Skip to “Comment” below, if the details of how to look at the Primary landscape become tedious.
The Washington State Primary Election is coming up on Tuesday, August 6. All candidates who will appear on the ballot for elective offices in Washington State, the U.S. Congress, and the presidential ticket have already filed with the county auditors and the WA Secretary of State (during the week of May 6-10). Individualized ballots have not yet been generated, but with some persistence you can explore who will appear on ballots in Spokane County by visiting the Spokane County Online Candidate Filing page and clicking the link “Candidates Who Have Filed”. There you can explore the entire field from U.S. Senator (11 candidates) all the way to Precinct Committee Officers. (Note: most county and city level positions are not in contention this election cycle except for Molly Marshall contesting incumbent Commissioner Al French to represent Spokane County Commissioner District 5 [SW Spokane County including a southwesterly part of the City of Spokane]. Two Spokane Superior Court Judgeships will also appear on the primary ballot.)
If you want to get into the weeds (which can be pretty interesting) you can look up how much each candidate is reporting in campaign contributions—and from whom. This campaign finance data for candidates for in-Washington-State offices can be seen at the Public Disclosure Commission (pdc.wa.gov). There click “For Voters and the Public” and then “Candidates” under “Political Disclosure Reports.”
Just to make elections more complicated (and less well understood by the voters), in the United States, federal campaigns and campaign finance operate under different rules and regulations than those of the states (which also vary from state to state). Federal campaigns are regulated under federal law and appear at the Federal Election Commission website (fec.gov). There you can explore campaign contributions to the U.S. Presidential, U.S. Congressional, and U.S. Senatorial candidates. The best way to access the congressional and senatorial data is to find your way to “Find elections by location” and key in your zip code.
Down this rabbit hole you can get to the campaign finance data for the candidates to replace retiring Congressional District 5 Representative of 20 years, Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Eleven candidates are technically filed to run, but only eight of them actually registered with the FEC, raised money, and reported it by the last FEC filing deadline of March 31, 2024.
There’s a point to all this orientation. Of the eight candidates to replace McMorris Rodgers for CD5 U.S. Representative, Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner stands out for his contribution haul. (That is, besides retiring McMorris Rodgers herself, who was still receiving contributions up to February 9 that total up to around $1.2 million dollars, a massive war chest with an uncertain destination) Baumgartner, with $404,000, is apparently the favorite of monied Republicans in this race. By March 31 none of the other seven reporting had raised more than about $150,000.
This financial disparity raises some interesting questions. Does raising nearly triple the amount of the next closest candidate guarantee Baumgartner winning a place on the general election ballot? He has signs out all over the county. He clearly wants everyone to think a primary win for him is inevitable.
Comment:
Yesterday, May 28, on the Spokesman front page appeared an article by Emry Dinman titled (in the paper paper) “Are Candidate Trips Political Stunts.” It is worth a look if you have a subscription. It comes with two photos, one of Mr. Bingle and the other of Mr. Baumgartner in front of the U.S.-Mexican border wall. One of the photos is almost certainly photoshopped, with a stern-looking Bingle superimposed on a razor wire-laden bit of old border barrier at which he may (or may not) have actually visited. [In the original post I mis-identified this as a photoshopped photo of Mr. Baumgartner.]
Jonathan Bingle (R) also visited the southern border:
…Bingle did make an effort to differentiate himself [from among the Republican candidate southern border obsessed], traveling to a border area and talking to law enforcement and border patrol in the area. He met with Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway and border patrol agents while touring the border wall, arguing in a KHQ interview at the time that most crossing illegally were just looking for work but some posed a threat to Americans. He also highlighted the human cost to the migrants themselves, noting the wreaths and crosses dotting the border where people had died during the dangerous trip.
In a recent interview, he acknowledged that he hoped the trip sent a message to voters ahead of the August primary, but also argued there was an opportunity to form his own opinion of the situation by seeing it first hand.
“You can learn about a lot of things in the classroom, but once you’re in the field you learn the difference between theory and practice,” Bingle said.
Notice Bingle’s generally positive spin. No denigration of fellow candidates.
But then there was Baumgartner’s trip [the bold is mine]:
In March, Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner, who is seeking the same seat in Congress, called Bingle’s visit a “political stunt,” comparing it to a spring break vacation and arguing Bingle should be focused instead on the issues facing the city of Spokane. Later, Baumgartner made his own trip to Yuma, Arizona, at the invitation of Morgan Ortagus, who served as State Department spokeswoman during the administration of former President Donald Trump, and met with border agents, various politicians and Trump-era acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf.
In a news release [why a news release if his trip were not a campaign stunt?], Baumgartner argued that President Joe Biden’s administration has failed to secure the border, pointing to degraded or uninstalled sections of the border wall [see the my comment on the photo] and the destabilizing effect that mass illegal border crossings have on the Mexican government.
He claimed to have overheard four Syrians who had crossed illegally speaking Arabic, a language Baumgartner has some ability to speak, and who said they planned to travel to Washington state after being processed by border agents.
“Other nationalities that night included Ecuadorians, Venezuelans and Chinese,” he wrote in a news release. “It’s worrying that so many people are entering our country without being properly vetted – including many from nations that pose significant national security threats.”
Like Bingle, Baumgartner also highlighted the danger that organized crime and the border crossing itself pose to those seeking a new life in the United States.
Baumgartner argued his trip should not be compared to Bingle’s.
“I was there with an extremely high-level delegation,” Baumgartner said. “I think it was pretty clear from Jonathan Bingle’s social media posts at the time that he was down there for spring break and happened to take some photos near the border.”
Unlike Bingle, Baumgartner was invited to Arizona and visited to learn about the issues on the ground, not as a campaign stunt, he said, though he did acknowledge paying for the trip with campaign funds.
This sort of denigration and disdain—in this case for his fellow Republican—is vintage Baumgartner. Baumgartner is an in-your-face political climber. Just two years after he won a Legislative District 6 State Senate seat in 2010 he mounted a campaign to replace U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell. Abandoning his State Senate seat in 2018, Baumgartner was elected as Spokane County Treasurer. His rationale at the time was a desire to be closer to home. He didn’t advertise that a state senator’s salary was in the mid-fifty thousands and the county treasurer’s salary is $111,562.49. I have it from several sources at the county offices that staff there joke about the rare “Baumgartner sightings.” Now, evidently, with his U.S. Rep. candidacy, being “closer to home” has ceased to be so important.
Baumgartner has a knack for self-aggrandizement while demeaning others. It’s all about winning and one-upmanship, not collaboration and collective problem-solving. As a state senator one of his emails to his constituents crowed:
…we [senate Republicans] triangulated a strategy to fund the state’s K-12 McCleary case through a “levy swap equalization” that will reduce overall property taxes on nearly 75% of households (largely in areas represented by Republicans) and increase property taxes largely in the Seattle area (represented by Democrats).
For Baumgartner, McCleary wasn’t about adequate funding for public education, it was about sticking it to those people.
Yet Baumgartner, judging by campaign contributions seems to be the darling of monied traditional Republicans. Considering his wife Eleanor’s position at the Washington Policy Center pumping out conservation talking points in Guest Opinion pieces for the Spokesman, perhaps that should come as no surprise. (Those pieces usually come with this disclosure: “Members of the Cowles family, owners of The Spokesman-Review, have previously hosted fundraisers for the Washington Policy Center and sit on the organization’s board.”)
McMorris Rodgers at least tried to project an image of decency, and pretended toward collaboration (although it never amounted to much in action). Baumgartner is simply a naked, in-your-face, obnoxious partisan. One hopes he will prove that spending large amounts of campaign money is no guarantee of advancing to the general election in November.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Bernie Bank’s trip to Ukraine, also covered in Dinman’s article, was, like Bingle’s border trip, presented as a respectable learning experience, rather than a chance to denigrate others:
In a recent interview, Bank noted the roughly 30,000 Ukrainian-Americans in Spokane County, the vast majority of whom are Christian refugees who immigrated to the U.S. to escape religious persecution.
“We have 30,000 Ukrainians in this county alone who have friends and family living through this war day in and day out,” Bank said. “I think it’s important to draw attention to that.”
She visited Lviv and Kyiv, witnessing daily military funeral processions and a program to implant prosthetics for amputee soldiers. Installing a phone app that provides alerts for incoming bombs and other munitions, she shared a recent notice informing residents to immediately proceed to a bomb shelter and instructions if none is nearby.
Bank argued that the U.S. and the West broadly owe Ukraine protection following the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S., Britain and other nations made security guarantees in exchange for the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine and other post-Soviet nations.
“That was part of my trip, to bring that part of history back to people’s minds and to remind them of our obligations and how important it is to keep those promises,” Bank said.
Bank encouraged her opponents to also visit Ukraine, and argued that Bingle and Baumgartner’s trips to the border may have also provided some needed perspective. Bingle said the same of Bank’s trip.
“If she’s going to see the people of Ukraine and see the situation on the ground, I commend her for doing that,” he said.