Endorsements Mean Something

The race in the 8th District, the party’s endorsement of Gabe Galbraith, and what we keep forgetting about how our own party actually works

Two Republicans are running for the open Senate seat in the 8th Legislative District, and a lot of people want to tell you it is a coin flip. It should not be a coin flip, and I want to explain why, because the reason goes straight to something I have been chewing on for a long time. What does an endorsement actually mean?

Here is my answer, and it is not complicated. When the county party endorses a candidate, that is the party speaking. The Benton County Republicans looked at this race, did the work, and endorsed Gabe Galbraith. That is not a friendly suggestion. That is the grassroots, the people closest to the ground, telling the rest of us who our candidate is.

How our party actually works

There is a notion floating around that the broader party should stay neutral in a contested primary, that an institution sits above the fray and lets things play out. With respect, that gets our party exactly backwards. If the party endorsed, why would they not help their endorsed candidate?

The National Republican Party, nor the State Republican Party are built from the capitol down. They are built from the precincts up. It is PCOs and county committees and the volunteers who knock the doors, staff the booths, run the dinners, and show up to the meetings nobody else wants to attend. When those people, organized as a county party, make an endorsement, they are not asking permission from anyone upstream. They are exercising the most basic function a political party has. An endorsement is supposed to be the considered judgment of the people who do the work, the volunteers and committee members who were themselves elected by their neighbors. It is not insiders overriding the voters. It is the grassroots pointing the way and asking the voters to confirm it at the ballot. When a local party renders that judgment, you would like Republicans would follow, democrats do, they respect it and get moving, but not republicans. We fight and have internal wars and call that principle.

I do this for a living. My job is to elect Republicans. And when the county party gives the marching orders, I follow them, because that is what it means to actually believe the grassroots run this party instead of just saying so on a podcast. An endorsement that the rest of the party shrugs at is not an endorsement. It is a press release. If we want the word to mean something again, we have to treat it like it means something, starting with the counties.

So let me be plain. The only ENDORSED Republican candidate in the 8th District is Gabe Galbraith.

The case for Gabe

And he is a strong one. Gabe is the president of the Kennewick School Board, a Marine, a security specialist out at Hanford, a small business owner, and a Kamiakin High School graduate who was born and raised in the Tri-Cities. He did not parachute into the 8th looking for a seat. He has lived his whole life in it.

His record is the kind we say we want and too rarely get. On the school board he backed putting more safety officers in Kennewick elementary schools. He pushed conservative reforms when it was not comfortable to do so. He ran the kind of hard-nosed budget oversight that, by his telling, left his district in some of the strongest fiscal shape in the Mid-Columbia. He won his last election without much opposition, because the people who actually know him kept him in the job. When a voter in Kennewick looks down the ballot and sees Gabe Galbraith, they are looking at a neighbor with a record they can check, not a name they are meeting for the first time.

The honest contrast

His opponent is Sen. Nikki Torres, and I will tell her story straight, because the facts are contrast enough without any spin.

She first won the old 15th District in 2022, and even that did not come the usual way. She had changed her voter registration to an address north of Pasco in order to run there, and the district’s long-time senator, Jim Honeyford, withdrew the Monday right after filing week closed. The seat fell open at the last possible moment and she stepped into it, a sequence that drew its own controversy at the time. In 2024 a federal judge tore up the Central Washington maps and drew her clean out of the district she represented. I will give her this honestly. That part was the court’s doing, not hers, and the Lasnik gerrymander has earned every bit of the criticism Republicans have aimed at it. But what came next was a series of choices. She announced for the new 15th and said she would move into it to run. Then this seat came open, and she pivoted again, moved across town, and filed in the 8th instead.

Whatever you think of the reasons, the result is simple and it matters. Torres has roots in the Tri-Cities, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. She has lived in Pasco for decades and served on its city council. But she has never once been on the ballot in the 8th District. Gabe has. Voters here have already elected him, more than once, to the Kennewick School Board. They have never had the chance to weigh in on Nikki at all, because until a few months ago she was running somewhere else. A district deserves a senator its own voters have actually had the chance to choose.

The residency question is fair

There has been a lot of noise about residency in this race, and I want to cut through it. Under Washington law, any registered voter has the right to challenge whether a person actually lives where they are registered. It is right there in statute, and the burden is on the citizen to personally verify the facts and swear to them under penalty of perjury. Asking where a candidate truly lives is not a smear and it is not harassment. It is the kind of civic oversight the law plainly contemplates, and it is a fair question.

And it is not a complicated question. Where does Nikki Torres live? The 15th, the 16th, or the 8th? The voters are not trying to trap her. They just want to know where their senator actually lives, and they deserve a straight answer. So which district does she actually live in? Quit the games.

It is also a question that got uglier than it ever should have. A pending case is involved, so I am not going to litigate it here or convict anyone in a newsletter, and I am not pretending every method in this fight was beyond criticism. Politics is nasty, but family and children should never be brought into it. The underlying question, though, is legitimate on its own, and it does not need the rest of the drama attached to it. We can ask a fair question without the media circus currently playing out. Republicans do not do victim mentality. Let us keep it that way. Just answer the question.

This is grassroots working

Come back to where I began, because this is the whole point. I have worried out loud for a long time about what grassroots even means anymore, whether it still means knocking doors and talking to neighbors or whether it has curdled into people performing politics online and calling it organizing. Here is grassroots working the way it is supposed to. The people who live in the 8th and do the unglamorous work looked at this race and made a call. The right response to that is not to second-guess them from a safe distance. It is to hopefully back their judgment and go win.

The grassroots only matter until they don’t

Here is the part that really gets me. Look at who lined up where. The incumbents, the legislators, the people already holding power, rallied around Nikki. She is the established candidate, one of their own, and they closed ranks to protect her. Gabe, the grassroots candidate the county actually endorsed, got left out to dry.

It follows a pattern I have watched too many times. When these elected officials are climbing, they tell the grassroots they want to work with them, that they need them, that they cannot win without them. And they mean it, right up until the grassroots make a call they do not like. Then they turn. They withhold the money. They go into survival mode. They act like every door that got knocked and every hour that got volunteered suddenly counts for nothing.

Well, newsflash. If the grassroots do not matter, then how did you get there? Who do you think put you in that seat?

This is bigger than one race. Stop trying to grow your own influence at the expense of my liberty. That goes for everyone in power. Chairs, electeds, all of them. Stop. The whole point of this is supposed to be that we protect one another’s liberty even when it costs us our own influence. Too many people get that exactly backwards. They will spend your liberty to protect their power and call it leadership.

What we keep doing to ourselves

Here is what makes the whole thing so maddening. This is a safe Republican seat. Whoever wins in November, the 8th is sending a Republican to Olympia. There is no Democrat to beat here. So every bit of the bitterness in this race, the money, the lawyers, the circus, is something we are doing to ourselves over a seat we already own.

That habit is bigger than this one race, and it is the thing that actually holds us back. The Democratic Party is splintering nationally, and what is rising in its place looks more like a socialist takeover by the month. By every normal rule of politics, common-sense conservatives should be cleaning up. Instead we take the seats we already hold and turn them into circular firing squads, we hesitate to get behind our own, and we treat unity like it is optional. And then on the rare occasions we do win real power, we get to the table and start cutting deals instead of delivering, because the deal feels like an accomplishment and the actual work is hard.

Screw the deals. Win, and then go to work for the people. Lower their cost of living. Make their streets safe. Stop wasting their money. Get out of their way. That is the entire job. We make it complicated because complicated lets us off the hook.

The only credential that counts

And one more thing, because it has been eating at me. I am tired of the so-called political experts trying to disqualify good people, sniffing that this one or that one is not qualified enough for the office. Here is the news flash. The only thing that has ever qualified anyone for office is this. The people vote for them, and they win. That is the whole list. Not what a local reporter decides. Not what some consultant with a contract thinks. The voters are the only credential that counts.

Go read about the people who founded this country. Farmers, printers, soldiers, shopkeepers, half of them self-taught. Not one of them would have cleared the bar these experts hold up today. They qualified the only way that has ever mattered, by earning the trust of the people they served.

The people are not asking for the most polished resume or the consultant-approved pedigree. They want someone who will actually work for them. Show up, bust their ass, and deliver. Enough with the bullshit.

The family meeting, and the long view

This is the family meeting I keep saying we need to have. Not a unity rally where we clap for each other and go home, but a real conversation about what kind of party we want to be. And a big piece of the answer is sitting right here in the 8th. We can be a party that trusts its own people and pulls in one direction, or one that turns every seat into an internal partisan brawl. We do not get to claim the first while living the second.

This year the country turns 250. That is the long view, and the long view is the one we keep refusing to take. We are never going to figure out how to be a united country again if we cannot even rally behind our own candidate in a single safe seat in the Tri-Cities without tearing each other apart first. Unity does not show up on its own at the national level. It gets built from the bottom up. On a porch, in a church basement, at a county meeting where people decide to treat each other with respect, and mutually pledge to work towards a better country for all.

The Benton County Republican Party made its decision. The voters of the 8th made theirs long before that, every time Gabe Galbraith’s name was on their ballot. The rest of the party and legislators in the 8th should rally to him, but they won’t. The back-and-forth drama needs to end, because at the end of the day the only thing that matters is the question the voters alone get to answer: who do they trust more to lead this district for the next four years? In my opinion, let’s get behind the candidate the people of the 8th & Benton County Republicans already know, and win. I have had a long hiatus, but I’m back in the saddle. We have lots to cover, stay tuned for my next series.