Mark Medina had seen enough.
It was late February. The Clark County Republican Party had just announced plans to tap then-state Rep. Matt Shea, a Republican from Spokane Valley who has espoused ‘biblical warfare,” to emcee a fundraiser in the spring.
“It’s really disturbing where we’ve gone,” he remembered thinking.
The 41-year-old Republican, who planned to be a preacher before entering social work, felt Republicans nationally and locally have steadily abandoned moderate policies to align with a fringe conservative agenda.
Medina is campaigning for his first political office. He is running to be a precinct officer, representing his hilly, central Vancouver neighborhood at local party meetings.
“I think they’re blinded by a bubble. And it’s built out of willful ignorance,” he said. “It’s going to cost them. I’m not the only conservative who’s tired of seeing this happen to our party.”
Washington state’s primary elections are Tuesday. In Clark County, staunchly right ideals – backed by the local GOP – will be facing off against a right-of-center ethos that moderate Republicans say is best for the county’s purple districts.
And while primaries often reveal a party’s fault lines, political experts and candidates said there is a particularly bitter recent history among Clark County Republicans.
As John Ley, a GOP-backed candidate for state Senate told OPB, there exists a “huge chasm” among local Republicans around the future of the party.
Wrapped around the axle
The causes of the chasm differ depending on whom you ask, but there are common ingredients: differing politics around taxes, controversial individuals like Shea, and a large fine by state campaign regulators a few years ago.
It was June 2018 when the Clark County Republican Party received a $75,000 fine for failing to report campaign contributions in a timely fashion. The fine was later halved to $37,500, but the financial woe caused a lasting strain.
“There was a huge divide created by the whole scenario,” Ley said. In fact, the party stopped paying its lease for its headquarters. “A lot of blame and finger-pointing happened over that fine.”
Typical political disputes became heightened as a result. People who cast votes or promoted policies that strayed from the party line were quickly labeled a “RINO,” a Republican in name only.
Sen. Ann Rivers and Clark County Councilor John Blom, both incumbents, said votes they’ve made in the past kept the label pinned on them within the party.
“You have to decide what’s really best for the people you’re representing – and is that always aligned with the strict party platform?” Blom said.
It was a calculus Blom no longer wanted to make. When he filed for re-election in May, the realtor dropped his Republican party affiliation. Then, hours before deadline, the GOP found a Republican to put on the ticket: Karen Bowerman, a former professor in the California State University system and the wife of party chair Earl Bowerman.
In recent campaign videos, Karen Bowerman has played up Blom’s vote as a rubber stamp for new taxes, including a property tax increase built into next year’s budget.
“Every year he’s been in office, my opponent Blom has voted for the highest allowed tax increases, and he’s already promised the same for your 2021 budget,” she said in a recent video. “What a campaign promise: tax to the max.”
Neither Karen nor Earl Bowerman responded to multiple requests for interviews.
A similar reputation trails Rivers. She voted in favor of a gas tax in 2015 and had a hand in passing tax reforms to fund K-12 education, both of which have marked her as a tax-and-spend official. Ley, her primary challenger, said Rivers has flip-flopped and now favors replacing the Interstate 5 bridge and tolling to pay for it.
“She’s moved further away from what she alleged were her original conservative roots,” Ley said.
However, unlike Blom, Rivers still has an “R” next to her name. Still, the local GOP doesn’t see her as part of the party.
According to multiple sources and unapproved minutes from the most recent meeting of the local GOP, the party in July decided Rivers no longer “met the standards for being a Republican under (party) bylaws.”
Party bylaws prevent endorsing one Republican in a primary if two Republicans are present. So, the local party revoked Rivers’ Republican status, allowing it to endorse Ley’s bid.
Ley, a retired commercial airline pilot passionate about transportation issues, described himself as the “true conservative” choice for the 18th legislative district. The district encompasses the outlying areas around the increasingly liberal city of Vancouver.
“If people like the incumbent senator, then they should vote for her. And if they think she has done a great job representing them, then she’ll get re-elected by the people,” he said. “I believe the incumbent has broken several promises to the people.”
Rivers said she wasn’t surprised the GOP abandoned her.
“I haven’t been endorsed by the Republican Party in Clark County in, I think, two races,” she said. “I can’t get wrapped around the axle because so few Republicans are actually even engaged with the Republican party.”
During this election cycle, Blom and Rivers have faced complaints filed to the state’s regulatory body for election transparency, alleging they threatened a local businessman for refusing a bribe.
The Washington Public Disclosure Commission declined last week to investigate either claim. But both incumbents’ GOP-backed opponents championed the claims on social media, however.
In response last week, Rivers launched a barbed campaign ad.
“I have a message for my opponent: integrity matters,” she said in the spot. “Deceiving the people of our district, manipulating them with false facts and information, is not going to move their ball forward.”
‘Do they want to win elections?'
Much of that may be palace intrigue, but it also may be an entirely typical way the political pendulum swings in America.
Infighting occurs constantly within the two umbrella parties, said Mark Stephan, a political science instructor at Washington State University Vancouver. It may be less noticeable in Democrats today, however, because political groups coalesce more if they have a common enemy.
“That was true for Hillary Clinton, that is true for Donald Trump,” Stephan said. “That tends to get people to focus a bit on opposition rather than each other. That can help.”
Still, he said, disputes usually spill into the public when there is a major policy dispute or a more entrenched ideological gulf.
Medina, the candidate for neighborhood delegate, said he’s more concerned with the latter.
Mark Medina stands outside his home in his central Vancouver neighborhood. Medina, 41, says he's running for a local office because he's frustrated with the direction of the local Republican party.
Troy Brynelson / Troy Brynelson
The Las Vegas-born Republican is pro-life and pro-Second Amendment. He embraces “America First” economic policies, he said. But he lamented what he perceives as a normalization of racism and xenophobia.
“I’m tired of everybody not being equal under Trump,” he said, pointing to Trump’s border wall and travel bans. “He picks enemies, he picks on people, finds groups that he can control so he can antagonize them. That’s not OK.”
To Medina, there is a “rot” in the character of local conservative politics. He said he hasn’t needed to look far to find examples.
His neighborhood’s last representative at the local GOP was a man named Dan Clark. Clark drew headlines last October when — after Clark County party officials tried to promote him to lead the party’s Bylaws and Resolutions committee — it was revealed he had criminal convictions involving sneaking into the bedroom of a 15-year-old girl when he was 43.
The scandal caused several local and state Republicans to condemn Bowerman and the party.
“We are deeply disappointed by the appalling lack of judgment provided by many of those in leadership of our party,” read the letter, signed by Blom and fellow councilor Julie Olson, state Sens. Lynda Wilson and Ann Rivers, and state Reps. Brandon Vick, Larry Hoff, Paul Harris and Chris Corry.
Then, in February, the announcement Shea would emcee a local fundraiser alarmed Medina and spurred him to campaign.
“You know, religious preferences from government are just one of the things that we absolutely cannot tolerate, and for the Republican Party to embrace it tells me that we’ve gotten so far astray,” he said. “We need people to come back into the party and provide the kind of leadership that’s really needed.”
A politician like Blom has to hope more voters feel that way, too. On Tuesday, he must finish in the top two against both a Democrat and a Republican.
When asked if there is room enough in the Republican party for someone like him and the leadership of the local GOP, he said that isn’t a question he can answer.
“I think the question parties have to decide is, ‘Do they want to win elections?’” he said. “Or do they want to have a small group of ideologically ‘pure’ individuals that can’t actually get anything done?”