by Orion Donovan Smith, The Spokesman-Review, Washington State Standard
October 21, 2024
PROSSER, Wash. – Sitting at home in Prosser two days after the August primary, Jerrod Sessler felt confident. His lead over Rep. Dan Newhouse, a fellow Republican who has represented central Washington’s 4th congressional district for a decade, was growing wider as more ballots were counted.
Now the men would face off in the general election – an intraparty matchup made possible by Washington’s unusual top-two primary and Democrats’ failure to unite behind one candidate – when voters in the state’s most reliably conservative district will choose between two very different versions of the GOP.
“All I ever wanted was a head-to-head race with him, and he’s in trouble, because I’ve spent my life in circumstances like this,” Sessler said. “The writing’s on the wall that the people are wanting change.”
Sessler, a Navy veteran, had been up before dawn to appear on a Fox News segment questioning the military service of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic candidate for vice president who served for 24 years in the Army National Guard but didn’t deploy to a combat zone. After accusing Walz of “pretending to do the things that we do in normal life,” Sessler told the sympathetic Fox host that Newhouse had “betrayed the American people” by voting for various bipartisan measures over the years.
At the center of the race is a single vote Newhouse took in January 2021, one week after supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the results of an election Trump had lost.
Sessler was among the Trump supporters who attended the then-president’s “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House and marched down Pennsylvania Ave. to confront lawmakers. He said he never entered the Capitol that day and he argues, like Trump, that the people who pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes related to the riot should be freed and pardoned.
Newhouse was one of just 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the riot. Of them, he is the only one to survive a Trump-endorsed challenge, squeezing through the 2022 primary ahead of Trump-backed Republican Loren Culp before easily defeating a Democrat in the general election. Sessler, who sought Trump’s endorsement but didn’t receive it, finished fourth in that race.
“Right here in central Washington, where I live, this is a lot of farmland and these are red-blooded Americans who want somebody that they can trust and they can believe in,” Sessler, who received Trump’s endorsement this year, said on Fox. “And this is certainly an important race to President Trump.”
There is indeed a lot of farmland in the 4th district, which stretches between the Oregon and Canada borders and includes Yakima, Moses Lake and the Tri-Cities. Newhouse, a third-generation farmer from Sunnyside who has earned a reputation as a genteel conservative willing to work with Democrats when their interests align, thinks he’s still the best person to represent it.
Newhouse casts his opponent – who bought 70 acres along the Yakima River in 2018 but didn’t sell his house in Burien until late 2021, according to property records – as a carpetbagger who is pretending to be a rancher.
In an interview at his home in August and in phone calls in October, Sessler rejected that idea. He said he had relocated part time to Prosser by 2019 and his family joined him later, but when asked when he made a permanent move, he said, “It’s too murky to say, and I really don’t see the point in saying a year.” Jerrod Sessler, a Republican candidate for Washington’s 4th congressional district, pets a pig on Aug. 8 at his home in Prosser, Wash. (Orion Donovan Smith/The Spokesman-Review)
As Sessler tells it, the arc of his life was always leading back to central Washington, even while he spent most of his life in the Seattle area. He was born in California and briefly lived in Pasco as a young child, he said, before his family moved west of the Cascades. He recalled visiting relatives in the Tri-Cities while growing up and learning to drive sitting on his grandfather’s lap on the streets of Pasco.
“This has always been my home,” Sessler said. “I spent my summers here. I traveled here hundreds of times as a kid, and I’ve always wanted to live here.”
A bout with cancer at age 29 prompted Sessler to adopt a plant-based diet that he credits with beating the slim odds of survival doctors gave him. After fellow Republican candidate Tiffany Smiley accused him of still being a vegan during the primary campaign, Sessler, now 55, taped an ad in which he eats ribs and calls himself “a cattle-raising, gun-carrying, brisket-loving conservative.”
Sessler identifies as a rancher and raises chickens, turkeys, pigs and a half-dozen cattle on his land in Prosser, where he said he envisions building a self-sustaining community with gardens, livestock and more homes. He emphasized that he isn’t opposed to using public services, but he’s concerned about the state of the world and wants to build a place that “can exist without outside help.”
“Unfortunately, we live in a time that is different than any other in the history of America, other than maybe back in the Revolutionary War time,” he said. “It feels like we have a lot of threats on America and people who would like to see our demise, including globalist elites who want to do all they can to destroy everything that America stands for.”
Sessler, who talks openly about his Christian faith, said in an interview with the Yakima Herald-Republic, published on Monday, that devout Muslims shouldn’t be in Congress “because they can’t take the oath of office” and “their fundamental belief system is anti-American.”
In the 4th district, where Trump won more than 57% of votes in 2020, Sessler sees a constituency that should be represented by a conservative who won’t compromise. He has the endorsement of the campaign arm of the House Freedom Caucus and said he would follow the example of some of that hardline group’s highest-profile members.
That may be one of the few points where the two men agree. Newhouse has a decidedly different approach to representing his district, whose agricultural economy relies heavily on international trade and migrant farmworkers.
While a staunch conservative on issues like abortion and gun regulations, the five-term Republican has led bipartisan efforts to update the nation’s guest-worker programs and create pathways for unauthorized immigrants to gain legal status. Rep. Dan Newhouse speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 16 in support of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill sponsored by the Republican from Sunnyside, Washington. (Orion Donovan-Smith/The Spokesman-Review)
Although he has relatively good relations with the Yakama Nation and the Colville Confederated Tribes – whose reservations are in his district, and the latter of which endorsed him – Newhouse flatly opposes efforts led by Northwest tribes to breach the Lower Snake River dams in an attempt to restore salmon runs. Those dams, along with dams on the Columbia River, create an important shipping corridor between Lewiston and the Pacific Ocean that the region’s farmers don’t want to lose.
Along with retiring Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Spokane, Newhouse has been a leading defender of the dams. That work has won him support from Rep. Russ Fulcher, a Freedom Caucus member who represents western Idaho.
In an interview Friday, Fulcher said Newhouse has been “a great ally” on the dams. While Newhouse has never asked for his formal endorsement, Fulcher said, “there certainly is an inferred one” after he spoke at a Newhouse campaign event this year.
On Oct. 9, less than a month from Election Day, Newhouse wasn’t campaigning. Instead, he was leading a small delegation from the Congressional Western Caucus, a group of more than 100 mostly Republican lawmakers focused on rural issues, on a tour of the southern part of his district. Newhouse was elected chairman of that group – which includes Fulcher and several other Freedom Caucus members, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. – in November 2020, just after an election that saw Republicans retake the House by outperforming Trump in districts across the country.
“I think what I’ve demonstrated as a member of Congress is that I represent everybody,” Newhouse said in an interview at an overlook near Roosevelt, as barges passed by on the Columbia below, acknowledging that some people consider him a moderate. “Whatever label fits.” Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, talks with Michelle Hennings (left), executive director of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, and Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, on Oct. 9 at an overlook above the Columbia River near Roosevelt, Wash. (Orion Donovan Smith/The Spokesman-Review)
Rep. Celeste Maloy, a Utah Republican who joined Newhouse on the trip, said she was proud to have the endorsement of Jordan, the Ohio congressman who helped start the Freedom Caucus, but she said she hadn’t joined the group “because I’d rather get things done than get attention, and I think Dan’s the same way.”
“There’s a difference between thunder and lightning,” Maloy said. “Everyone hears the thunder. It’s lightning that does the damage.”
As Newhouse prepared to leave for the next stop on the tour, Jason Blain, a rancher from Roosevelt, pulled him aside and the two men talked for several minutes. After the delegation departed, Blain said they had talked about a range of challenges facing the region’s farmers and ranchers, including falling commodity prices and what happens to water rights when farmland is turned into housing developments.
He wasn’t sure how he would vote, Blain said, but it would probably be for Newhouse. In any case, he didn’t know Sessler.
“I don’t think Dan Newhouse and I will ever be friends, but we have jobs to do and get things done, and he listens to me,” Blain said, adding that he grew up milking cows with members of the extended Newhouse family and working in an orchard they owned.
Blain acknowledged that members of the Klickitat County GOP were upset by Newhouse’s impeachment vote, but he said his own experience serving on local fire department, cemetery and conservation district boards has taught him the importance of compromise. He dismissed the lingering anger over Trump’s impeachment as “Facebook drama.” Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, talks to rancher Jason Blain at an overlook above the Columbia River near Roosevelt, Wash., on Oct. 9, 2024. (Orion Donovan Smith/The Spokesman-Review)
For Newhouse to pull out a win, he will need the votes of people like Blain who are more concerned about what he does for central Washington than what he says in Washington, D.C. He’ll also need the district’s more liberal voters to back him, as they did when he defeated fellow Republican Clint Didier in 2014 and 2016.
Doug White, a Democrat from Yakima who ran against Newhouse in 2022, said in an interview he plans to vote for his former opponent. Mary Baechler, the top Democratic vote-getter in this year’s primary, said in a text message that she also would have voted for Newhouse had she not moved back to the Seattle area after falling short with 16% of votes in the primary.
But Democrats in the district have another option, whether or not they know it. Cherissa Boyd, a 61-year-old mother from Kennewick who is running a write-in campaign, said she believes she can win if Sessler and Newhouse split the Republican vote.
“If we’re going to flip the seat to Democrats, this is our only year,” Boyd said in an interview, arguing that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign will energize voters and boost her fellow Democrats. “I feel that it’s the year of the woman, and so I jumped on the bandwagon hoping that I can make a difference here.”
But in a district where Democrats have historically won about one-third of votes even when they are on the ballot, some of her fellow Democrats think she’s more likely to play the role of spoiler and help Sessler.
“I have had a lot of negative feedback from Democrats,” Boyd said. “They’re angry because they’re saying that I’m messing the numbers up. But if they look at it, if I didn’t have this write-in campaign, Sessler is going to win anyway.”
After initially announcing seven debates before Newhouse had agreed to any of the dates, Sessler reversed course and has refused to participate in the two televised debates that were scheduled unless Boyd is included, despite the Democrat not being on the ballot.
When the CBS affiliate in Yakima refused to change the debate format, Sessler campaign adviser Matt Braynard called KIMA-TV anchor John Kennedy O’Connor a derogatory name in a series of text messages Braynard posted on X. As a result of Sessler’s withdrawal, one station canceled the Oct. 11 debate and another plans to hold a televised forum with only Newhouse, the Tri-City Herald reported.
The clear difference between this year and Newhouse’s earlier Republican-versus-Republican races is the impeachment vote, which Trump hasn’t let his supporters forget. In a post on his TruthSocial platform in April, Trump gave Sessler his “Complete and Total Endorsement,” calling Newhouse a “weak and pathetic” Republican “who voted to, for no reason, Impeach me.”
Days before the August primary, Trump hedged his bets by also endorsing Smiley, whose last-minute entry into the race sought to capitalize on name recognition from her unsuccessful Senate run two years earlier. The former president reiterated his earlier endorsement but misspelled Sessler’s name, giving his “Complete and Total Endorsement to both Tiffany Smiley and Jerrod Kessler.” Jerrod Sessler, a Republican candidate for Washington’s 4th congressional district, waves to onlookers at the Hop Festival Parade in Moxee on Aug. 3, 2024. (Orion Donovan Smith/The Spokesman-Review)
After finishing third with about 19% of votes, Smiley declined to endorse either Sessler or Newhouse. In a statement thanking her supporters, she pledged, “This is just the beginning.”
Newhouse’s impeachment vote came at a fleeting moment when many Republicans appeared ready to turn away from Trump, professing to be disgusted by the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, that left at least 140 police officers injured, according to the police union.
In a speech on the House floor on Jan. 13, 2021, Newhouse said he and other Republicans were “responsible for not speaking out sooner, before the president misinformed and inflamed a violent mob who tore down the American flag and brutally beat Capitol Police officers.”
Sessler’s views on that day’s events couldn’t be more different. In videos posted after the riot, he downplayed the violence and said police had welcomed protesters into the Capitol.
“The level of weeniness of these people was unbelievable,” Sessler said of the officers in one video.
“Just absolute wimps,” he said. “They made a mockery of what it is to be a man in uniform.”
In an interview, Sessler said the crowd – which he estimated at “well over 1 million people” – was peaceful, with the exception of people he said looked like “antifa with a Trump shirt on,” referring to left-wing, antifascist protesters. Kevin McCarthy of California, then the House GOP leader, said in January 2021 that “there is absolutely no evidence” that antifa members were responsible for the riot and “conservatives should be the first to say so.”
One police officer died from strokes suffered the day after the riot, which a medical examiner said “played a role in his condition,” and four other officers died by suicide in the following days and months.
A police officer shot and killed one rioter who was trying to climb through a broken window to reach the House chamber. Two protesters died of heart attacks outside the Capitol, and a third protester died from a drug overdose.
Newhouse knew he was taking a political risk with the impeachment vote, but at the time it seemed possible that enough Senate Republicans agreed with him that a two-thirds majority of senators could convict Trump and bar him from running for office again.
Yet despite saying Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of Jan. 6, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky voted to acquit him on a technicality. Most Senate Republicans followed his lead and Trump remained eligible to return to the White House. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, rides atop a Jeep driven by his wife Joan Galvin at the Hop Festival Parade in Moxee on Aug. 3, 2024. (Orion Donovan Smith/The Spokesman-Review)
On the day of the impeachment vote, McCarthy said Trump “bears responsibility” for the “attack on Congress by mob rioters.” But by the end of the month, McCarthy visited Trump’s Florida resort and made amends with the former president, whose support among the Republican base was indispensable in what turned out to be McCarthy’s briefly successful effort to become speaker of the House.
In the following years, Trump reasserted his control of the GOP while the 10 House Republicans who backed his impeachment were largely cast out of the party. Most who chose to seek re-election lost, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of southwest Washington.
Now, his rematch with Sessler has quietly become a test of the extent of Trump’s domination of the GOP. Newhouse’s allies say there should be room in their party for both moderates and hardliners.
“I have a productive relationship with Jim Jordan and I have a productive relationship with Dan Newhouse,” Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska, another Western Caucus member, said during the 4th district tour. “I see both having different roles but both a part of the team that helps us get policies done that are good for our country.”
Newhouse survived with just a quarter of votes when six Trump-aligned Republicans split the vote in the 2022 primary, leaving the incumbent with an easy matchup against White, the Democrat, in November. After finishing with 12.3% of votes in the 2022 primary, Sessler resolved to run again. He said he started by making amends with the other GOP candidates from that race.
“My perspective basically was, ‘Well, I thought this was going to be a two-year campaign, but I guess it’s going to be a four-year campaign,’ ” he said.
Sessler’s largely self-funded and relatively frugal campaign – he had contributed $350,000 of his own money and spent about $264,000 as of Sept. 30, according to Federal Election Commission filings – has continued since the last race ended, he said. Newhouse has raised about $2 million and spent roughly $1.5 million in that time. Jerrod Sessler, a Republican candidate for Washington’s 4th congressional district, pulls weeds outside his house in Prosser on Aug. 8, 2024. (Orion Donovan Smith/The Spokesman-Review)
That nonstop campaigning has been possible, Sessler said, because of his savings from a career as an entrepreneur. He still owns and operates HomeTask, a website that connects customers to local handymen and other home services providers, and the human-resources software company eValueMe. He previously founded several other companies in the Burien area and raced in a regional NASCAR touring series in the early 2000s.
“All the money that I’ve made wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for this country, if it wasn’t for the freedom that we have, so what’s the difference if I spend all the money I have?” Sessler said. “If I want to take my life savings and pour it into trying to save our country and trying to preserve it, so it can have another 250 healthy years, then that’s my choice.”
There has been no public polling on the 4th district race, but Newhouse said the last internal polls he had seen showed it was “neck and neck.” He acknowledged that Democrats and independents make up a key part of the coalition he needs to hold onto his seat, but he added that higher turnout in the general election could also help his chances.
At home in August, Sessler said he was optimistic that as more voters get to know him, they will decide it’s time to replace Newhouse.
“Even though he’s got his base, it’s still not going to be enough,” Sessler said. “I’m not an empty shell, and the more people get a chance these next two or three months – as I get more media and more opportunities for people to see who I am – they’re gonna see, ‘This guy is actually pretty smart. This guy’s got some good ideas. He’s not selfishly motivated. We ought to give him a shot.’ ”
This article was first published by The Spokesman-Review. Orion Donovan Smith’s work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact the Spokesman’s managing editor.
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