Traffic whizzes by a patch of grass crowded with election campaign signs along a busy stretch of Highway 503 in the southwest Washington city of Battle Ground. They’re promoting a jumble of Republican and Democratic candidates for different races, and they signal a bitter battle brewing in one of the state’s last swing districts.
Battle Ground is at the heart of the 18th Legislative District, an area that has been a Republican stronghold for decades but has been shifting blue in recent years. Currently, the district is represented by Republicans at the state House level, but it also has a Democratic state senator, a rarity in an increasingly divided Washington state, where a single party tends to control all the seats in a given district.
Democrats are looking to scoop up more legislative seats this November in Battle Ground and other chunks of Southwestern Washington as they edge toward a supermajority in Olympia — a shift that would give them broad power to pass legislation or redraw the state’s voting maps.
A total of four state House seats in the 18th and neighboring 17th Legislative District are up for election, and the sitting Republican representatives underperformed in the primary race against Democratic challengers.
Shifting demographics in the region are helping change who gets elected here, said Dean Nielson, a Democratic political consultant.
The area has long been home to conservative Christians — evident on a drive through Battle Ground, where there seems to be a church every few blocks — but more families are relocating up from the Portland metro area, just across the state line, looking for affordable housing.
“It's been Republican for most of the time I've been in politics for the last 30 years,” Nielson said. “It was rural turf, and as these areas have suburbanized, different types of people have moved there. Young families with kids and who are turned off, I think, by the national Republican social agenda, and they're turned off by, in particular, Donald Trump.”
This fall, Republican incumbents Reps. John Ley, Stephanie McClintock, Kevin Waters, and David Stuebe will face Democratic challengers, Deken Letinich, Randi Knott, Ben Christly, and Diana Perez respectively. After the August primary, all four Democratic challengers were leading their races with over 50% of the vote.
Part of what’s made these contests so competitive is a flood of attention and campaign dollars into a particularly hot Congressional race, Neilson said. The 17th and 18th Legislative Districts are located within the 3rd Congressional District, where incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is running against Republican John Braun, a state Senator. Nielson said extra money and support from this Congressional race has trickled into down-ballot matchups in the area.
Residents in Battle Ground are at the center of this fight between Democrats and Republicans. They say they’ve noticed politics in their area getting more polarized lately. Even their formerly quiet City Council meetings, which used to be civil and mostly focused on local issues, have changed in tone, said long-time resident Jessica Cole.
“People need to tone it down. We should be uniting around local issues, like roads,” said Cole.
She and other residents said local Republicans who are more aligned with national party talking points have issued Council proclamations vowing to protect the nuclear family and declaring support for Trump’s immigration crackdowns.
Cole, who said she used to be a Republican voter but who doesn’t identify with a political party now, said neither of her Republican state House representatives were advocating for her community. She mentioned Rep. Stephanie McClintock in particular.
“She used to be a school board member, and she did not come and speak in support of our school board. That's where you lose me,” Cole said. “I don't care what letter's behind your name if you're not gonna help us here on the ground where we live.”
The campaigns for Republicans representing the 17th and 18th Legislative Districts did not respond to KUOW’s requests for comment. But Chad Minnick, a Republican political consultant and strategist, said he believed it was too early to tell how the races in these Southwestern districts might end up in November.
“ The primary election is almost entirely comprised of partisan voters, and so, the primary election in Washington state ends up becoming more of a temperature-taking of the passion that each base has,” Minnick said.
“ What's been happening in Washington is the Democrats have been doing very well among Democrats, but, with a couple exceptions, they generally don't do well among non-partisan and swing voters,” he cautioned.
But as swing districts in the state disappear, more moderate candidates who can appeal to both Republican and Democratic voters may eventually be pushed out, said Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University. Donovan, who has studied Washington’s swing districts, likens this area of the southwest to “one of the last white rhinos.”
“We were just a much more competitive two-party state, even going back into the '90s or early 2000s,” he said.
Donovan added Washington’s government is trending toward even greater majority control by Democrats. The party is not expected to pick up enough wins this fall to attain a supermajority of the Legislature, but it could by 2028.
