had been counted in Thurston County past the deadline was disqualified and her lead was reduced to 129 votes. Washington's Republican leadership then filed suit, claiming that hundreds of votes, including votes by felons, deceased voters, and double voters, had been counted, but on June 6, 2005, Judge John E. Bridges ruled that the Republican Party had not provided enough evidence that the disputed votes were ineligible—or for whom they were cast—to overturn the election.
On October 28, 2004, the Seattle Times reported that out-of-state donors were contributing heavily to Gregoire's campaign. Trial lawyers who had worked closely with Gregoire on the 1998 tobacco settlement gave the Democratic Governors Association more than $1,000,000. According to the Times's analysis, nearly half of Gregoire's 2004 campaign contributions came from out of state.
2008 gubernatorial election
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton heavily lobbied Gregoire for her endorsement as a superdelegate.Gregoire officially endorsed Obama on February 8, 2008, hours before an event at KeyArena in Seattle where she introduced him before a crowd of 18,000 people. The Washington caucuses were held the next day; Obama beat Clinton in every county.
Gregoire began her reelection campaign at her late mother's former employer, the Rainbow Café in Auburn, Washington, on April 7, 2008. Immediately after her announcement, she began a biodiesel bus tour of the state. Her opponent in the race, Dino Rossi, had announced his candidacy in October 2007.
Gregoire and Rossi fast approached fundraising records early in their campaigns. In April, Gregoire hosted a fundraiser with Bill Richardson at the Seattle Westin that netted the campaign over $300,000. In July, she held another large fundraiser with Michelle Obama at the WaMu Theater, with 1,600 attendees raising over $400,000.
The Seattle Times reported that Gregoire gave cost-of-living increases to state employees who hadn't received raises in "many years", and funded voter-approved initiatives to raise the pay of teachers, all groups that gave money to her 2004 recount campaign.
Gregoire won Washington's first ever top two primary on August 19, 2008, with 49% of the vote. She advanced to the general election against Rossi. The general election was expected to be close, but Gregoire benefited from large turnout among Democrats to vote for Obama in the concurrent presidential election and won with 53% of the vote. There was a marked geographical split in the 2008 election: the more populous and Democratic-leaning Western Washington counties supported Gregoire, while the less populous and more Republican-leaning Eastern Washington counties supported Rossi.