But back to the present: For Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, coming around on Trump has touched off a unique sort of political storm. She is being pilloried now in ads for flipping to back the candidate who actually won her district by a solid 7.4 percentage points in 2016.
“She bought in — to him,” says one ad, disgust in the narrator’s voice, with video of Herrera Beutler saying “I am” alongside footage of Trump talking about injecting bleach to cure the coronavirus.
It makes the 3rd Congressional District one of the few in the country where Democrats, in this case represented by professor Carolyn Long, have gone all-in on saddling a GOP incumbent with the perceived baggage of Trump.
After five-term incumbent Herrera Beutler won the August primary surprisingly easily, pulling nearly 56 percent of the vote, her boarding of the Trump train was seized on by Democrats. Especially because she had expressed her disdain for Trump’s obnoxious behavior in the past.
“I didn’t want to have to tell my daughter that I’m OK with behavior like this,” she said about why she didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 (she wrote in then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan).
The national Democratic Party and a few political action committees have since pumped $1.1 million in independent ad spending into the district, much of it highlighting the Trump conversion. In response, Herrera Beutler has said she’s just going along with the voters in her red-leaning district. National GOP groups, sensing she might need some propping up, have poured in $1.5 million in independent expenditures, pillorying Long as a “liberal professor” who is out of touch with the district.
Combined with the candidates’ own fundraising, the total spending will top $10 million, by far the most in the state this year. So what’s going on down in Southwest Washington?
Simple: Of the two dozen Pacific coastline congressional districts in the lower 48 states, Washington’s 3rd is the only one left still represented by a Republican. The Trump era has all but wiped out GOP moderates.
Second, this is a state where the incumbent president may be headed for defeat by historic margins. Polls in Washington state since Joe Biden clinched the nomination show the Democrat up by an average of 24 percentage points.
Republicans ran stronger than expected in the August primary, but Trump wasn’t on that ballot. If anything like a 25-point blowout happens here this year — look out below.
Herrera Beutler has been an independent-minded voter in Congress and remains favored to win. But her story is the dilemma tale of modern GOP politics. It’s been shown repeatedly that Republicans who distance themselves from Trump, alienating his rock-solid base, don’t earn any crossover love from Democrats and so end up with less voter support than they had before.
So they can’t win without him. But in a blue state, can they win with him? This is the one to watch on election night, as it will decide whether one of the lasting legacies of Trumpism isn’t cobbling together a crazy-quilt of a new political party, but turning the entire West Coast a uniform shade of blue.
