Michael Baumgartner

Voters considering who will represent Eastern Washington in Congress for the next two years may experience a bout of déjà vu when they see their ballots, but a lot has changed since Michael Baumgartner and Carmela Conroy first competed for the seat in 2024.

Baumgartner handily defeated Conroy that November with over 60% of the vote, but before the night was over, Conroy already declared she would seek a rematch.

At least 10 people who also ran this year believed Conroy wasn’t the right candidate to end 32 years of Republican control of the district, but only Spokane firefighter Nate Powell, an independent dark horse candidate backed by a sizable dark-money campaign, came anywhere close to replacing her on the ballot. In the end, with nearly 19% of the vote, Conroy cemented her place in the general election this fall.

While this vote share was eclipsed by Baumgartner’s 47%, the incumbent was the only Republican in the race, and it was the first time since 1992 that Republicans got less than a majority of the vote – which was also the last year a Democrat, former House Speaker Tom Foley, won the district. This year’s primary was complicated by the presence of a relatively popular independent candidate. While Powell has since endorsed Conroy, it’s unclear how much a Democrat can capitalize on a relatively poor showing for a Republican incumbent.

Baumgartner has argued that the first re-election is the hardest – at least in the context of a fundraiser email asking for support – but he also enters the midterms in a particularly unfavorable political environment for his party.

Despite some occasional tempered criticism of the president, over such issues as tariffs, Baumgartner has rarely if ever broken ranks on the chamber floor, including in a handful of cases where legislation championed by the president only passed by a few votes. As of Wednesday, Trump’s net approval rating was roughly 22 points underwater, and his handling of major issues such as inflation (-48), the economy (-33) and trade (-28) are even less popular, according to an aggregate of recent polls published by the Silver Bulletin.

It’s not clear if Baumgartner’s couched opposition to the president’s trade war – free trade is preferable and tariffs are undesirable, he has argued, though he has repeatedly voted to support tariffs while arguing the president can use them to gain concessions – will help distance him from its unpopularity. He has also been one of the most vocal supporters of the Iran War (-24.5 favorability), arguing the nation has been at war with the U.S. since the Islamic Revolution 50 years ago. He has committed to support the war “as long as it takes.”

Conroy has pointed to the trade war and armed conflict with Iran as major drivers of higher costs for residents of the district, arguing the incumbent has abdicated the authority of Congress to check the executive branch. Baumgartner has argued that voter frustration should be directed instead at the policies of state-level Democrats, blaming Washington’s climate policies for soaring gas prices, while pointing to tax breaks championed by Republicans in D.C. and a recent bipartisan housing affordability package.

Baumgartner has repeatedly invoked the president’s immigration policy as the reason Republicans came into power two years ago, which was Trump’s most popular policy when he came into office (+7 to 11.1 favorability in Trump’s first three months), though approval has dropped more than 20 points since then. The congressman has criticized some of the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, particularly in Minneapolis, but has broadly praised the president’s immigration strategy.

Meanwhile, Conroy has gone so far as to call for Congress to “dismantle and behead” the Department of Homeland Security – language she later denied and mildly walked back – arguing that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign was terrorizing local communities and villainizing migrants who had otherwise committed no crimes.

A litany of favorability polls indicate 2026 is likely to be a bad year for Republicans, but they reflect national attitudes. There’s a dearth of public polling in Eastern Washington, so it’s less clear how the national sentiments compare to those of the relatively conservative voters of the district. For reference, Trump in 2024 won the national popular vote by 1.5 points, but won over voters in the 5th Congressional District by nearly 10.7 points – and Baumgartner doubled that margin with a 21.3-point win over Conroy.

But 2024 was a swing year when Democrats had held the presidency and lost across the board, and midterms tend to swing against the party in power.

Rewind to the last midterm when Trump was president, to the 2018 race between then-incumbent Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Democratic challenger Lisa Brown. Trump’s national approval rating was -14 during the election, according to Gallup polling, and McMorris Rodgers still defeated Brown by around 9.5 points.

While the president’s approval rating is eight points lower today than it was eight years ago, it remains to be seen whether a blue wave will crest high enough to carry Conroy above the Eastern Washington bulwark that has repelled Democrats for a generation.

One sign that the landscape may have shifted is the recent announcement that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has added the 5th Congressional District to its list of winnable races.

“Families are struggling in Eastern Washington,” said Congresswoman Suzan DelBene, who represents Redmond and Bellevue and is chair of the DCCC, in a recent news conference. “They’ve been hit incredibly hard, not only with disasters and fires, rising costs. We’re a trade-dependent state, impacted by trade – our farmers being hurt.”

“So absolutely, this is on the map,” DelBene added. “I think Donald Trump made sure to endorse Baumgartner and to call out Carmela, which says – I think, also is a sign that they’re pretty scared there.”

Baumgartner, meanwhile, has taken to fundraising off the back of his race being targeted by the DCCC – as Conroy has fundraised off the back of Trump’s Oval Office endorsement of Baumgartner.

It remains to be seen how that fundraising has been going.

Federal candidates haven’t had to publicly report the size of their war chests since mid-July, and the latest quarterly report won’t be out for another week. At last count, Conroy had raised nearly $400,000, compared to just above $600,000 she raised by the end of the 2024 election. Having won the primary since the last report came out, it’s likely she has since cracked her fundraising total from last cycle.

Baumgartner, meanwhile, topped his 2024 figures before the summer was out. He had already raised more than $1.7 million by mid-July, a good bit more than the $1.5 million he raised in 2024, and that figure has also certainly grown in the intervening three months.

With ballots arriving soon and the election just a few weeks away, both will likely use that money to blanket the airwaves, hoping to convince voters as November swiftly approaches.

“Conroy thinks it’s fair to raise Social Security taxes,” states one of two similar videos from the Baumgartner campaign. “Conroy is too far left for Eastern Washington, and that isn’t right.”

“In Eastern Washington, we fix things ourselves,” states an ad Conroy began airing in late September. “So does Carmela Conroy.”