Tony Ventrella: I honestly never thought that I’d win Congressional seat

Republican Dave Reichert was taking 58 percent of the vote in election results as of 11 a.m. Wednesday. Challenger Tony Ventrella was trailing behind his Republican opponent with about 42 percent.

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While most people on the south end of those numbers might be glum, that wasn’t the case for Ventrella Wednesday morning.

“When you lose an election it’s very depressing. Oh wait a second, I’m sorry, that’s the wrong script,” Ventrella told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “Hey, I’m doing great. It was a great experience. Congratulations to Dave.”

Ventrella, who announced he was ending his campaign in July, changed his mind and told KIRO Radio’s Seattle’s Morning News about a month later that he was resuming his campaign for the 8th Congressional District seat.

Ventrella made the decision to drop out before the primary election results were released. He ended up winning 17 percent of the vote, ahead of Reichert’s other challengers. He says he needed to resume his campaign, otherwise Reichert would be running unopposed.

The former sports broadcaster wanted to get big money out of politics and said he had a hard time calling people for money. Ultimately, he said he saw it as an “opportunity” and an “obligation.” He told Dori that he printed hundreds of signs and spent his only marketing money on social media.

“This is great, we raised less than $10,000 to run a congressional race against an incumbent who had $800,000 and we still got 42 percent of the vote,” he said. “I’m unhappy about that, not because it’s an ego thing but because it shows that it’s possible to run a campaign for certainly less than the $2 million that was spent in one of our state senate races and some of the other obscene amounts of money spent.”

Ventrella said he knew the race was over by about 9 p.m. Tuesday night and that he picked up campaign signs on the way home “so they don’t litter the landscape” for weeks.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m thrilled that I did it, and, frankly, I’m glad that it’s over.”

When asked if he ever felt optimistic about the possibility of winning, Ventrella responded “not really” and that he tried to stay realistic the whole time.

“My goal was to win, obviously, but I thought if I get 45 percent, that’ll be really good,” he said. “Well, we fell a little bit short of it with 42, but I honestly never thought that I would win. I was hoping to, I was into it. I was ready to serve. And people around me said, ‘Oh you’re gonna win, and everybody’s voting for you,’ and I’m going, ‘I don’t think everybody’s voting for me.’”

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