Brett Simpson spoke at City Hall last week and didn’t wait long to tell the crowd who he was. To loud cheers, Simpson, who is running for Clark County auditor, told the crowd, “I’m your local voter.”
But the roughly 65 people who gathered last Thursday in Ridgefield to hear Simpson after a town hall in Southwest Washington for Republican Joe Kent don’t seem to be representative of the general electorate.
Simpson trailed longtime Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey by a nearly 3-to-1 margin in Tuesday night’s primary election.
Election skeptics in Washington had a rough night. Republicans, who played along and campaigned on tales of election fraud, are doing badly — at least for now.
Candidates campaigning for county auditor — the local office that conducts elections by mailing, receiving, verifying and counting ballots — questioning the election system are also trailing in Mason, Pend Ore and Spokane counties.
As in Kimsey’s race, the race in Pend Oreille is not close, with County Auditor Marianne Nichols leading by nearly 3 to 1. But races in Mason and Spokane counties, where GOP Rep. Bob McCaslin is challenging Auditor Vicki Dalton, remain close. These results could still be reversed in the coming days.
Meanwhile, the two Republican state lawmakers who have come forward about election fraud — Reps. Robert Sutherland of Granite Falls and Rod Chase of Spokane Valley — have backed away from challengers within their own party. Sutherland used taxpayer dollars to attend the MyPillow election symposium last year in South Dakota, and Chase helped organize an event in Idaho that promoted stories of election fraud.
Kent, who has vowed to use congressional powers to investigate the 2020 election, is trailing Democrat Marie Glusenkamp Perez by less than 6,000 votes in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District. It’s still close enough that the results will change as more ballots come in and are counted in the coming days.
And state Rep. Brad Klippert, a Kennewick Republican who has been running a write-in campaign for secretary of state since the GOP was shut out in the August primary, is sitting somewhere at 3 percent or below. This comes after Clippert received the endorsements of the Washington State Republican Party and the King County Republican Party.
But in that race, Democratic Secretary of State nominee Steve Hobbs won after nonpartisan challenger Julie Anderson lost the race Thursday. Meanwhile, 3 percent of the write-in ballots have not yet been broken down by name and may not all be for Klippert.
The results mirror the struggles of other prominent candidates across the country, who have cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election, said longtime Washington pollster Stewart Elway. He drew attention to Mehmet Oz’s loss in the US Senate race from Pennsylvania and Republican Kari Lake’s loss in the Arizona governor’s race. The race in Arizona, however, remains too close to call.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted pressure from former President Donald Trump to change the 2020 results, won re-election.
“Most election deniers don’t win,” Elway said. “And if it also applies to these local races, then that would be a big message for the Republican Party to get away from that message.”
