Carmela Conroy will need more than math to get to Congress

Former diplomat Carmela Conroy announced she would make a second run for Congress the same day she lost her first by 21 points to Michael Baumgartner. Two years later, she argues it wasn't a bad showing.

Conroy still has one of the most impressive resumes of any candidate for the office, with a wealth of foreign policy and diplomatic experience, including as the former consul general in Lahore, Pakistan, amid terror attacks, death threats and diplomatic crises. She has taken a more vocally progressive position on several economic issues this time around, supporting a substantial increase of the federal minimum wage "in the ballpark of $16 an hour," setting national standards for paid-time off and paid sick leave, and "moving towards" a universal, single-payer healthcare system.

She said voters are looking for a congresswoman who will work to undo damage caused by the Trump administration in the past two years, including undoing tariffs, repairing international relations and restoring domestic programs to support the poor.

She also believes the math is on her side this time.

Former Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers was challenged eight times by Democrats who, like Conroy, came in with little to no prior political experience. On average, they earned 38.9% of the vote against the Republican incumbent, which Conroy notes she overperformed in 2024 by 0.3 points - though she wasn't running against an incumbent.

First-time candidates have a hard ceiling of roughly 40% in this district, she argues, so her defeat two years ago doesn't mean she will lose again in 2026 - it's why she's the challenger with the best shot. She has better name recognition this time, she claims to be a more polished candidate, and her early announcement of a second run gave her a sizable fundraising head -start over Baumgartner's other opponents.

Democrat Joe Pakootas tested this theory a decade ago. He ran against McMorris Rodgers in both 2014 and 2016, making it to the general election both times. He improved on his 2014 result of 39.3% when he tried again two years later - by almost exactly one point. If Conroy replicated that improvement this year, she'd still be roughly 10 points away from a win.

But she points again to the math: Democratic candidates in the district tend to do better during midterms than presidential election years, and Pakootas had the disadvantage of making his second run the same year Donald Trump was first elected president. There's some truth to this. Since 2004, excluding Lisa Brown's outlier overperformance in 2018, midterm candidates tend to do roughly 1.5 points better on average in Washington's 5th Congressional District.

The math doesn't factor in the incumbency advantage that Baumgartner didn't enjoy when he defeated Conroy in the first open race for the seat in 20 years, a possibly once-in-a-generation opportunity in a district that tends to hold onto incumbents for decades. By that metric, Conroy underperformed; 2004 was the last time the race was for an open seat, when first-time Democratic candidate Don Barbieri managed to earn 41% of the vote.

Incumbency is a double-edged sword, however, and Conroy believes that Baumgartner's massive fundraising advantage ($1.4 million as of the end of March) will not be enough to overcome his voting record and ties to an unpopular president.

With more than $300,000 raised (and those figures are more than two months out of date, as the most recent Federal Election Commission report includes only contributions made by the end of March), Conroy has a larger war chest than the other candidates combined, excluding the incumbent. This was one marked advantage of announcing her re-election bid so early, before almost any other candidate joined: By the end of 2025, she already had raised more than $170,000, according to FEC records, which would be enough to put her in the fundraising lead among Baumgartner's challengers.

That head -start did little to whittle down the rest of the field, however, with more people running for the seat than two years ago or, for that matter, in any cycle this century . And practically all of Baumgartner's other challengers, whether Democrat or independent, told The Spokesman-Review the same thing: Baumgartner has to go, and Conroy can't do it.

And while Conroy is coming into her second election bid with some new ideas, she claims to be largely running a stronger version of the campaign she ran two years ago.

If she makes it past the primary this time around, and if the rest of her campaign math holds true, she is still banking on a "blue wave" midterm to help lift her into office.

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This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 8:06 AM.