Mainstream Republicans working to elect Rodney Tom in the 48th Legislative District

The Repub­li­can Par­ty may not have any­one run­ning under its ban­ner for Leg­is­la­ture in the 48th Dis­trict this year, but that does­n’t mean the par­ty is bereft of can­di­dates to sup­port. As reports filed with the Pub­lic Dis­clo­sure Com­mis­sion show, the par­ty appa­ra­tus is heav­i­ly invest­ed in sup­port­ing the come­back bid of Rod­ney Tom, who claims to be a Demo­c­rat, but who Democ­rats say is real­ly a Republican.

Tom, for read­ers who don’t know, is a peren­ni­al par­ty switch­er who start­ed out his polit­i­cal career as a Repub­li­can, left for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in 2006, and rejoined his old par­ty six years lat­er as part of a back­room deal in which he was installed as Major­i­ty Leader in return for deliv­er­ing the State Sen­ate into Repub­li­can hands.

Before defect­ing back to the Repub­li­cans in 2012, Tom had won two com­pet­i­tive elec­tions to the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate as a Demo­c­rat with Demo­c­ra­t­ic sup­port. After deliv­er­ing the Sen­ate into Repub­li­can hands, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty dis­avowed Tom, and he began mak­ing prepa­ra­tions to seek reelec­tion to a third con­sec­u­tive term in 2014 with Repub­li­can help — despite still claim­ing to be a Democrat.

But a few weeks after the end of the 2014 ses­sion, Tom abrupt­ly end­ed his reelec­tion cam­paign, say­ing his first pri­or­i­ty had to be to look after his father.

Tom remained involved in state pol­i­tics as a right wing polit­i­cal oper­a­tive, but did not reen­ter the elec­toral are­na as a can­di­date until this spring, when he let it be known he would be run­ning for the posi­tion he pre­vi­ous­ly held.

When the Repub­li­cans found out that Tom was inter­est­ed in try­ing to win back his old job and take out Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Pat­ty Kud­er­er, their oper­a­tives began mak­ing plans to inter­vene in the race on his behalf.

First, they worked to clear a path for Tom by mak­ing sure that he would­n’t have any Repub­li­can oppo­si­tion (very impor­tant because Tom’s planned path to vic­to­ry over Kud­er­er requires the sup­port of Repub­li­can voters).

In this, they suc­ceed­ed. You can see from look­ing at the can­di­date fil­ings that Tom and Kud­er­er orig­i­nal­ly had two Repub­li­can oppo­nents: Ken Seal and Richard Ben­nett. How­ev­er, both of them with­drew their can­di­da­cies on May 21st, leav­ing just Tom and Kud­er­er and a third can­di­date named Bill Hirt.

Hirt (who by his own admis­sion peren­ni­al­ly runs for office mere­ly to have a plat­form to denounce Sound Tran­sit’s Link light rail project) was deter­mined to stay in the race. He was, how­ev­er, amenable to iden­ti­fy­ing as an inde­pen­dent in order to min­i­mize the pos­si­bil­i­ty of caus­ing inter­fer­ence to Tom’s candidacy.

Sec­ond, the Main­stream Repub­li­cans agreed to endorse Tom. (The Main­stream Repub­li­cans are a group that is a part of the Repub­li­can Par­ty appa­ra­tus in Wash­ing­ton State, but is admin­is­tered sep­a­rate­ly, as opposed to being under the aus­pices of the Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can Par­ty Cen­tral Committee.)

You would­n’t know it from look­ing at their pub­lic list of endorse­ments — his name has been omit­ted — but sources tell us that Tom was indeed endorsed.

NPI reached out repeat­ed­ly to the Main­stream Repub­li­cans to con­firm this infor­ma­tion, but we received no response.

Last week, how­ev­er, we got the con­fir­ma­tion we’d been seek­ing when mail­ers paid for by the Main­stream Repub­li­cans began arriv­ing in the mail­box­es of vot­ers in the 48th Dis­trict. The mail­ers instruct right-lean­ing vot­ers not to waste their vote on Bill Hirt, but rather to sup­port… Rod­ney Tom. Take a look — here’s the front:

And here’s the back:

This is the most overt effort we’ve seen yet to recruit Repub­li­can vot­ers to sup­port Rod­ney Tom so that he’ll per­form bet­ter in the August Top Two election.

Tom had pre­vi­ous­ly ben­e­fit­ed from inde­pen­dent expen­di­tures in sup­port of his can­di­da­cy from anoth­er PAC that usu­al­ly inter­venes on behalf of Repub­li­cans. Now, he’s get­ting help from an arm of the par­ty that has “Repub­li­can” in its name.