Whenever Nicolette Ocheltree tells people she’s running for the state legislature in the Sixth District, people keep responding with the same line: For which party?
It’s a joke. Kind of.
Ocheltree first made her name in local politics as a left-wing activist, counterprotesting anti-abortion rallies and speaking out for tenants’ rights at Spokane City Council meetings.
But then, in a surprise move in 2022, she was hired on as a legislative aide for Jonathan Bingle, the most right-wing member of the council.
“I started with a megaphone screaming at the City Hall building,” Ocheltree said. “I traded that for the podium mic to give testimony to council members, and then traded that for a [council] job, and every step of the way trying to impact change.”
Her role as Bingle’s aide didn’t last long — a few months into the job, then-council president Breean Beggs offered her a better-paying job, in a subject matter she really cared about: She was made the council’s manager of Housing and Homelessness Initiatives. She thinks they moved her for strategic reasons too.
“I think in some of their minds, I was making Jonathan too powerful,” Ocheltree said. She’s at least half-serious.
But Bingle lost re-election for city council — blame over-confidence and a failure to knock on enough doors in a district where personal contact matters more than ideology.
With Rep. Jenny Graham retiring and Rep. Mike Volz vacating his seat to focus on his role as county treasurer, both spots are open in the 6th legislative district, covering the northwest of Spokane County. And now, Ocheltree and Bingle are both gunning for a seat.
They aren’t running against each other, as interesting as that would be. Ocheltree says that would be strategically stupid. Bingle already has a bunch of money and an endorsement from the incumbent.
“He's going to come out a juggernaut,” Ocheltree said. Besides, for as much as she disagrees with much of his politics, she’s not trying to sabotage him.
“I'd like to be a seatmate of his,” Ocheltree said. “That's my ideal scenario."
For either to succeed, they’ll have to break out of the bounds of their parties: To win in a district that hasn’t seen a Democrat in 16 years, Ocheltree will have to sway the support of independents and Republicans. And to anything done in Democrat-dominated Olympia, Bingle will have to convince progressives to work with him.
Ocheltree, for her part, is making her friendship with Bingle a part of her campaign strategy — a contrast to the partisan nastiness that pervades so much of politics.
"It's happened before, where people are like 'what the hell are you doing, working together?" Ocheltree said. “Maybe people will actually see that Jonathan and I get along, making each other better thinkers and better doers.”
Cats and dogs, living together
Consider, for a moment, one of the most wholesome of all clickbait tropes: the unlikely animal friendship. The hippo who hangs out with the tortoise; the snake who’s buddies with a hamster; the lion that lays down with the lamb.
Bingle and Ocheltree are the Unlikely Animal Friends of the local political scene.
Even aesthetically, the two make for a sharp contrast: Ocheltree’s rockabilly fashion is infused with Tumblr quirk — the Pac-Man-patterned dress she wore to the RANGE interview is cinched up with a sparkly Hello Kitty belt. Jonathan Bingle, meanwhile, typically looks like he is freshly cooled from the Michael Baumgartner-mold on the Republican Politician assembly line — though, to be fair, sometimes he has a mustache.
Their politics on deeply-felt issues are the polar opposite: Bingle wants to restrict abortion rights in Washington to 13 weeks. Ocheltree says that’s the kind of thing that would get her to take up her megaphone and start yelling again.
Still, it’s not hard to find similarities in their approach.
“They both love to debate,” Council Member Paul Dillon said with a laugh. “That’s the common thread.”
Ocheltree rattles off her thoughts on positions with a machine gun whir: Details, caveats — toss in an occasional squib of City of Hall gossip — all flooding out with a rapid pace.
Bingle’s one-on-one style is often softer, relying on asking questions first, before sharing his own view. He likes to invite journalists out to coffee, not to feed them a news story, but to ask them questions about faith, say, or about their definition of Christian Nationalism.
Bingle and Ocheltree said they would call the other up to argue about the stuff they disagree with, a way of refining their own points and strengthening their understanding of their own views.
“People need to get back to having a little nuance in life,” Ocheltree said.
Democrats, in Ocheltree’s mind, get wrong the same thing most Republicans get wrong: “we talk about communication, collaboration and coordination, but we don't actually do it.”
Change my mind
“I'm firm in my beliefs,” Bingle said. “But that doesn't mean that I'm not open to having my mind changed, particularly on things that I care deeply about.”
On one hand, Bingle bristles when liberals selectively quote scripture to him to challenge his stance on issues like immigration. Yet, when I questioned him on his heavy use of Christian imagery during his unsuccessful attempt to run for U.S. Congress in 2024, he changed course.
At that moment, he was walking downtown, wearing a big cross lapel pin with an American flag pattern emblazoned across it.
“I both deeply love my country and I deeply love my God, but anytime you have the American flag draped on a cross, it becomes the focal point, and not the cross itself,” Bingle said in an interview last week. “I literally took it off of my jacket in the moment, like, this is wrong. I threw that pin away, got rid of it.”
Two years before that, Bingle had another regret: he lied to me.
He had filed an ethics complaint against former City Council President Ben Stuckart, and had flat-out denied to me that anyone other than Ocheltree had assisted him.
In fact, an unprotected Google Doc revealed an edit history that involved multiple regional political operatives had been heavily involved in proposing, drafting and refining the complaint and associated press releases.
"I contemplated resigning over that situation. I'm not kidding,” Bingle said. “I, in this moment, failed so miserably."
But even here, Ocheltree said she was proud of him: he had been pushed to file a second, ethics complaint against then-City Council President Breean Beggs too, but had refused. She saw him wrestle with the ethical struggle.
"He struggled like all day, literally looking physically ill,” Ocheltree said. “Part of that is because he does care."
In fact, Ocheltree may be the most persuasive, Bingle suggests, when pushing him to do what he already knows is the right course.
“Because of the relationship we had, she would be able to say, Jonathan, this seems to me to be in conflict with who you are and what I know you to believe,” Bingle said.
Two pariahs in a pod
Other decisions, however, Bingle doesn’t regret. His very first month in office in 2022, amid the ongoing COVID pandemic, Bingle refused to wear a mask in City Hall. In one move, he’d violated a state mandate and pissed off fellow council members. Back then, the City Council passed a resolution to not only censure Bingle, but to urge the Mayor to enforce rules that would have prevented him from entering City Hall entirely.
“I was a pariah from everybody, and that was a really, really lonely time,” Bingle said, “but I knew it was the right thing to do.”
Bingle acknowledges that N95 masks, worn correctly, really did keep people safer from COVID-19, though research also shows that cloth and surgical masks were much less effective.
But he saw his anti-mask stance as a symbolic protest, protesting a whole suite of complaints about what he saw as the government’s absurd COVID responses, from contradictory guidance on masks from the feds, and state rules resulting in “churches being shut down while weed stores could be open.”
The government could pick and choose which businesses were considered essential — and under their standard, his bar trivia business was considered, well, trivial.
“They ruined the businesses like mine for very specific political purposes,” Bingle said. “For me, that was a great injustice that was done to a number of folks throughout the country.”
Ocheltree, too, has stepped on toes in City Hall, though in her case, it’s less often from defying the rules so much as trying to get them enforced.
She says she’s pored over receipts from the region’s shelter providers over the years and has identified irregularities. When she believed that members of the Continuum of Care Board, which coordinates the region’s response to homelessness, were violating federal conflict-of-interest rules, she said she reported it to multiple officials in City Hall. That got her yelled at, she said.
“This is just a series of things where, when I witness something that I don't think is right, and I pointed out where, I ended up getting a trouble for it,” Ocheltree said, “and then somehow that's me ‘being not a liberal’ or ‘not a Democrat’.”
Sometimes, she’s taken matters into her own hands. When city council members held an unrecorded meeting discussing cutting staff positions, and wouldn’t let her attend as a staff member, she took the day off, attended as a citizen, and recorded it herself.
Along with two other council staffers, Ocheltree sued the city last year over the improperly calculated salaries and underpaid wages for city council employees.
She tries to strictly police her own ethics too: She sent me a late-night Facebook message after her interview with RANGE, worried that the picture I took of her with the Spokane County courthouse in the background could possibly be construed as using county facilities for campaign purposes.
I assured her it was fine.
Different kind of experience
Both Bingle and Ocheltree, Council Member Paul Dillon said, have a “flair for the dramatic.”“They’re both theater kids,” Dillon said. “There’s a place for that in politics.”
After all, plenty of previous Spokane council members, from Steve Eugster to Ben Stuckart, have had their stagy moments.
At times, Dillon said, it has seemed like Ocheltree had influenced Bingle, such as on housing issues when Bingle voted to decrease parking regulations to make it cheaper to build new housing.
“Some of those conversations with Nicolette opened the door with that new thinking,” Dillon said. But then, he said, Bingle would swing back hard to the right.
When it came to rights for transgender people, Dillon said, Bingle introduced a slew of conservative red meat to “legislation that he knew wasn’t going to pass, to create tension.”
Council Member Zack Zappone credits Bingle for friendliness and for good intentions, but argues that his pursuit of culture wars distracted him from his job on council. He points out Bingle skipped a number of council meetings, including one city council meeting, to talk about transgender issues at a Mead School District meeting.
In fact, at one point, Ocheltree became so frustrated with Bingle’s approach to trans issues that she froze him out for a month.
“I still had to occasionally talk to him at work, but I stopped answering his calls or calling him outside of the office,” she said.
Running for the conservative-leaning 6th District, of course, his strain of social conservatism won’t necessarily harm Bingle. The district repeatedly elected Michael Baumgartner, who could shake hands across the aisle with one hand, while lobbing bombs with the other.
Instead, Ocheltree faces the big uphill climb. She’ll have to prove she’s Democrat enough for the primary, but flexible enough in the general. In the primary, she’ll have to contend with Democrat Michaela Kelso, the candidate who unsuccessfully ran against Rep. Graham in the same district in 2024.
She points to her record scrutinizing the government on fiscal issues.
“I do think that there's a lot of waste, fraud and abuse,” Ocheltree said. “Those all sound like, you know, Republican talking points, but I do think it happens.”
She points out, for example, that the city of Spokane doesn't buy bottled waters for homeless shelters in bulk, instead relying on the pricier method of reimbursing individual shelters for buying their own water bottles.
Bingle cites governmental waste as a huge problem too. But there’s a notable difference in where they see the waste.
“There's a ton of programs that Washington state is funding that we shouldn't be funding,” Bingle said. “Probably the glaring example is all the spending that we're doing on homelessness, right? It clearly and obviously has not been working.”
West coast states frequently had some of the highest homelessness rates in the country, a problem that correlates tightly with the region’s low supply and high cost of housing.
“It's a failed philosophy and failed ideology that is driving this thing,” Bingle said of government spending on homelessness. “It is just not a core governmental function. That level of charity belongs in the private area, not in the public.”
But Ocheltree has a more personal kind of experience. She was homeless herself in 7th grade, living out of a VW bus. Sometimes, when men had finished paying her mom for sex, she got to sleep in a hotel.
So while she’s seen plenty of opportunities to improve the spending, she’s also seen the success of programs like the state support for dismantling the Camp Hope homeless encampment in a compassionate way.
“If the private sector can address this problem better and without public funds, then I’m not sure what’s stopping them from doing that right now,” Ocheltree said.
The August 4th primary election is months away, but Bingle has already made an endorsement for the other 6th district seat: Republican Isaiah Paine.
But Ocheltree? She may give Bingle her support anyway.
“I might endorse him,” Ocheltree said. “I’m certainly going to be honest about the fact that I want him to win.”
