Central WA Republican-on-Republican brawl sees 1 MAGA candidate rise, another falter
For one Central Washington candidate, the recipe for success was clear: Years of campaigning and grassroots support, matched with an early endorsement from former President Donald Trump.
The plan worked, trumping massive spending and attack ads from another GOP latecomer candidate.
So is the story of Jerrod Sessler, the Prosser businessman and former regional circuit race car driver, who’s currently leading in the Aug. 6 primary race for Washington’s 4th Congressional District. The top two will face off in November.
The MAGA Republican was sitting tight with 31% of the vote, according to vote counts updated Wednesday afternoon.
Republican Dan Newhouse, the five-term incumbent congressman and Sunnyside farmer, was trailing Sessler with 25% of the vote.
And lagging behind at 19% was Tiffany Smiley, the third Republican in the eight-person race.
The Pasco veterans advocate’s deep pockets and spending appear to have failed to lift her past the primary and into the Nov. 5 general election.
To date, Smiley spent about $29 for every vote she received compared to Newhouse’s $43 per vote, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Sessler spent just $6 per vote.
Those numbers will change as more ballots are tallied in the coming days. About 90,900 votes have been counted, and there’s an estimated 41,000 ballots outstanding.
Sessler ran a relatively low-key primary campaign, stepping back in recent weeks as Newhouse and Smiley traded jab for jab in TV and radio ads and in mailers.
“Once again, the vast majority of this district who know Dan Newhouse well voted to end his congressional career, and unlike in 2022, Republicans succeeded in unifying behind a single campaign that stands for secure borders, traditional constitutional values and a robust America First agenda,” Sessler said in a Tuesday night statement.
His win this week is sure to add some wind to the sails of his campaign as Central Washington’s MAGA base gears up for a Republican-on-Republican brawl.
A good slice of his party still wants to see Newhouse ousted over his 2021 vote to impeach Trump over his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
So how far will Sessler’s campaign tactics take him?
“It looks like it’s going to be Jerrod Sessler and Dan Newhouse, and Dan Newhouse has fought this battle before so he’s in a good spot,” said Peter Graves, director at Axiom Strategies, an independent Republican consulting firm.
The 4th Congressional District includes most of Central Washington. It stretches from the U.S.-Canada border south to the Columbia River, and includes the Tri-Cities, Omak, East Wenatchee, Moses Lake, Yakima and the Yakama Indian Reservation.
It’s the state’s most conservative congressional district, too.
Trump won the district by an 18-point margin during the 2020 presidential election.
With the former president at the top of the ticket again, Newhouse may find winning the general election a tougher task.
And while Sessler remains a threat, it’s possible some Democrats — which represented one-third of 2020 general election voters in the district — and moderate swing voters could save Newhouse.
Graves admits Sessler has primary momentum, but he’ll need to build a broader coalition of support if he hopes to come within striking distance of unseating the incumbent.
“Jerrod needs to recalibrate this thing and figure out how to get past being just a conservative in this race,” he said.
Did Smiley miscalculate support?
Smiley ran in a similar political lane as Sessler.
And while she piled on several weeks of attack ads against Newhouse and Sessler, and earned herself a late co-endorsement from Trump three days before the primary, it wasn’t enough to earn her the support of Central Washington voters.
“I think Tiffany may have miscalculated that Republicans would say she is a good enough replacement to Dan Newhouse, because he clearly signaled he was going to fight for this thing to the very end,” Graves told the Herald.
She did not return a Wednesday afternoon request for a comment on the primary.
Smiley’s 93-day campaign for the Central Washington district burned red hot with a flurry of cash donations, support from prominent community members, mailbox ads and at least six TV spots — but it wasn’t enough.
She painted Sessler as a “tax-hiking vegan” in one TV advertisement. Sessler tried to “settle the beef” in a followup ad, characterizing himself as a “cattle-raising, gun-carrying, brisket-loving conservative.”
The attack comes from a plant-based diet he ate decades ago during a bout with stage four metastasized melanoma cancer.
Smiley also attacked Newhouse several times on his immigration policies — comparing “Amnesty Dan” to President Joe Biden in one ad — and tried recentering herself as the candidate who could address affordability and crime.
Smiley and Newhouse spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent weeks on TV and radio media buys, attempting to smear one another over fundraising and voting records.
Trump endorsed Sessler in April, and the weekend before the primary gave a resounding co-endorsement of both Sessler and Smiley.
But the three-day endorsement came too little, too late for Smiley, who was unable to leverage the full force of the president’s backing to gain votes in a vote-by-mail-only state, where many already had returned their ballots.
Sessler said he would “welcome the support of her and her voters as we advance our cause to finish the fight in November.”
Aug. 6 ballots trickling in
Sessler leads in all of the district’s eight counties — Adams, Benton, Douglas, Franklin, Grant, Klickitat, Okanogan and Yakima.
As of Wednesday, he even led Newhouse by more than 2,000 votes in his home area, Yakima County.
Smiley has the second-most number of votes in her home of Franklin County, but trails Sessler by almost 500 votes.
Democrats will be shut out of the general election since Mary Baechler, Jane Muchlinski and Barry Knowles chose to divide the vote. Baechler leads her party with 15%, Muchlinski with 7% and Knowles with 2%.
John Malan, who called himself a MAGA Democrat, and Benny Garcia, an Independent candidate, each received less than 1 %.
Newhouse’s impeachment vote marks a pivotal epoch in the Sunnyside Republican’s electoral dominance. In the previous primary during a presidential year, in 2020, Newhouse fended off two Republicans and one Democrat with 57% of the vote.
Newhouse’s campaign did not respond to a request to comment on the primary, but he told the Seattle Times on Tuesday he was “not sure that the endorsement of two of my opponents by the former president really changed everything.”
He said he still plans to vote for Trump in November.
This story was originally published August 8, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
