Republicans vying for McMorris Rodgers' seat make early pitches to their base

Mar. 9—Republicans hoping to win a coveted seat representing Eastern Washington in Congress have begun making early pitches to their base, trying to distinguish themselves through the force of their personalities, their records in office or their claim to be political outsiders, and in some cases their support for former President Donald Trump.

There has been a flurry of activity in Eastern Washington following the surprise announcement last month that longtime Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers will not seek re-election this year, creating a rare opening for a Republican political hopeful in Washington to seek higher office.

Though the filing deadline is two months away, seven Republican candidates have formally announced. Most had their first real opportunity to speak directly to members of their own party on March 2 as hundreds gathered for the Spokane County Republican Party Convention at Valley Assembly of God in Spokane Valley.

They all touched on the same top-line issues, including the U.S.-Mexico border and the Snake River dams, but most found ways to differentiate themselves.

Their ability to reach the crowd of party loyalists may prove to be an early sign of their viability as a candidate in an increasingly crowded field.

Michael Baumgartner

Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner, who introduced himself as a "recovering state senator," framed himself at the convention as the candidate with the most experience and longest record of political victories.

Baumgartner, who's known for his frequently divisive political humor, also made the most successful jokes that morning.

"If you were like me, growing up and going to church, listening to the gospel, and dreaming of one day being a tax collector, well, oh boy, I've achieved that dream," Baumgartner said.

He quickly added that the treasurer doesn't set tax rates, and noted that a large portion of taxes collected by his office are set by local voters.

"I don't know why you do that!" Baumgartner said. "Why do you vote yes on all of these bonds and levies? Tell your neighbors to stop raising our taxes!"

The Spokane County Republican Party this year campaigned against levies and bonds on the ballot in the Spokane, Central Valley and Mead school districts. Every bond in the county failed during the February special election, though this was a consistent pattern statewide.

Baumgartner said a candidate for this congressional seat needed to accomplish three things: defeat Democrats, "drain the swamp" and "make Eastern Washington great." He argued his record in Olympia proved he could do all three, pointing to his victory over an incumbent Democrat in his highly competitive state Senate campaign in 2010.

He highlighted his roots in Eastern Washington, his Harvard education — "not usually a big bonus when you're running in a Republican primary," he quipped — and his work in Iraq and Afghanistan as an officer in the State Department. Baumgartner praised former President Donald Trump's assassination of Qased Soleimani, the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

He also noted he met his wife, Eleanor, a British immigrant and former journalist, in Afghanistan.

"If anyone here doesn't believe in God or has a friend that doesn't believe in God, you tell him that Michael Baumgartner went to Afghanistan," he said. "And amongst the Taliban and the opium poppy fields, I met the love of my life, Eleanor. We fell in love amongst the bombs and bullets. We came home and have five beautiful children."

It was for those children that Baumgartner said he was running for Congress, repeating his election motif that the American dream is dying and that it needs to be saved for the sake of future generations.

Jonathan Bingle

Former pastor and Spokane City Councilman Jonathan Bingle seemed right at home on the church main stage, delivering a speech about his faith and "a battle for the soul of the United States" that got some of the longest applause of the morning.

"I'm running because I think it's OK to be a Christian, and I think you should be proud of the fact that God gave us certain mandates to live our life ... and it is not hateful, it is not bigoted, it is not mean for us to stand up for the things that we know to be true," he said.

"I'm running because I want my kids to grow up in a school system where they're not confusing them about their gender,. I'm running because I don't want my kids to be taken away from me if we say, 'That's not a boy, that's a girl,' and they consider that hate speech."

He told the crowd that he and his wife were told by doctors that they would be unable to have children. They now have three.

"We prayed and we wanted babies more than anything in the world, and I felt the Holy Spirit minister to me: You will have children, and they're going to come to you naturally," he said.

Bingle noted his Spokane roots, his family and the small businesses he founded, Bent Trivia and Bent Events. He said he was drawn into politics "earlier than I expected" in response to the difficulties his business experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which Bingle blamed on Gov. Jay Inslee's lockdown orders.

"We had every penny that we had ever had locked into that business, and with a swipe of a pen, it was stolen from me and my family," Bingle said.

Bingle's first attempt at elected office was a year before the pandemic began, when he ran in 2019 for Spokane mayor and came in fourth behind Nadine Woodward, who won, and Ben Stuckart, who was the City Council president. Bingle ran for office again in 2021, this time winning a seat on the City Council.

Bingle noted that he didn't get vaccinated against COVID-19 and refused to wear a mask in City Hall after he was sworn in as a council member.

"When I got into City Council, I was censured in my first month because I refused to wear a mask at City Hall," he said to particularly loud applause. "They threatened me with $14,000 a day in fines, and we did not relent."

Some council members called for Bingle to be locked out of City Hall, in part because a violation of the state mask order could be met with fines by the Washington Department of Labor and Industries. Bingle claimed in a Wednesday interview that city officials had said they could pass the fine onto him because he was knowingly violating the mandate.

Terri Cooper

Medical Lake Mayor Terri Cooper, who has served in that position since 2021, opened her speech by saying she was not a politician.

"I ran for mayor because I saw some problems, and I was raised that way by my military father — if you see a problem, you find a solution and you go about fixing it," she said. "You don't sit around and complain about it.

She initially struggled to get a reaction from the crowd, who listened as she talked about her prior experience as a municipal court commissioner "trying to put people's lives back together who are in addiction and had fallen into all manner of evil, some of it not of their own doing."

Her first applause came when she noted that she had been married to her husband for 44 years, had three children and 11 grandchildren. She picked up steam as she talked about her leadership in the wake of a devastating fire last summer that destroyed dozens of homes in her city, saying she had confronted Inslee and President Joe Biden to do more.

That experience has convinced her that she had the capacity to lead and clarified shortcomings in federal and state policy that stymied recovery efforts, she said.

"When you have 22,000 acres that burn, and your state government and the U.S. government says: Call your insurance company, and clean up your square — I have to change policy at the federal level," she said.

Cooper echoed that she was not a career politician throughout her speech, and though she said she was friends with the other candidates, she argued that separated her from the pack.

"I love people, I don't love politics; nobody owns me, no one can buy me; I don't care about your opinion, I know who I am," she said. "I'm a servant, and I'm here for you."

Brian Dansel

No other candidate has worked more closely with the Trump White House than Ferry County Commissioner Brian Dansel, an association he stressed during his speech to the county convention.

Dansel worked as adviser to the National Economic Council and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Trump administration, and later was appointed by the White House to serve first as state director of the Washington USDA Farm Service Agency and then as regional director of the agency's Pacific Northwest region.

Elected to the state Senate in 2013, Dansel claimed to be the first elected politician west of the Mississippi to endorse Trump for president in 2015.

"You got to imagine a 2015 endorsement of Donald Trump, all the way up to election day; that wasn't all roses and flowers on the way," he said. "I had to be pretty sure in my decision, but you know, I don't give my name to something if I don't believe it."

Dansel argued that despite having served in elected office or worked as an administrator in government since 2010, he didn't speak with the typical "pentameter, tone or tenor" of a politician.

"It isn't usually the car with the most polish and shine on it that wins the race. It's usually the one that's been bumped around a little bit, maybe even a little rough around the edges," Dansel added. "But you know what you're gonna get out of it because they're consistent."

He called for slashing regulations and moving away from the state's Growth Management Act, which places restrictions on land use to prevent urban sprawl and protect the environment.

"When you need a permit to get a shed at Costco, there's something wrong in this country," he said to applause.

Dansel acknowledged that most of the Republican candidates for Congress had advocated for broadly the same goals.

"We're for strong borders, or for protecting the Second Amendment, or for lower taxes, less regulations, all the things that everybody says all the time," he said.

"But I think the only thing to do is to take a look at our voting records to compare and contrast and see where we're different, and to leave the personal out."

John Guenther

John Guenther, a member of the Alaskan Aleutian tribe who recently retired from a nearly three-decade career with Washington's Child Protective Services, acknowledged that he wasn't as "polished" as some of the other candidates, and complimented the speech given by Bingle, who immediately preceded Guenther.

"I'm not slick, but if you send me, you're sending strength," he said. "If you vote for other folks, well, maybe you won't, maybe you'll have a RINO and you'll wish you didn't."

He distanced himself from the "Nikki Haley, Bushes, Mitch McConnell and, forgive me, Reichert" wing of the Republican Party, referencing former Congressman David Reichert, who is running for Washington governor, and former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He aligned himself with Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, whom he called individualists.

Guenther said he would save the Snake River dams, expand domestic fossil fuel production and argued that social media companies "are publishers," alluding to an argument that the companies should be held legally liable for the content that appears on their sites.

Though Guenther had difficulty at times connecting with the crowd, his two biggest applause lines of the speech were back-to-back, when he said that the U.S. should "stop with the billions of dollars to Ukraine," and when he said he would vote for term limits in Congress.

"We need to coalesce around somebody who's not going to get to Congress and fool you," Guenther said.

Twice, Guenther told the convention he had worked as a law enforcement officer, which he does not appear to have previously mentioned to reporters, including during his unsuccessful 2022 Senate run, and this work experience is not mentioned on the candidacy website or his LinkedIn page. Guenther could not be reached for comment.

Rene Holaday

Horse breeder, radio host and former legislative aide Rene Holaday was the only candidate who has announced a run for the 5th Congressional District but did not attend the convention. A prerecorded introduction video was played instead.

"Don't waste your vote on another career politician that's only in it for the paycheck," said Holaday, who served as an aide to former state Rep. Matt Shea. "Vote for the only real communist fighter in this race."

She listed seven pillars to her campaign, including to "re-establish God over this nation," to "re-establish the Constitution over this nation," to ban electronic voting machines nationwide, to secure the U.S. borders and to stop child trafficking. Holaday also said she would "expel all illegal aliens," and "block the Chinese from the USA."

Holaday did not respond to a request for comment to clarify these positions.

She said she has written a bill that would simultaneously ban electronic voting machines, close the U.S.-Mexico border and end child trafficking, and that Trump thanked her for doing so. "The Checkmate Bill," so called because "each topic is connected to each other," is not available on Holaday's website and has not been introduced to Congress.

Holaday claimed to have written the first book in the United States on the United Nations' Agenda 21, a 1992 nonbinding resolution signed by then-President George H.W. Bush and the leaders of 177 other nations that signaled a collective intention to address overpopulation and sustainability in the 21st century.

In January 2012, Holaday published "The Perils of Sustainable Development," which argued that Agenda 21 was a plan to "completely abolish things like private property rights, individual rights, air conditioning, driving of vehicles, rural living, meat consumption, livestock ownership, farming, logging, and much, much more." It's true that Holaday wrote about the U.N. document before many others, including conservative political commentator Glenn Beck, whose dystopian novel "Agenda 21" was published 10 months later and depicts a future America under the rule of a world government.

But retired forensic real estate appraiser Rosa Koire's "Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21," which lists an endorsement by Washington state Rep. Jim McCune, R-Graham, was published weeks before Holaday's book.

Tom DeWeese, founder of the American Policy Center, has written about Agenda 21 for decades and published a book collecting his articles in 2011.

Holaday also repeated a claim that fellow candidate Dansel handed her book to Trump during his time in the Trump administration.

"Who would you rather have fighting for you in Congress, the guy that recommends my book, or the person who wrote that book?" Holaday said in her video.

Dansel has denied giving Trump a copy of Holaday's book since at least 2019 when he was asked by the Inlander.

Jacquelyn Maycumber

State Rep. Jacquelyn Maycumber, R-Republic, emphasized her roots in Eastern Washington, noting she lived on a 100-year-old farm with its own cemetery.

"So I know where I'm going to be buried," she said.

Like Dansel, Maycumber noted that the Republican candidates for Congress would all agree on many of the hot-button issues like border security and protecting the Snake River dams from removal, and urged those at the convention to consider her record as a legislator. She boasted a 100% rating by the pro-life Organization Human Life of Washington and an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association.

"And let me tell you, that is very hard to do, very hard to do," she added.

She touted her work to improve federal payments to veterans, increase apprenticeship programs in Washington high schools and supporting a cap on insulin costs for state residents.

"My son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes," she said. "Nothing would prepare us for this. Just to get him out of Sacred Heart was over $1,000 in insulin and materials."

She noted that she was a prolific political fundraiser, claiming to have collected more money for the election efforts of other Republicans than any other politician in Eastern Washington.

"I will promise you I will continue to fight to make sure that we continue to have Republicans elected because we cannot stand here if we lose another seat," Maycumber said. "We cannot stand here if we lose another battle in Spokane.

While Maycumber's fundraising prowess may prove a real advantage on the campaign trail, it didn't appear to resonate with the convention crowd.

Maycumber has come under attack from some prominent Republicans for her fundraising, as well as her endorsement for Haley, former governor of South Carolina and until Wednesday a Republican candidate for President. While the Spokane County Republican Party convention was still going on, Loren Culp, who ran as a Republican and lost to Inslee in the 2020 gubernatorial race and to U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, in 2022, posted on X a photo of Maycumber with "I hope voters don't find out I received $thousands$ from BIG PHARMA" written over it.

Hours later, Culp called Maycumber a "back stabbing (insert female dog)" in a social media post that literally said "insert female dog." The post has been heavily criticized by Baumgartner, conservative commentators Jason Rantz and Brandi Cruz, and others.

"My family has fought since the Revolutionary War for this country," Maycumber told the convention crowd. "I want you to stand with me, because it's just words now, but tomorrow it's the most important thing you and I do."