Ballots go out today. They’ll hit most mailboxes Friday. In honor of our Democracy I’ve decided to hit the campaign trail and attend three public events in three different Congressional races across the state. Today I’m headed out to the debate between Dino Rossi and Kim Schrier in Ellensburg, which will be the first time we’ll get to see the candidates face off on the same stage. Tomorrow I’ll cover the Rep. Adam Smith v. Sarah Smith debate in Seattle.
But to kick off this mini-series, I traveled down to Battle Ground, WA, where Democrat Carolyn Long drew a crowd of 100 to a town hall at the Center Point Conference Center.
Last month Herrera Beutler declined an invitation from the League of Women Voters to debate Long in the small town just north of Vancouver, WA. The LWV found out about the rejection in the papers and uncharacteristically threw some shade at Herrera Beutler in The Columbian, saying they “bent (over) backwards” to get the Congresswoman to agree to debate, but she “did not react.” Long decided to darken the shade by turning the canceled debate into her own town hall in the incumbent’s hometown.
Given the circumstances of the event, and given the tenor of the negative ads from Herrera Beutler, I expected a little more blood in Battle Ground. What I found was a bunch of excitement and polite concern!
A day after raising nearly three times as much money as her opponent last quarter, Long entered the room to a round of applause. “You are a rock star!” someone shouted. She immediately started working the room, at one point running into her old biology teacher, “Mr. Gary,” who jokingly claimed she still had two outstanding absences. These people were fans.
Long fielded questions for an hour about health care, term limits, Washington state’s carbon fee, campaign finance reform, gun safety, redistricting, student loan debts, Kavanaugh, the electoral college, veterans issues. She maintained her center-left position on all fronts, saying she wants to shore up Obamacare, keep term limits, get rid of dark money in politics, pass responsible gun safety laws, get rid of interest on student loans (!!!), and in general promote the idea of letting “science guide public policy.”
Her criticisms of Herrera Beutler focused on policy and money. She slammed the Congresswoman for taking $56,000 from Big Pharma and then voting for the Republican Tax Cuts, which gave a big break to pharmaceutical companies. Herrera Beutler shot back at Long for this criticism in a negative ad, claiming she’s the one who’s actually in the pocket of the drug companies because her husband is a sales rep for Sanofi-Aventis and the family has retirement funds invested in pharmaceuticals.
Over the phone, Long told me she thinks this line of attack is “incredibly sexist.”
“All women should be offended by the allegation that because someone’s husband works in a certain profession that means she will mimic his viewpoints,” she said. As everyone has reported for a while now, Long and her husband belong to different political parties and have different perspectives on the issues. Long says she wants Medicare to be able to negotiate prices with drug companies, which isn’t something Herrera Beutler likes. “And one of the things I’m proud of, having worked since 12, is that I have my own pension that is separate from my husband’s,” Long added.
At the town hall, Long would occasionally, maddeningly (to this reporter), merely present the two sides of an argument about a contentious issue and say she’d “continue exploring it.” When Shelly of Battle Ground asked whether she should vote “yes” on I-1631, the carbon fee initiative, Long dodged diplomatically. Though she wants to fight climate change as a federal official, she said she wasn’t “the best person” to weigh in on this state initiative. She likes that the initiative was organized and drafted by a broad coalition of stakeholders, but says that the Washington Building Trades union (which supports Long) was not supporting the measure, which concerned her. The world is melting. Long should support the initiative.
But Chris Fink, a retired educator and mom of three kids, said Long’s answer on the Carbon Fee initiative actually embodied what she liked about the candidate. “She owns what she does know and what she doesn’t know, and she’s not just saying what she thinks is going to convince us,” Fink said. She’s planning to canvas for Long for the first time this Saturday, driven by her policy positions and her message of civility. “I grew up in a time way back when there was much more civility in politics, people would work together. I want to return to that if possible,” Fink said, laughing.
Long’s presentation also seemed convincing to Freddie Rodriguez, 21, who runs a small business with his friends fixing camping equipment. He’s lived in Battle Ground for three years and says he’d never attended a town hall before last night. He hadn’t been following the Congressional race closely, but “big things in the news” spurred ” spurred him to Google the names of the candidates, which is how he found out about the forum.
“I thought it was going to be more boring. I thought it was just going to be a lot of old people talking about fruit stands or something the whole time,” Rodriguez said. “But it was interesting. It’s so great to have a personal experience with this, and I want to get more involved.”
Long is going to want to find as many people like Rodriguez as possible.
Though Long massively outraised her opponent in the last quarter, public polling appears to be conflicting at the moment. Internal polling from Long’s campaign, which can often be biased, shows the challenger up by two points after starting out 20 points behind at the beginning of the campaign. However, even though they haven’t concluded their polling and I probably shouldn’t mention it, Herrera Beutler is leading in the New York Times/Siena poll by 9 points. That number will likely change, but a lot of those little red dots indicating support for Herrera Beutler look appear to be popping up in Clark County, an area Long needs to win by overwhelming numbers.
Long maintains her optimism. “I just told my team this morning that this is why we don’t look at a partials, because it just freaks us all out,” she said over the phone. She points out that the Times/Siena pollsters are reaching more men and more people over the age of 65 than they want to, which might skew the results. “I’m very comfortable with our pollster. Our June poll was almost right on the money with the primary results in August, and I think the numbers are going to shake out for us in the end,” she added.
As an indicator of the increased enthusiasm for her campaign, Long says the team had to open up a new field office in Vancouver last week because they didn’t have the capacity to accommodate all of their volunteers. Long has offices in Longview, Bingen, and Vancouver, which covers a large part of the district. The campaign also boasts “super volunteers” that lead their canvass and phone banking efforts in Pacific and Wahkiakum counties. With only a few weeks to go in the campaign, Long plans to deploy her 1,600 volunteers in a “massive” get-out-the-vote effort.
Herrera Beutler and Long will face off at a candidate forum this evening in Goldendale, WA, which lies in the extreme east of the district. I’ve been told by more than two parties that the event will be “a shitshow.” The forum will include appearances by 17 candidates running for state and local offices, and it’s expected to draw a large crowd. Follow Katy Sword over at The Columbian for updates on that. And follow me tonight in Ellensburg at the debate between Rossi and Schrier.
