Republican Spokane City Council Member Michael Cathcart and Republican accountant Dale Whitaker are currently locked in a bitter battle over who gets to be County Auditor. It’s not a particularly sexy job: It’s about conducting local elections, issuing vehicle and marriage licenses, and scrutinizing county finances.
But a year ago, during a summer drink at the Garland Drinkery, Cathcart said Whitaker presented him with a proposition: Promise to hire him as deputy auditor if Cathcart won the auditor election.
It’s a nice job: the chief deputy auditor’s salary starts at $93,000 and can eventually hit as high as $130,000. It’s the sole decision of the elected auditor to decide who gets that job.
According to Cathcart, Whitaker outlined a deal.
“He offered that he would not run against me if I were to hire him,” Cathcart said. “I told him my ethics would not allow that to take place.”
He said he did not want one of the most important early decisions he would make in leading “a trust-based office” to be “a political decision.”
Cathcart said that Whitaker followed up a few weeks later, in a conversation with another proposal: promise him the county elections director position. Cathcart said he refused that one too.
“I had others encouraging me to just do it to get over the politics of it,” Cathcart said. “I have zero interest in compromising my ethics and my values to win a political race. … If I lose this primary to him, at least I am losing it with my ethics intact.”
Whitaker declined RANGE’s interview request, writing in a text message he was so focused on meeting voters he wouldn’t have “time to sit down for a conversation.”
“Michael offered me a job last year if I stayed out of the race,” he wrote in a text message, saying that he decided to run anyway because “Michael isn’t qualified for the position.”
“He is absolutely lying,” Cathcart said.
It’s just one taste of the behind-the-scenes tension that has turned a race for a position that rarely makes headlines into one of the ugliest primaries in the county.
Cathcart has said he doesn’t want to make the race about his opponent, preferring to focus on his own platform of fiscal discipline and governmental transparency. But as the animosity between the two Republican candidates has deepened, the drama behind the curtain has spilled out into center stage. The Spokane County GOP has charged into the fray on Whitaker’s side — discouraging discussion of Whitaker’s vacated criminal past, challenging Cathcart to prove his bona fides, and even considering new rules to prevent endorsing him.
Spoils sport
Only two people — Cathcart and Whitaker — know exactly what went down at the Garland Drinkery last summer, and their stories contradict.
Republican Rep. Mike Volz, who considers Whitaker the more qualified auditor candidate, said he knew Whitaker had wanted to be hired by Cathcart.
“Dale reached out to me and said he was interested, and then that kind of went away,” Volz said. "I suggested to Cathcart to talk to Dale and if you guys could work together and run one candidate instead of two, we could avoid some of these problems.”
Cathcart said he felt Volz was nudging him to hire Whitaker.
“I’m not going to just blindly hire somebody who I don't know anything about and who may not have the necessary skills or character, frankly, to fill that role,” Cathcart said.
But Volz said he wasn’t trying to push Cathcart to make that kind of explicit deal.
"I've never encouraged anybody to do that, whether it's legal or not," Volz said. "I think that's poor form. I've never done it. Would never advocate for it."
County Commissioner Josh Kerns said he spoke with both Cathcart and Whitaker about their conversation before Whitaker had filed for auditor.
Kerns said Whitaker told him that Cathcart had initially agreed to hire him, but that, during a second meeting, Cathcart made it clear that he couldn’t promise anything. Kerns portrayed Whitaker as irritated.
"Dale felt, ‘That's a total 180! First he told me he would hire me, then he told me couldn't!’” Kerns recalled.
By June, rumors of Whitaker’s would-be deal with Cathcart had reached the ears of their Democratic opponent.
“That is very unethical, and I know that that happened,” Democratic auditor candidate Callie Gee told RANGE after we asked her if she would have agreed to a deal giving a potential opponent a job if they’d drop out. “I know that Dale went to Michael and said that. That is unacceptable.”
The rumors stretched across the state. Rep. Jim Walsh, chairman of the Washington state Republican Party, told RANGE he heard the inverse: that Whitaker had tried offering Cathcart a job.
For his part, Cathcart has worked much harder than Whitaker to bring RANGE evidence supporting his account: he sent over a screenshot of a Facebook Messenger conversation in May where he talked to a supporter about pressure for one Republican Auditor candidate or another to drop out of the race.
“You could offer Dale a job, like he asked for months ago …,” the supporter wrote.
“I have my ethics,” Cathcart replied in the screenshot. “He wanted to be deputy auditor or elections director. I’m not making a political hire for either one of those.”
Whitaker told RANGE he stands by his account, and that “Michael will do everything he can to make this campaign about anything other than his qualifications, or lack thereof, for this position.”
Promising jobs in exchange for political favors used to just be the way American politics worked.
In the 19th-Century era of powerful party machines run by guys like William “Boss” Tweed, elections ran on the “spoils system” — as in “to the victors belong the spoils.”
But by the turn of the century, political reformers had tarred this kind of patronage as a major source of corruption. Today, there are laws against promising employment for positions at the federal level in exchange for political activity.
In some states, there are precedents for prosecution: In 1978, a New York legislator was found guilty of state charges of corruption and “fraudulently and wrongfully affecting the result of a primary election” for offering a lucrative no-show job to a competitor in an attempt to stop him from running for his seat.
While local city and county governments in Washington state contain many “civil service” positions that are legally protected from the whims of political hires, there are no such restrictions on the deputy chief auditor position, said Vicky Dalton, the current auditor,
If a candidate gets elected and rewards one of their campaign workers by “giving them the chief deputy position, there’s nothing that prohibits that,” she said.
In the general sense, behind-the-scenes maneuvering and horse-trading over who is going to run for what is extremely common in the run-up to election filing. Walsh, the state GOP chair, said he generally doesn’t have a problem with that sort of thing as long as it happens before the candidates have entered the race.
“We’re always trying to preemptively resolve primaries,” said Walsh, another Whitaker supporter. “That didn’t happen this time.”
Instead, the race became an object lesson for just how messy a Republican-on-Republican battle during a three-way primary can become.
Deep convictions
The conservative political leadership in Spokane is sharply divided.
Cathcart has the support of much of the elected political establishment from Spokane, including Congressman Michael Baumgartner, former Spokane City Council Member Jonathan Bingle, state Sen. Jeff Holy and all three Republican county commissioners. Rep. Volz, meanwhile, has endorsed Whitaker, arguing Whitaker’s accounting experience makes him the most qualified candidate.
And Whitaker also has the key support of the Spokane County Republican Party central committee leadership.
Earlier this year, he was removed as the local party’s state committeeman for missing too many meetings. Yet the party’s official newsletters promote opportunities to door-knock on behalf of Whitaker, but not Cathcart.
On June 15, the Spokane County Republican Party put up a context-free “public service” Facebook post deceptively warning that a person publicly disclosing an “expunged” criminal conviction "may face legal issues."
The post ended with a wholly invented quote falsely attributed to Winston Churchill: "Smear campaigns are the last refuge of those who have no legitimate argument."
Any journalist who entered “Whitaker, Dale” into the Spokane County Court Viewer could figure out exactly which criminal conviction the post was alluding to.
A dispute in 2015 that began with Whitaker arguing with his girlfriend’s uncles on Facebook ended with Whitaker strangling his girlfriend on the floor.
This wasn’t some case of “he said/she said.” According to police records from the arrest, Whitaker himself told police that he grabbed his girlfriend by the throat and pushed her to the ground. He also told police that his girlfriend’s Black uncles were “racist pigs” and “fucking race baiters” and that he yelled at his girlfriend’s son to "get your mom before I fucking hit her.” He demanded his girlfriend be arrested too, saying that she hit him in the back of the head and sometimes goes "fucking crazy" because of her period.
Police say Whitaker kicked the living room couch as he was being escorted out and that they identified "speckled abrasions" on both sides of his girlfriend’s neck below the jaw line and "dried blood" behind her right ear.
He was initially charged with felony second-degree assault, but his plea deal got that downgraded to misdemeanor fourth-degree non-domestic violence assault. He married his girlfriend that same year. They are still together today.
“They worked it out. She stuck with him. Their minister was involved," said Volz, who said he’s spoken to both Whitaker and his wife. He said Whitaker regretted the assault “horribly since.”
In a 2022 interview, Whitaker claimed that after he became a Christian in his mid-20s, he began to process the roots of his anger, which he blamed on his parents' divorce.
But both his opponents, Gee and Cathcart, believe the assault raises relevant questions about Whitaker’s character. To Cathcart, there’s also the issue of whether Whitaker tells the whole truth: while being vetted by the GOP, Cathcart said, Whitaker denied he had had any criminal convictions. Cathcart said he did the same thing while running for Secretary of State in 2024.
In a legal sense, Whitaker has the right to say he was never convicted: As part of his plea, his criminal conviction was vacated after two years without reoffending. But to Cathcart, not revealing the full truth put the party and the integrity of the office at risk.
Domestic violence accusations can sometimes mean the end of political hopes in local politics. Whitaker has condemned efforts to dredge up the past, calling them irrelevant smears.
In 2022 and 2023, Whitaker was director of We Believe, We Vote, a local organization that assesses candidates’ adherence to Christian (and Republican Party) values. In that role, Whitaker argued that a candidate’s personal beliefs represented crucial information for voters, telling the Spokesman-Review “we want to raise up candidates that align with our values.”
The Spokane GOP’s efforts to squelch discussion of the assault may have backfired on Whitaker: It turned what might have been a story on a decade-old crime into a story about a heated political battle between two of their own.
To Cathcart, the Spokane GOP’s approach to defending Whitaker was a wild contrast from the way that the party leadership handled the anonymous AI-edited attack ad brochure that an unknown party sent out attacking Cathcart.
Along with accusing him of wearing a government-mandated mask in City Hall during the COVID pandemic, the ad pointed to Cathcart’s decision to accept the endorsement of two Democrats: Dalton and City Council President Becky Wilkerson.
While Spokane GOP Chair Rob Linebarger disavowed the ad, he hammered Cathcart in an official GOP email last month for being willing to accept an endorsement of a Democrat, writing that “a commander or leader should never accept aid and comfort from the enemy while engaged in battle …”
To Linebarger, the stakes went far beyond a primary for a county-level election’s position.
“We are on the right side of the spiritual war that we find ourselves in,” he wrote, “and we can win without favor from those we are working to defeat.”
Purity test
As the campaign has continued, the Spokane GOP leaders have continued to scrutinize Cathcart.
On June 30, John Scherling, the chair of the Spokane County Republican Party’s Candidate Committee, sent Cathcart an email demanding he answer a battery of questions: Does he actually agree with the Spokane Republican Party platform’s opposition to vote-by-mail? Did he tell the Spokesman-Review about Whitaker’s 2015 assault? Was he at a Democratic fundraiser for Danny Tarkenton, the candidate looking to unseat the Republican prosecutor?
“By what manner was it a good idea as a prominent ‘Republican Candidate’ to present yourself at this event?” Scherling wrote.
The letter ended with a hard deadline to respond in writing by 5 pm the next day because the committee would be holding an emergency meeting.
“I will respond directly,” Cathcart began in his reply, “but I want to start by saying plainly that I find this entire process deeply disingenuous.”
Cathcart was reluctant to share his full response with RANGE — arguing the dispute wasn’t what he wanted the race to be about — but did so after we pointed to his rhetoric about transparency.
His 10-page PDF of a response ranged from indignant to outraged, condemning what he saw as a joke of a process that “raises serious moral concerns, not to mention practical electoral concerns.”
Cathcart wrote that he supported the local GOP platform he helped write in 2014 — including support for more in-person voting and Voter ID — but did not support the current platform that called for “single day in-person voting” without any specified exceptions, decrying its impact on military voters, disabled voters and “basic limited-government principles.”
And no, he wrote, he hadn’t been part of a Democratic fundraiser. (Tarkenton, running as an independent, confirmed he had never attended one of her fundraising events.) He attached screenshots showing that a person spreading those rumors had helped run Democratic County Commissioner Chris Jordan’s campaign.
Instead, Cathcart appeared with Gee at a “Donkey Club” event where all the auditor candidates were invited to speak.
Cathcart noted he had advanced conservative policy for years, including as a minority Republican on a city council dominated by Democrats.
“I have done real work in difficult rooms, not just performed purity for friendly audiences,” Cathcart wrote.
And by treating Whitaker’s vacated assault conviction as “merely as a paperwork problem” when it became “politically inconvenient,” Carthcart wrote, party leaders were squandering their credibility on “public trust, moral accountability, and family values.”
“If the Spokane GOP wants to hold candidates to honesty, transparency, and public trust, I welcome that standard,” he concluded. “But standards only mean something when they are applied equally.”
Reached by phone, Scherling asked how RANGE got the “private letter” and said the emergency meeting ultimately never took place.
“I'm not going to discuss anything further,” Scherling said.
By last Thursday, a salvo of new attacks was hammering Cathcart. Yakima Mayor Matt Brown — chair of the Yakima County Republican Party — launched his own website dedicated to attacking Cathcart. Echoing the same bullet points from the anonymous AI attack ad, the site accuses Cathcart of not being an authentic Republican.
And on Saturday, the Spokane County Republican Party introduced a resolution for consideration at their August convention. The resolution calls for defaulting to denying endorsements to any Republican who accepts an endorsement from a Democratic official, writing that their party had a “right not to associate with those who hate America and wish to see its downfall.”
Local political parties often choose leaders more radical than their rank-and-file — those willing to volunteer hundreds of hours working on politics tend to be die-hard in their positions.
Cathcart knows that well. At one time he was one of the party radicals, a Republican who pushed the party to rally behind the most libertarian Republican presidential candidate in 2012.
"He was a hardcore Ron Paul-er," Volz recalled, saying Michael has evolved since then.
There’s a cycle to these things: In Republican politics, you either die a radical or live long enough to become a “RINO” — a “Republican in Name Only.”
“A RINO is a Republican who gets elected,” Walsh likes to joke.
Cathcart said he’s still conservative — he and Whitaker have identical We Believe We Vote scores — but he says that he has become more pragmatic over time.
“I’ve demonstrated that I can work across political lines to get something done,” he said. “I’ve learned how things work, how you actually get things across the finish line.”
By contrast, he argues that us-vs-them rhetoric portraying the other side as the “enemy” is worth condemning, not just for moral reasons, but for practical ones.
“Treating a primary like a war is how you lose the general election,” Cathcart wrote in his letter to local GOP leadership.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to clarify the Spokane GOP's 2024 platform's mail-in voting stance.
