The new district is large. The 12th had comprised the Eastern Washington counties of Chelan, Douglas and Okanogan, but the ruling cleaved that in two, using the Columbia River as the new eastern border. The western border of the 12th now stretches into Western Washington and includes most of Chelan County plus the eastern parts of Snohomish County and King County. If you draw a triangle from North Bend to Monroe and Wenatchee, that’s basically the new 12th.
The new lines changed the 12th’s political landscape as well.
Since at least 2008, no Democratic legislative candidates in the 12th District have broken 40 percent in a primary or the general – and in some years no Democrats were on the ballot at all.
This year, two Democrats got 44 percent and 43 percent in their primaries. Most folks who were active in the politics of the old 12th District can’t remember a time when a Democratic candidate was considered a serious contender for a legislative seat in either chamber.
Douglas and Okanogan counties became a part of the 7th District, which now stretches all the way to the Canadian border in the North and the Idaho state line to the East.
In Democrat Jim Mayhew’s estimation, the ruling turned the 12th district from a place unwinnable by his party into one that is in play for the first time since the Eisenhower era. Mayhew is running for Hawkins’ senate seat and got 43 percent in the primary.
“The 12,000 to 13,000 voters that came into the 12th in Snoqualmie are all in [voting] districts that are fairly blue,” said Mayhew, a Snoqualmie City Council member. “So that shifted, you know, 12,000, 13,000 people, Democrats into a district that had been red before and it shifted 13,000 folks from, like, Douglas County out of the district.”
Hawkins has a different perspective on the redistricting results and process.
“I think the whole redistricting process this time around for the state of Washington has been a complete disaster,” Hawkins said.
Big Shift
Every decade, after the most recent nationwide census, states redraw their legislative district maps. In Washington that’s usually done by a bipartisan committee appointed by lawmakers in Olympia. It didn’t appear that the makeup of the 12th District would be drastically different come 2024 until the night of the deadline.The state Supreme Court upheld the last-minute maps, but then the state was sued in Federal court for disenfranchising Latino voters in the Yakima Valley, some of which is in the 15th District.
Susan Soto Palmer, a Latina voter from Yakima now running as a Democrat for Yakima County Commissioner, filed the suit along with a group of organizations, including the UCLA Voting Rights Project, on behalf of herself and other Latino voters in the district. They argued that the 15th was drawn in a way that excluded areas where Latinos were more politically active and included areas where their turnout was historically low.
In August 2023, Federal Judge Robert Lasnik ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the 15th to be redrawn by the state commission and transmitted to the Secretary of State before the 2024 elections.
In the end the Legislature declined to convene a special session and appoint a new commission, leaving it to Lasnik to redraw the maps. So he released them two months before the May 6 candidate filing deadline. The new 15th caused a ripple effect across Eastern and southwestern Washington, changing the borders of the 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 16th, 17th and 31st districts and displacing five Eastern Washington lawmakers – Sen. Nikki Torres, R-Pasco; Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima; Rep. Chris Corry, R-Yakima; Gina Mosbrucker, R-Goldendale; and Hawkins.
King moved so he could run. And he didn’t have to move far. The boundary of his new district, the 14th, was only eight blocks away from his home in the 15th. Corry moved so he could stay in the 15th, and garnered nearly 75 percent of the vote in the August primary. Mosbrucker declined to move and is not seeking reelection.
12th District Shuffle
In the 12th, the change led to a game of Republican musical chairs among those currently in leadership and those waiting in the wings.Prior to the May 6 filing deadline, Hawkins had announced his reelection campaign, and had already raised $66,000. Like King and Corry, Hawkins had changed addresses so he could be eligible for his seat, but ultimately decided to withdraw and run for Chelan County commissioner instead. With a heads-up from Hawkins, the two state representatives currently representing the 12th District in Olympia, Keith Goehner and Mike Steele, got together to discuss which one of them would step up to run for Hawkins’ Senate seat.
It was also important to decide who would be tapped to run for the seat one of them would be giving up.
“Mike and I had to kind of think about, was that something one of us should do?” said Goehner, who decided to run for Hawkins’ seat. “If so, what are we going to do about the seat we’re vacating because we feel, you know, a responsibility to try and make sure that we have someone that can represent this district well.”
They and the GOP turned to former Chelan County Sheriff Brian Burnett to run for Goehner’s seat.
“I was approached April 22 by multiple GOP board members asking if I would consider running since Senator Hawkins was stepping out of the State Senate Campaign,” Burnett wrote in an email. “My wife and I took 10 days to consider this and talk to multiple people to include Keith and Lisa Goehner and [former state legislator] Clyde and Ruth Ballard and other current and prior legislators around the state and lobbyists that I know.”
While sheriff, Burnett supported a lawsuit against Governor Jay Inslee over pandemic emergency public health mandates. In 2022 he lost his reelection bid in a landslide, largely due to a series of lawsuits by former deputies.
Former Deputy Jennifer Tyler filed one suit, alleging Burnett and his administration discriminated against her based on gender; refused to provide her properly fitted protection equipment like Kevlar vests and latex gloves; and put her life at risk by refusing to provide her with backup in the field. Another deputy, Aaron Shepherd, also sued, saying he was punished and bullied after he left Burnett’s church, Grace City Church, after a divorce.
The lawsuits, settlements and attorney fees they have accrued have cost Chelan County taxpayers millions so far, and Shepherd’s case has not been resolved yet.
His opponent, North Bend Democrat Heather Koellen, sees Burnett’s past as a potential liability in the new 12th. She’s a nurse at Harborview and has served on North Bend’s city council for two terms.
“All the Google searches about his church and how he got sued for his practices as a sheriff, I question his leadership,” she said. “I think he says one thing and does another.”
Time will tell what the voters of this newly reformed district will decide, and Democrats had the most encouraging primary for this race in a long time. In August Koellen came in first with 44 percent of the vote; Burnett got 41 percent and a third Republican candidate named Jennifer Bumpus picked up 13 percent. Koellen admits that that 13 percent has her worried.
However, not everyone agrees that redistricting is necessarily an all-bad thing for conservatives in the 12th. Chelan County GOP President Aaron Young says it has “energized conservatives on the west side of the district” by connecting them with many more people who share their values.
“It's pretty exciting to see how involved and active west side republicans are compared to our local population,” he wrote in an email. “If their energy is contagious, Republicans in the 12th district will be in great shape for the foreseeable future.”
On the other side, 12th District Legislative Chair Alma Chacon and Chair of the Democrats of Chelan County Richard Acosta said they are not taking anything for granted, but they are also energized by the change in demographics.
“We are excited at the opportunity to flip seats in the 12th,” Acosta wrote. “With a changing population, we are hopeful at the prospect of picking up opportunities in the state legislature.”
The Republicans are in no danger of losing the second legislative seat in the house, currently held by Mike Steele, the director of the Lake Chelan Chamber of Commerce, who is being challenged by Republican Daniel Scott of Cashmere.
Steele doesn’t like the way the redistricting process was handled either, but he said he still believes Republicans maintain a slight advantage in the district. What is most concerning about the process for him is that it split Chelan and Douglas counties. Those two counties and the largest cities in them, East Wenatchee and Wenatchee, sit on either side of the Columbia River and have close ties and common interests economically and politically.
And for the most part all of Chelan County is in the 12th, except for a tiny sliver of Wenatchee right on the Columbia, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense to Steele.
“I think one of the most disappointing results is losing the connection between Chelan and Douglas Counties,” he wrote in an email. “I also find it odd that three precincts in Chelan County now reside in the 7th. I think this causes confusion for our voters and residents of Chelan County.”
He has raised more than $156,000 from donors like the Washington Association of Realtors, Bristol Myers Squibb and the Washington Oil Marketers Association PAC, according to Washington State Public Disclosure Commission filings.
Daniel Scott, Steele’s challenger, an electrical engineer who works for the Chelan County PUD, admits he has little chance of unseating the incumbent. For him, though, it’s about getting his message out there.
“I don’t believe I can beat Mike,” he said. “But what I have done is I’ve gotten my message out. What’s important to me, and some of these other candidates have really picked up on some of the things important to me that are now important to them that may not have been on the radar before.”
His priorities are education, the economy and public safety – which in his mind includes road safety. He said he travels on Highway 2 frequently between Cashmere and Everett, and much improvement, including basic repairs and more passing lanes, are needed to keep Washingtonians safe on our highways.
Big District
Competitive legislative races in the 12th District are something no one in living memory can recall, and with new perspectives come disagreements over how problems should be handled. But one thing all candidates running for office in the new 12th agree on is how onerous the travel is.The 12th is now twice the size of Delaware and five times the size of Rhode Island, while straddling the Cascades. Mayhew, the Democrat running for the Senate seat, described it as a legislative district that has the dimensions of a Congressional district. Candidates say they sometimes travel 3.5 hours one way to attend a public event, debate or forum. Goehner and Burnett carpool to many events, and Goehner said sometimes they don’t get back to their homes in Chelan County until midnight or later.
Then, once a candidate is successful, they have to travel not just around the district but also back and forth to Olympia throughout the year.
That also is a big part of the reason why Hawkins decided to withdraw.
“What I found myself doing in the new legislative district of the 12th is putting thousands and thousands of miles on the car, traveling over Stevens Pass, Blewett Pass, Snoqualmie Pass in the winter to get back and forth to Olympia,” he said. “And it’s quite dangerous and it’s not what I signed up for, quite frankly.”
Another thing the candidates and former candidates agree on is that if an elected representative is doing their job right, they’re serving all of their constituents regardless of their political affiliation.
“It shouldn’t matter,” Goehner said. “If you’re making good decisions, if you have good representation, it shouldn’t be a major factor.”
For Mayhew, he sees this as an opportunity to introduce fresh ideas into the discussion and make the case that his party’s policies better serve the mostly rural, working-class voters of Chelan, Snohomish and eastern King counties. To him, the new 12th District offers a unique opportunity for Democrats to prove their policies work for rural communities.
“If the Democrats could take a rural district and then deliver for a rural district, that could change politics dramatically in the whole state,” he said. “By the way, you can win a district focusing on what you’re going to do for people. To hold a district you need to then do it.”
This article was first published by Cascade PBS. Read the original article.
