by Orion Donovan Smith, The Spokesman-Review, Washington State Standard
June 11, 2026
MOSES LAKE – For the first time in a dozen years, Rep. Dan Newhouse won’t be on the ballot when voters in central Washington cast their votes in November to choose who will represent the state’s 4th Congressional District.
The genteel GOP lawmaker’s announcement in December that he wouldn’t seek re-election cleared the way for another Republican to represent Washington’s most reliably conservative House district, and 11 candidates have jumped into the race to succeed Newhouse. But a crowded field and the state’s unusual open primary system – in which the top two finishers in the Aug. 4 vote advance to the general election, regardless of party – complicate the question of which candidates will appear on the ballot this fall.
Unlike in 2024, when moderate and left-leaning voters helped Newhouse defeat fellow Republican Jerrod Sessler in the general election despite having finished behind Sessler in the primary with just 23% of votes, Democrats in the district have united this year behind a single candidate, retired Air Force Maj. John Duresky. That leaves three prominent Republicans – Sessler, Yakima County Commissioner Amanda McKinney and state Sen. Matt Boehnke of Kennewick – jostling for pole position in the general election, which may require scarcely a quarter of votes in the primary.
Seven other candidates – three more Republicans, a member of the nascent Cascade Party, an independent and two who claim no party at all – trail substantially in fundraising but could nonetheless influence the outcome, as the results of past primaries suggest. The district stretches across the middle of the state, from Oregon to the Canadian border, encompassing the Tri-Cities, Yakima, Moses Lake and Omak. Since Newhouse was first elected in 2014, no Democrat running against him has won more than 37.2% of votes in the general election, while his toughest challenges have come from his fellow Republicans.
“Several Republicans are going to split the vote on that side; a Democrat won’t,” said Todd Schaefer, chair of the political science department at Central Washington University. “So, chances are, what you’re going to see is sort of like having a partisan primary, where the No. 1 Republican advances to face the No. 1 Democrat, and that’s kind of odd. And then probably, because it’s such a red district, the Republican will win.”
Loyalty to Trump – and to Newhouse – could help decide outcome
President Donald Trump’s influence looms large in the primary, even as his approval rating among Americans hit an all-time low of 35% on Friday, based on the Economist’s tracker of polling by YouGov. No independent polls have been conducted in the district this year, but the president remains broadly popular among Republicans, and the Cook Political Report rates the district “R+10,” indicating that voters there favored Trump by a rate 10 percentage points higher than the national average in the 2020 and 2024 elections.
Trump has officially endorsed only McKinney this year, after splitting his endorsement between Sessler and another Republican in 2024. That’s despite McKinney being one of the few elected Republicans in the district who stood by Newhouse after he was one of just 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for the president’s role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
With the 70-year-old Newhouse seeming to mull retirement, he tacitly endorsed McKinney as his chosen successor by inviting her to attend Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress as his guest in March 2025. But four days after Newhouse announced he wouldn’t run again, McKinney went on stage at AmericaFest, an annual conference in Arizona organized by the influential conservative group Turning Point USA, and claimed she had decided to “retire” Newhouse because of his vote to impeach Trump in January 2021.
Sessler and other Republicans were quick to point out that McKinney had stood by Newhouse for years after that vote, even recording a campaign ad for the congressman in 2024. In an interview on May 23, she said it became “pretty clear to me” after the 2024 election that Newhouse had to go, putting the time frame of that decision nearly four years later than she suggested at AmericaFest.
“When you’re choosing an elected representative, it’s not houses or spouses,” the former mortgage banker said, explaining that she backed Newhouse in the 2024 election because she felt he was the best option in a race that also featured Sessler and Fox News contributor Tiffany Smiley. “I stand by that decision, but it was also very clear to me that CD4 was ready for that next generation of leadership.”
In addition to Trump’s support, McKinney benefits from endorsements from Turning Point USA, which was founded by the late Charlie Kirk; House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.; and Republican elected officials from across the state and the country. That backing from the GOP establishment also brings a big fundraising advantage.
McKinney has served as a county commissioner since 2020 and said her decision to run for Congress was informed by that experience and the realization that many decisions that affect people’s lives are made at the federal level, not by local leaders. She said her work in Congress would be guided by her values, foremost among them her integrity, “because I am someone who says what I’m going to do, and then I go and do what I say, and that is the thing that I have become known for.”
McKinney, 48, said she supports term limits for members of Congress and would serve no more than 12 years, so she could enjoy retirement with her husband and their two children. Until then, she promises to be a new kind of representative for the district.
“Dan Newhouse represents more of the statesmanship, more quiet, reserved,” she said. “And what people are looking for is they want someone who is a fighter, but they also want someone who can still win the day, tell a story successfully, build coalitions, be successful, be someone that they can take pride in.”
Nearly a year after inviting McKinney to attend Trump’s speech to Congress, Newhouse signaled he had a new preferred successor when he invited Boehnke as his guest to the president’s State of the Union address on Feb. 24. The state senator and former Army helicopter pilot, whose name is pronounced “BANK-ee,” is running a campaign that will test the importance of local connections and quiet leadership in an era when Congress is increasingly defined by fiery debates on national issues.
In an interview after he attended a Memorial Day event in Richland on May 25, Boehnke said he’s running for Congress because he sees an opportunity to build on investments made in the district with the help of Newhouse and his predecessor, former Rep. Doc Hastings, and to bring the kind of prosperity seen in the Tri-Cities to other parts of the district.
Asked which current or past members of Congress he most admires, Boehnke named Hastings, a Republican who represented the district from 1995 to 2015.
“He was on the Ethics Committee for a reason – everybody trusted him on both sides of the aisle,” Boehnke said of Hastings, who has endorsed him. The state senator said the nation’s elected representatives are facing an “ethical dilemma,” which he described as “supporting good policies” or “just trying to do the rhetoric for the likes and clicks.”
“I want to be known as a statesperson who actually gets back to governing the right way, to help solve problems in our community,” Boehnke said.
In addition to Hastings, Boehnke is endorsed by 20 of his colleagues in the state Legislature and several local officials in the district, including LaDon Linde, McKinney’s fellow Yakima County commissioner. He said he would welcome Newhouse’s endorsement, but given the outgoing congressman’s limited support among Republican voters in the district, it’s unclear whether that would help or hurt Boehnke’s chances of advancing to the general election.
As for Trump, Boehnke said he has personally voted for the president three times and supports “America First” policies, but he would rather seek the support of people in the district and let McKinney and Sessler fight over who is most aligned with the president.
Sessler, a Navy veteran who grew up in the Seattle suburbs, bought land along the Yakima River in Prosser in 2018, started living part time in the district in 2019 and launched a campaign against Newhouse after the congressman voted to impeach Trump in 2021. Sessler owns HomeTask, a company that connects customers to local handymen, and has run a largely self-funded campaign for the past five years, crisscrossing the vast district and building a loyal base of support among Trump-aligned conservatives.
If Washington had partisan primaries like most states, that would have been enough to get Sessler to Congress, since he won the 2024 primary by a wide margin, earning about 33% of votes to Newhouse’s 23%. But after the two Republicans advanced to the general election with no Democrat on the ballot, left-leaning voters largely backed Newhouse, helping the congressman hold onto his seat.
This year, Sessler hopes the absence of Newhouse – and the presence of a single Democrat on the ballot – will clear a lane and help his years of campaigning pay off. In an interview before he talked with voters and handed out his signature red hats in Moses Lake’s Spring Fest parade on May 23, Sessler said Boehnke and McKinney are “part of the establishment” while he’s a “regular person.”
“We’re the only real conservative with a shot to win this thing – obviously, with President Trump’s endorsement, the massive name recognition from the last cycle, where I really should have won,” he said. “We got kind of taken advantage of in the general, as you know, but we’ve been working hard for the last 18 months advancing President Trump’s agenda.”
Sessler said he spent about 10 weeks in the summer of 2025 redesigning the Federal Emergency Management Agency “using the DOGE methodology,” referring to the now-defunct Trump administration project led by billionaire Elon Musk. He said he partnered with Michael Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who briefly served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term, to author a forthcoming “Declaration of Liberty” that will be released on July 4. And he said he traveled to Dubai and Singapore for cryptocurrency conferences where the president’s son, Eric Trump, touted a business venture called World Liberty Financial that had earned the Trump family about $1 billion as of December, as the Wall Street Journal reported.
Sessler dismissed Boehnke as “Newhouse 2.0” and accused McKinney of “political flip-flopping” and lying about her plan to oust Newhouse.
“If she was truthful, she would just say, ‘Look, I want the seat and I’m using whatever means I can to get it,’” he said of McKinney. “I don’t really think we need to elect people that are the smartest in the room – although that would be nice; I have a very high IQ. We need to elect people that have the integrity to fight for the things that are pissing us off.”
To make the point that he will “protect your wallet,” Sessler then displayed one of the monogrammed wallets he gives to supporters who donate at least $100 to his campaign.
Sessler touts endorsements from Flynn and other prominent figures in Trump’s orbit, including political consultant Roger Stone and several members of the House Freedom Caucus. He has also worked to win the support of county GOP committees, with the endorsements so far of the Republican central committees in Douglas and Benton counties.
In a text message sent to potential donors, Sessler’s campaign said he won 57% of votes in the Yakima County Republican Central Committee, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for a preprimary endorsement. In another sign of Sessler’s ties to influential Republicans in the district, his 2024 campaign manager, Matt Brown, serves as chairman of the Yakima County GOP, executive director of the Washington State Republican Party and mayor of Yakima.
Sessler said he’s leading “wildly” in internal polls his campaign has conducted, which he declined to share “because of the tension with the other candidates in this race.”
A survey conducted by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and published by Punchbowl News in February showed Duresky leading with 25% and McKinney in second place with 20%, with 27% of respondents undecided. But after the likely primary voters were told that only McKinney had Trump’s endorsement, her support shot up to 40%, while Sessler’s fell from 14% to 6%.
McKinney’s campaign is hoping that blanketing the district with that message will send her to November’s general election, and she has the money to do it. According to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, her campaign had raised nearly $524,000 and spent only about $73,000 by the end of March. Meanwhile, Sessler had raised about $402,000 and spent more than $351,000, while Boehnke had raised roughly $58,000 and spent nearly $18,000.
Ultimately, the three-way race among the most prominent Republicans could come down to who is perceived as closest to Trump.
At a time when a growing number of Republicans in Congress are publicly differing with the president, McKinney said there is no issue on which she disagrees with Trump, while Boehnke said the president should have included farmers in his delegation to China in May, where Trump was joined by Musk and executives from Apple, Nvidia and other tech companies.
Asked if they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, as he still frequently claims – a question that has become a litmus test for unflagging loyalty among Republicans – Boehnke gave a flat “no” while McKinney said she opposes mail-in voting and isn’t confident that the United States has “completely secure elections.”
“With broad strokes, I would say that there clearly were discrepancies,” McKinney said of the 2020 election. “As long as there’s states like Washington that do it the way that we do, we do not have safe and secure elections.”
Boehnke, who teaches cybersecurity courses as a professor at Columbia Basin College, said he has worked with the Washington secretary of state’s office and local election officials in Benton County to show skeptical voters exactly how the state’s election system works.
“I’ve given classes locally and a lot of people go, ‘Yeah, you’re lying,’ ” he said. “And I’m like, ‘No, go check for yourself.’ ”
Sessler, who attended the Jan. 6 protest but has said he didn’t enter the Capitol that day, has consistently backed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats united
John Duresky may be the only Democrat in the race, but even he isn’t a big fan of today’s Democratic Party. Sitting in his home in West Richland on May 24, the retired Air Force major brandished a sheet of paper with a graph showing how Americans’ wages have fallen over recent decades in relation to the cost of healthcare, housing, education and other essentials.
“I would like to see the Democratic Party go back to its working-class roots that it really never had any business leaving in the first place,” he said. “We’re not looking to exclude anybody – the tent is big enough for everybody – but we have to focus on the kitchen-table issues that matter to everybody, that have impacted everybody in such a way that people believe the system is rigged and isn’t working for them anymore.”
That’s a critique that most Democrats seem to have absorbed from the 2024 election, but Duresky said he isn’t the typical Democratic candidate. He recalled working as a project controls officer at the Department of Energy’s Hanford field office in Richland in early 2025 when he received the infamous “Fork in the Road” email from Musk’s DOGE team, encouraging federal employees to quit.
After talking with his wife, Duresky decided to take the early retirement offer. The next day, he was listening to “The Next Level,” a podcast created by anti-Trump former Republicans, when host Sarah Longwell said something that struck him like “a bolt of lightning.”
“She said this next election is going to be driven by the kind of candidates that see how crazy everything is, and they have to get in the game, they can’t sit on the sidelines anymore,” he said. “I had never planned to be a candidate. I’m a working-class dude, I’ve worked my whole life, and this kind of thing is not something that I would, you know, be drawn to.”
Learning from 2024, when Democrats in the district failed to unite behind a single candidate and let two Republicans advance through the primary, Duresky set to work consolidating support from county Democratic Party committees, most of which endorsed him early enough that no other Democrat even got on the ballot.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do here,” he said. “If we can win, we are looking at 50.2%. We are going to squeak it by, and that’s just the nature of how this district is constructed, it’s nature of where the electorate is right now, and everything else.”
The key to his pitch is a simple message, Duresky said: The Democratic Party’s “brand is in the toilet, and people don’t trust the party, and we have some work to do.”
Nationwide polls show that many Americans find neither party’s brand appealing. That creates an opening for candidates like Devin Pooré, a 31-year-old software engineer who lives in East Wenatchee and entered the race as an independent before joining the Cascade Party, a centrist party founded in 2024 by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic.
Before participating in the May 23 parade in Moses Lake, Pooré said he’s received lots of positive feedback from voters who like the issues he highlights, but perhaps appreciate most of all that he isn’t part of either major party.
“I’ve had so many people, the moment they see independent on my literature, they just go, ‘I like that!’ ” said Pooré, who grew up in Ferry County. “And then they read through some of my items – campaign finance reform, banning stock trading for members of Congress, more proactive wildfire management solutions – a lot of people like that.”
On a key issue that has divided Democrats in central Washington – whether the Lower Snake River dams should be breached in an effort to restore salmon runs – Duresky said he has studied the idea and doesn’t see a way to make it work. Pooré, however, said he supports the idea.
Pooré said he had met with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the western half of which lies in the 4th Congressional District, and with people all across the district. In the Trump campaign’s February poll, 5% of likely voters said they preferred Pooré.
That level of support – combined with the six other candidates running, none of whom had raised the $5,000 to require an FEC filing by the end of March – could impact the outcome of the primary even if none of them advance to the general election.
Ballots in Washington’s primary election must be postmarked or dropped in an official ballot collection box by Aug. 4. The general election takes place on Nov. 3.
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