Slade Gorton, Who Was Voted Out of Senate and Then Back In, Dies at 92

Slade Gorton, a Washington Republican who in three nonconsecutive terms in the Senate championed his state’s logging, aviation and technology industries and feuded with Native American tribes over fishing rights and sovereignty in the casino age, died on Wednesday at his daughter Sarah’s home in the Seattle area. He was 92.

J. Vander Stoep, who served as Mr. Gorton’s chief of staff in the Senate, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In his interrupted Senate service, from 1981 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 2001, Mr. Gorton achieved a little-noticed distinction: He was one of only 16 senators in history to win the office back after having been turned out by the electorate. (Senators have been directly elected by voters only since 1914, when a constitutional amendment removed that power from the various state legislatures.)

First elected on the coattails of Ronald Reagan’s presidential landslide in 1980, Mr. Gorton became known as a “giant killer” for upsetting Senator Warren G. Magnuson, a 75-year-old Democratic institution who began his congressional career during the Depression and ended it as the Senate’s senior member.