Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the two Republican members of the Washington state congressional delegation who voted to impeach Donald Trump, has conceded her reelection attempt after being surpassed in late vote tallies by a GOP opponent backed by the outgoing president.
In the 3rd Congressional District race, Trump had endorsed Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, and targeted the six-term incumbent. Southwest Washington is home to the district, which is separated from Portland, Oregon, by a boundary.
On election night, Kent, who won a seat in the U.S. House for the first time in 2010, trailed Herrera Beutler by around 4,700 votes.
However, her advantage dwindled over the next week, and Monday night’s updated results moved Kent above and into the No. 2 position.
Kent was ahead of Herrera Beutler by 928 votes after the largest county in the district, Clark County, and Thurston County updated their results on Tuesday.
According to the Associated Press, there are still approximately 10,000 ballots to be counted, therefore it is still too early to declare who will advance to the primary round as the second contender.
Following the most recent development, Herrera Beutler conceded in an email, writing, “Since I was originally elected to this position, I have done my very best to serve my home region and our country.”
She stated, “Though my campaign fell short this time, I’m pleased with all we’ve accomplished together for the place where I was raised and still call home,” adding, “I’m proud that I always told the truth, kept to my convictions, and did what I knew to be best for our country.”
The top two vote-getters in each race on August 2 proceed to the November election under the Washington primary system, regardless of party. Voters in the mail-voting state of Washington are not required to identify their political party.
As the top vote-getter in the Aug. 2 primary with 31% of the vote, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez had already qualified for the November ballot.
The secretary of state’s office reports that Rep. John Miller, who lost to Ralph Horr in 1930, was the last sitting congressman to lose in a primary in Washington state.
Because Washington is a vote-by-mail state where votes only need to be received by election day, it frequently takes days to discover the final results of close contests as ballots arrive at county election offices throughout the week.
The votes in the Clark County Auditor’s office took longer to process than usual, according to Greg Kimsey on Tuesday, since many more voters kept their ballots longer than in past elections. 92,300 ballots were received between Monday and Wednesday of last week, according to Kimsey, as opposed to 49,000 during the same three days in 2018.
Following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Herrera Beutler said she had no regrets about her vote to impeach, and she stood by her remarks both on the floor and on Twitter.
She also revealed that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had told him that he had spoken with Trump as rioters stormed the Capitol and that the president had said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” according to McCarthy.
On Steve Bannon’s podcast on Monday, Kent criticized the state primarily as “not a transparent process” and claimed that he had to correct a signature issue with his own ballot that day.
Kent is a regular on conservative cable shows and shares the former president’s complaints about the outcome of the 2020 election.
Elections officials in the county, including Kimsey, stressed that the procedure for guaranteeing the security and integrity of the state’s vote-by-mail system depends critically on signature verification.
The 3rd Congressional District campaign “is going to be a national bellwether for the direction of the country, and for the future of our democracy,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement released Monday night after Kent gained the upper hand. She cited Kent’s remarks about the state’s elections.
Four of the ten House Republicans who supported impeaching Trump did not seek reelection. Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina lost to a Trump-backed opponent in June, while Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan lost to John Gibbs in a primary last week.
Dan Newhouse, a Washington state representative, defeated a rival who had received support from Donald Trump to win the right to run in the general election this November with Democratic challenger Doug White.
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According to Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy at Washington State University, he was able to win his primary with only 25% of the vote because three anti-Newhouse Republicans received double-digit percentages from their primary voters.
It was close, but not enough to split the anti-incumbent Republican vote in the third district, where Kent and Heidi St. John were the only two credible Republican opponents.
Despite campaign manager Ozzie Gonzalez saying in an email sent last week that Kent would wait until the winner was confirmed, the Kent campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
County canvassing boards must certify the results by August 16 for counties to have until August 19 for the secretary of state to do the same. Counties have till August 16 to complete their count.
