EDITOR’S NOTE: Just as RANGE was preparing to publish this story Friday, all hell broke loose at the Washington State Republican Convention, as the state GOP’s Candidate Endorsement Committee attempted to strike the governor’s endorsement from the convention ballot. Many speculated that the effort began because of a Seattle Times story alleging Bird had not disclosed pleading guilty to a misdemeanor larceny charge. But in a phone call with RANGE, Spokane Valley Council Member Al Merkel — member of the party in attendance — said the reason wasn’t clear. Nonetheless, Bird supporters seemed to take it as an effort to sideline their candidate. Footage tweeted by the Spokesman’s Emry Dinman showed Bird supporters standing and booing while waiving Bird campaign signs. The uproar led to a vote by the body to keep the governor’s race on the ballot. In response, Dave Reichert — the ostensible Republican frontrunner — said he would withdraw his hat from the endorsement, sharply criticizing the developments on Twitter.
Boy howdy, the drama! But the clamor underscores what our following piece covers in detail: Bird’s support in Eastern Washington is fueling his insurgent campaign, while establishment Republicans like Reichert clearly believe that it’s more important to win west-side moderates than fire up the base, even if that means rejecting your own party’s endorsement. Enjoy it. — Luke Baumgarten
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Conservatives have descended on Spokane this weekend for the Washington State Republican Convention. There will be a lot of pomp, some stumping, and a few votes, most importantly the vote by party delegates to endorse candidates for this year’s election.
In the race for Governor, Dave Reichert, a well-known former lawman and member of Congress, is assumed by many wonks and media people to be the conservative front-runner to make the general election. But there is a growing movement in the lands east of the Cascades, especially among Christians, to push hard for a passionate upstart named Semi Bird.
Bird has spent months cultivating this support, including making a series of at least six stops in the Spokane area since March of last year. In that same time, RANGE was unable to find evidence of a single visit by Reichert, and his campaign hasn’t responded to questions.
While Bird crisscrosses the fields and scablands of Eastern Washington to build name recognition, Reichert has focused on securing the moderate Republicans and persuadables in the suburbs up and down the expansive Seattle metro area. (National coverage in publications like Bloomberg calling Reichert the “Serial killer-hunting sheriff who wants to paint Washington Red” is a nice bonus.)
Reichert’s is the more traditional path for a Republican hoping to win statewide. Although no Republican has been governor of Washington in 40 years, Dino Rossi got close in 2004, using a similar strategy to the one Reichert is currently employing.
That strategy assumes two things about conservatives in Eastern Washington:
- First, that there aren't enough of them alone to decide who gets through the primaries.
- Second, that conservatives will all line up behind the Republican candidate in the general, regardless of who it is.
Semi Bird and the supporters he has cultivated east of the Cascades, though — including the Spokane County GOP, which gave him their endorsement last fall (Bird attended in person; Reichert sent a video) — want to test those assumptions, and they’re doing it this weekend in Spokane, at the convention.
With Governor Jay Inslee’s decision to not seek reelection, leaving the Democratic field without an incumbent for the first time in over a decade, and Republican operatives have seized on this election as their best opportunity to finally make it over the top. But the strength of Bird’s insurgency demonstrates that the Republican base in 2024 looks a lot different than it did in 2004 — a half-decade before even the emergence of the Tea Party movement, let alone MAGA.
Whoever clinches the state party nomination tomorrow or advances to the general after the August primary, the person of Semi Bird, and the passion he has ignited across Eastern Washington, demonstrates that any Republican hoping to win statewide office must weave together a broader ideological coalition than Rossi ever dreamed of.
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Bird’s fame among Eastern Washington conservatives is partially earned and partially made.
It was made during a recall from the Richland School Board in 2023, spurred by parent anger after Bird voted to make masks optional in the district the year before, in defiance of a state mask mandate to combat COVID-19 still in effect at that time. He began earning the fame, though, even before that. Bird was already running for governor when the recall was announced. His first campaign stop in Spokane was a meet-and-greet organized by the East Washington Freedom Alliance in March 2023, just after he announced his candidacy. At the event he was adamant about his commitment to the U.S. Constitution. Lawn signs for his campaign started popping up around Spokane even before last year’s election season concluded.
He had already been hard at work painting himself as a conservative true believer to other true believers. The recall cemented his status as a willing martyr to the fight against government overreach.
His campaign slogan is “Give Olympia the Bird.”
The Eastern Washington conservatives RANGE interviewed over the last several months said they love that about Bird: it represents attention to the needs of children, who they believe suffered from wearing masks. (While the mandates were part of public health measures designed to blunt the spread of COVID and overcrowding of hospitals, some studies have reported masking caused some children anxiety, stress and problems with concentration and learning.)
Bird “saw the kids struggling, and that hits home to me,” said MJ Bolt, the chair of the Spokane County GOP, which endorsed Bird shortly after he announced his campaign, in an interview with RANGE. “That's my heart, because the mental anguish of our kids through COVID and after COVID has been horrific.”
The Spokane GOP was one of the first county parties to endorse Bird’s campaign, late last summer. Of Washington’s 39 counties, Spokane and 16 others have endorsed Bird, according to his website. Eight county sheriffs have done the same. (By contrast, Reichert enjoys 30 sheriff endorsements. Reichert’s campaign website doesn’t list county endorsements.)
Conservatives in our region are also enamored about the attention Bird has given them. Bird has come to Spokane and Spokane Valley for at least four events (two at churches), and he headlined the county convention March 2. The county convention had more buzz than usual, as it also hosted a who’s who of GOP candidates for the U.S. congressional seat being vacated in November by Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Reichert did not show up to that event, effectively ignoring the most powerful block of conservatives in what is traditionally a powerful congressional district, hosting not just McMorris-Rodgers rise to near the top of Republican leadership, but also Democrat Tom Foley’s 40-year march to become Speaker of the House of Representatives more than 30 years ago.
One of those congressional candidates, City Council Member Jonathan Bingle, told RANGE in a recent interview that he supports Bird’s campaign and is seeking Bird’s endorsement in turn.
The symbolism of the March 2 event was hard to miss. Bird in person, Reichert on-screen in a taped video address, in which the former Sheriff invoked the biblical story of the Israelites in the desert after Moses led them from Egyptian bondage. “I've been living in a world that's upside down,” Reichert said. “I've been living in a world that's upside down. … We have a chance, after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, with no Republican government, we have a chance to make a change here.”
Reichert’s pitch was that gubernatorial electability runs through Seattle and its suburbs, not Eastern Washington. “I can win. Why? Because I've won nine elections before,” the recording went. “A lot of those elections have been in King County, where we need those votes.” Some folks in the crowd of hundreds clapped.
But then Bird was up to speak, in person, about the voters and the Constitution. He strode onto the stage and took the mic from Bolt. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
Reichert’s video hadn’t been stiff. He’s a seasoned politician and comfortable on camera, both from a career’s worth of law-enforcement press conferences and a long afterlife as a talking-head on true crime cable shows.
Bird, though, was loose. He worked the crowd. “Should I talk about Thomas Paine? Should I talk about President Washington?” Bird asked, rhetorically. Laughter rose from the pews. Bird chose not to talk about either, and instead pivoted into his trademark populism. “Let's talk about you.” The crowd was rapt. “Patriots, Republicans, Americans. … You are here, you are preserving, you are protecting the Constitution of the United States of America. And whenever you have a politician or an elected official or a candidate, if they're not talking about the Constitution, the Constitution, the Constitution, if they're not talking about that, something's wrong.”
Reading the room just right, he talked about God being on “your side” and about the 3% of Americans who many contemporary conservatives claim fought the British in the Revolutionary War and how today the US has reached another “1776 moment.”
RANGE reached out to Reichert’s campaign for an interview or a statement, but as of press time has not heard back.
At the end of the day, the county party had conducted a straw poll (technically it was a coffee stirrer poll). Trump ran away from Nikki Haley, who was still in the race at the time, garnering over 93% of the votes. Bird didn’t quite reach Trump numbers, but he still beat Reichert more than 4 to 1.
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It’s a long way to the governor’s mansion for Washington conservatives. Rossi came the closest in recent memory, losing by 129 votes to Christine Gregoire in 2004, a razor-thin margin that some conservative operatives in the state insisted was the result of fraud. The last Republican to hold the office was John Spellman, elected in 1981.
Bird’s campaign, if it were to be successful, would be historic in other ways. The last Eastern Washingtonian to hold the office was Clarence D. Martin, elected in 1932. The last Black man to hold the office was — well, there has never been a Black governor of Washington, a former part of the Oregon Territory, which barred Black people from migrating here from 1844 to 1866.
But if history teaches it’s going to be difficult for a Republican to win the governorship, and equally hard for someone as conservative as Bird to win the state party’s endorsement, all any of that means to Bird and his followers is that he is a historically unique candidate, riding a historic shift in Republican base politics, giving him an open lane and a significant tail wind to make history.
In February, Bird was the only of three invited governor candidates to show up to a meet-and-greet event at Calvary Spokane, a church just outside the city’s northern limits and within Mead School District, one of the places right-wing candidates have successfully won school board majorities in the county. (The other candidates invited were Reichert and Washington Attorney General and Democratic candidate Bob Ferguson.)
And while he is openly embraced by many Christians, most of his positions steer clear of Christian nationalist stances that have become so buzzy. Bird has a dash of Trump, but more hints of Reagan.
And while it would be easy for him to lean into governmental overreach and tyranny, given the recall, he has chosen instead to run, at least in part, as something of an endangered creature in American politics: a budget hawk.
Bird thinks government is too big. He promises to order on his first day in office a statewide audit of anything Washington spends money on. He leans directly into some of the culture wars that have consumed his party but is less than committed to others. For example, he is not on board with a central goal of the GOP base: prohibiting or limiting access to abortion care. That’s something Bird told RANGE Washington voters have repeatedly weighed in on. State code establishes a legal right to abortion.
“It's law,” Bird said of the procedure in an interview after his appearance at Calvary Spokane. “I value life from conception to last breath, and I will never back away from that. But it's not my druthers. It's the people that have voted on it.” Last week, Trump made headlines for charting a similar position.
Bolt said, “I think that's an appropriate response from Semi because that is his role to uphold the law.”
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Bird’s willingness to buck the more conservative aspects of party policy doesn’t end with reproductive rights. Last year, when he campaigned at Family of Faith Community Church, a woman in the pews told Bird what she wants in a governor: “I want somebody that knows God and that intends on taking God into the rooms with him and defeating these people that are trying to destroy our future, which is our children and our country because they hate it.”
Bird did not acquiesce.
“I'm down with some Jesus Christ,” Bird said, before qualifying, “there may be people who believe in a different belief. There may be people who do not believe at all. I have to acknowledge and represent the Constitution of the United States of America. I don't want to lose your vote. But the Constitution of the United States of America is the foundation of my administration.”
Though he didn’t use the term, his comments revolved around what has been an elephant in regional politics for years, and grown to become relevant nationally: Christian nationalism, the political belief that Christians should control the levers of power in a society and govern according to certain conceptions of Biblical values. There are broad variations of this belief, but many interpretations say that, if Christians cannot establish that control democratically, then democracy itself should be suborned to the will of their God.
Far-right Spokane pastor Matt Shea and several other Christian figures in the Inland Northwest have dedicated their lives and professions to advancing the Christian nationalist cause. The most prominent recent example of the growing Christian nationalist influence on the United States is the Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February that held frozen embryos are legally children with rights. Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote a concurrence to the ruling in which he cited the Bible and several other Christian texts as the legal reasoning for defining cryogenic embryos as full humans. Parker also spoke approvingly of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a Christian nationalist philosophy that Christians should control the heights of the seven realms of social influence: government, media, family, religion, entertainment, business and education.
If the stance that a zygote constitutes a person becomes recognized across the country as legal doctrine — and Republicans in at least a dozen states are drafting legislation that would do just that — the landscape of reproductive healthcare in the United States could become unrecognizable. As Time magazine noted, miscarriages could be increasingly investigated as murders. Abortion could become punishable by death in some states. It’s possible more fetuses will turn up in drainage ditches, as happened recently in North Idaho, where abortion is illegal with very few exceptions.
But Bolt said the most extreme versions of Christian nationalism do not represent most conservatives or even most Christians — or even most Christians who believe the Constitution is inspired by the Bible.
“I believe in the opportunity for any people of any religion to have the freedom to believe and walk that faith strongly, how they see fit,” said Bolt, who identifies as a Christian. “And that's what we believe as Republicans. That's what we believe as constitutionalists. That's why we believe in the Constitution.”
So what happens then, when Bird — the apparent constitutionalist — comes into contact with a figure like Matt Shea, who has not explicitly endorsed the Seven Mountains Mandate, but certainly preaches Christians controlling every aspect of culture and has a sticker on his laptop that says, simply “Dominion”?
Rather than hashing those positions out when Shea hosted Bird on his Patriot Radio talk show last spring, the two unpacked conservative positions they agreed on, with Shea skirting questions about issues they might disagree about, such as abortion. (“Homelessness is a product of addiction and mental illness,” Bird told Shea. “It is not the product of unaffordable housing.” The borders, Bird agreed with Shea, are a mess. Crime is out of control in Washington.)
Shea stopped short of endorsing Bird during that show, but Bird repeats all this and goes further when he comes to Spokane, where he said at his February stop at Calvary, “I stand with Texas,” a state that had defied a Supreme Court order to allow the feds to cut down razor wire it had put in the Rio Grande to stop immigration. (The wire has injured and even killed migrants crossing the border.)
These have been staple issues for Republicans for decades. But given Bird’s commitment in his governing philosophy to putting the Constitution before his religion, it does seem there’s a distinct separation between Bird and at least some of his supporters.
Folks who believe Christianity should be more influential in society are a complex group who don’t need Bird to check all the boxes. Many of them prove that with their support of former President Trump, who, despite allegedly being a serial adulterer, won much Christian support by promising to nominate Supreme Court candidates who would erode reproductive rights.
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It’s too early to characterize the support Eastern Washington conservatives feel for Bird as being as passionate or unequivocal as many of them feel for Trump, but the dynamics are clearly similar, and today’s controversy at the convention — whatever ended up going down! — suggests the state party might be on the verge of the kind of realignment we saw nationally in 2016.
It’s also not clear whether Reichert’s lead in the sparse, partisan polling data we have is evidence of actual popularity or merely name recognition. Bird hasn’t yet demonstrated an ability to make news the way Trump does, much less dominate every news cycle, and Washington state lacks the kind of press corps that would make such a thing possible.
But today’s dustup at the convention will definitely be news, so Bird’s profile will grow. And if Reichert is successful in pulling his name from consideration for the party endorsement, Bird becomes the most likely candidate to earn that endorsement. None of which means the chosen candidate of many Eastern Washington conservatives will make it past the primary, much less become our next governor.
It does seem obvious that the story we’ve been hearing — of a galvanized Republican party attracting enough fed up moderates to avenge Dino Rossi and finally return a conservative to office — has a few holes.
Between now and August 9th, we’re going to learn a lot more about just how big those holes are, and whether any of them are big enough to flip a Bird through.
