Last week our state had its primaries. Like in other places, the media has been projecting Doom and Gloom onto Democrats here for months, both at the state and Federal levels. Seems like the outcome is much closer to the opposite of that. I won’t write about State legislature since I haven’t delved into these races; but for an overall impression, I’ll take our Dem party state chair’s word.
WA is a vote-by-mail state, so results are notoriously drifty. As long as the margin is single-digits on election night, hold on to your beer! In particular, Greater Seattle region lefties like voting last-moment (guilty as charged), leading to some acrobatic progressive “comeback” victories, most famously by socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant who’s turned it into an art form (she wasn’t on the ballot now; city elections are stupidly an odd-year affair).
Oh! another important detail. Not only are we vote-by-mail, but our primaries are of the “Jungle” top-2 type. So Laws of Unintended Consequences usually fall upon the unwary, in at least one race each cycle.
Anyway… now 6 days after the last ballots were mailed back, the picture is clear enough to start calling the close races. Bottom line? Plenty of Dem enthusiasm, and lots of circular fire squads over on the GQP side, which might enable Team Blue to go from a 7:3 U.S. House delegation to 8:2, touch wood.
Below some details about the U.S. Senate and 3 key U.S. House races. The full official (but still interim) Federal results are here.
quick one on the u.s. Senate race
For whatever reason, some people thought that kick-ass U.S. Senator Patty Murray was “vulnerable”. But despite having no less than (checks notes) 17 challengers including at least 5 from the left, after 6 days of counting she’s sitting at nearly 53%. Her main GQP challenger whose campaign has already dumped $5 *Million*, got only 33.5%. Barring some major negative discovery about this well-known, admired public servant and committee chair who’s served in the Senate for 30 years, let’s cross that one off our watch/worry list and move on.
disaster averted in wa-04
It might be a strictly numerical coincidence that 2 of our 3 GQP U.S. House members actually cast the bravest anti-Q vote they could have made, joining Dems in that 2nd impeachment vote that would have rendered Trump ineligible to run for office again. But I’m still proud of them for that. Reminder: only 10 Republicans voted with Dems in 2021’s House impeachment vote.
Trump being Trump, he’s been chomping at the bit to get revenge on all 10, endorsing whatever scrap metal can be found to run against the incumbents. The scariest piece of work in our parts was probably in WA-04, our reddest district (PVI R+13). The incumbent Dan Newhouse is a pretty hardline conservative himself — however, the type of conservative with more integrity and genuine patriotism than ~200 of his fellow GQP House members who voted to keep Trump in office and in our politics. So of course, Newhouse had to be made to pay.
Trump picked his biggest fanboy in the state, Loren Culp — a failed two-bit town police chief, and actually the GQP’s last nominee for Governor in 2020. It stands to WA Republican voters’ eternal shame, that this useless heap of malice, incompetence, and conspiracy theories, got 43.12% of the total vote in November 2020 — 1.75 million people in our supposedly enlightened state voted for him.
So Culp had name recognition, bragging rights, Trump behind him, and a blood-red district (at least by Left Coast standards). Had Culp beaten Newhouse, the Dem candidate would stand no chance in the General. Even worse, Newhouse and Culp could have ended 1-2, completely shutting us out of the final round, which did happen in WA-04 a few cycles back.
Drumroll… as of Monday night, Newhouse is first with 25.5%, Democrat Doug White 2nd with 25.2%, and Culp 3rd with 21.3%. In this race the margins have hardly moved since Election Day, so it’s a done deal.
Newhouse is a likely shoo-in for reelection, which all things considered is the least evil outcome here. Unless — unless Trump gets his flock to actually boycott the General election! I’ve seen weirder things happen in recent years.
an opening to reclaim wa-03
WA has a “bipartisan” redistricting committee. I much prefer *nonpartisan* ones, because the former tend to cut horse-trading deals that leave voters less empowered with too many safe districts. In 2010 we got our 10th seat, and in exchange for making it pretty safely D, Dems agreed to move the state’s two swingiest districts (03 and 08) a bit to the right. This has made the life of then-freshman Rep. Jamie Herrera-Beutler (R) much easier. On paper it is still our 2nd-closest district (PVI R+4), but Herrera-Beutler had gained in popularity rather quickly, and the closest she got to being unseated was a 5% margin in 2018.
Then came January 6 and Herrera-Beutler was indeed the other WA Republican to vote to impeach. Unlike Newhouse, she’s been cultivating the image of a moderate — and seems to be a genuine one on many topics — and had taken other key votes against Trump over the years. Remember what I wrote about WA’s GQP voters? Well, if the 43% for Culp in 2020 was Exhibit A, then last week’s WA-03 primaries are Exhibit B, testament that the rot and sickness are only metastasizing with time.
Coming into the primaries, Herrera-Beutler picked up two high-profile, totally nutcase challengers: Trump-backed ex-soldier Joe Kent, and Christian motivational author Heidy St. John. They were so evenly matched, that the Seattle Times — never too slow to jump on a bad hot take when it sees one — declared Herrera-Beutler “saved” by their vote-splitting, because on Election Night she was ~4% ahead of her nearest GQP challenger. But fast-forward 6 days, and we have…
- Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — 31%
- GQP, Trump endorsee Joe Kent — 22.8%
- R, incumbent Jamie Herrera-Beutler — 22.3%
- GQP, starry-eyed culture warrior Heidi St. John — 16%
Dave Wasserman just called the #2 spot for Joe Kent. Jamie Herrera-Beutler is out.
Kent’s candidate statement is among the most extreme I’ve read this cycle from viable candidates, far more extreme than e.g., Loren Culp who had learned since 2020 to how to make semi-palatable word salads. Here are some nuggets from Kent’s statement: (emphases mine)
...I’m endorsed by President Trump, Loren Culp, Lars Larson, and Gen. Michael Flynn.
My priorities are: ...investigating the 2020 general election, election integrity laws and impeaching Biden and Harris immediately…. and enacting an America First economic agenda…
Like many of you, I’ve voted for Jaime Herrera Beutler before, but her betrayal of our conservative values compelled me to run against her. She voted with the Democrats to impeach President Trump, halt construction of the border wall, give 1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood, and enact “Red Flag” laws that take away 2nd Amendment rights. …. and, most recently, to send $53 billion of your money to Ukraine.
Kent’s dramatic personal tragedy (which of course, he does mention in his statement) has likely touched GQP voter hearts. His late wife, also a soldier, was killed in Syria in 2019 — a death for which in Kent’s books Trump, already 2 years in power at the time and responsible for horrendous escalation and chaos in Syria, emerges scot-free. Instead, Congress is somehow to blame.
Bottom line: this is now an open seat in a swingy district. The >60% shared among the top 3 R candidates might seem formidable, but this was an August primary hotly contested on their end. It remains to be seen, e.g., whether Herrera-Beutler endorses anyone here. It’ll be an uphill battle, but with a likable, anti-Establishment female Dem candidate vs. the blatantly hyper-extremist and inexperienced Kent, it seems eminently more winnable.
smoother sailing in wa-08?
Last but not least, the state’s swingiest district (PVI 0). Sophmore Rep. Dr. Kim Schrier, the first Democrat in WA-08’s 40-year history, successfully defended her 2018 Blue Wave seat in the surprisingly challenging 2020 environment. Much of the 2022 mainstream Doom+Gloom was focusing on WA-08 being supposedly “a bridge too far” to defend this time…
Enter last week’s primaries and a totally splintered R/GQP electorate in this vast suburb-exurb-boonies territory. As of Monday night we’re seeing:
- D, incumbent Kim Schrier — 47.9%
- R/GQP(?) Matt Larkin — 17%
- R/Establishment Reagan Dunn — 14.5%
- R/GQP(?) Jesse Jensen — 12.9%
Dunn had by far the most political experience and name recognition. His mom actually held that seat in the 90’s and early 00’s, and he’s been a King County council member for over a decade. At least to me his defeat seems a shock. The #2 winner Matt Larkin is a near-complete unknown. He tried to run for state attorney general in 2020 under a [cough cough, Trump race-baiting]“Law-and-Order” banner, and made it to the final round against incumbent star Ken Ferguson, then getting a Culp-like 43.5% share of the vote. Still, this is his only recorded political experience. A near-complete unknown and likely more extreme than Dunn. Surely too extreme for this district. Even though Larkin’s statement is more guarded than Joe Kent’s, he still shares with us his goal to “Make Crime Illegal Again”. Whatever that means.
Rep. Schrier’s re-election work seems quite a bit easier to me this week than it seemed last week. And this, before factoring in that she’s one of very few female physicians in Congress, in an election when Roe is definitely on the national ballot.
What do you think? Feel free to voice out in the comments. Thank you!