The Washington State Republican Party’s Central Committee will be tasked with picking a new chair this summer following incumbent Caleb Heimlich’s announcement that he has has accepted another job in politics that he believes will allow him to better provide for his family.
Heimlich announced his plans in a note sent to other Republican officials. (The message was not distributed to the party’s larger mailing list, which often gets emails signed by Heimlich excoriating Democrats and asking for money.)
“It has been a tremendous honor to serve as the chairman of this great organization for five and half years, but for the sake of my family it is time to pass the torch to someone new,” Heimlich’s message said.
“Chairman Caleb Heimlich’s departure paves the way for fresh leadership within the party, the election for which will take place during the State Committee meeting on August 12th, following his departure. Heimlich, along with the WSRP staff, remains committed to ensuring a smooth transition and continuity of the party’s work in supporting great candidates for local elections this year and next.”
“I’ve done my time at the party,” Heimlich told The Center Square’s Brett Davis in an interview. He added: “I’m leaving the party in good financial shape – $500,000 in the bank – and no scandals,” he said. “The organization is healthy.”
But not electorally healthy.
Heimlich began working for the Washington State Republican Party over a decade ago. As Davis mentioned in his writeup for The Center Square, Heimlich has been political director, executive director, chief of staff, and party chair. He took over for Susan Hutchison after she left the role following the 2016 presidential election.
During the Chair Heimlich era, the party experienced the following losses:
That is a lot of losing.
Embarrassingly, Republicans were unable to get a candidate on the general election ballot for Secretary of State the following year despite having held the office for over sixty years prior to Wyman’s resignation.
The above list doesn’t include the losses the Republicans experienced in contests for seats that were held by Democrats. The party has not won a gubernatorial race since 1980, a U.S. Senate contest since 1994, or any statewide executive position aside from Treasurer and Secretary of State since 2008.
Outside of rural or exurban areas and the occasional contest with unusual circumstances, Republicans are not electorally competitive in Washington.
Is all of this losing Heimlich’s fault? No and yes.
No in the sense that Heimlich, a state party chair, is not responsible for the direction of the national party, which heavily influences how the party is perceived here in Washington, and yes in the sense that Heimlich did not make any kind of effort to get the Washington State Republican Party on a different path.
The state party had many, many opportunities to break with the national party, and repudiate the evil deeds of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and try to build its own brand as a distinct political entity loyal to republican principles.
It didn’t.
Instead, it put up its own set of extremists for state office — folks like grifter Loren Culp, who was not qualified to be governor of Washington State.
The job of leaders is to lead, but as party chair, Heimlich was a follower and enabler with the hugest double standard of anyone in state politics. Heimlich would regularly call for civility from Democratic officeholders while continually embracing the fascism and bigotry coming out of Donald Trump’s White House.
The closest Heimlich ever got to repudiating Trump might have been these comments: “My personal opinion is I would rather see somebody else in 2024,” Heimlich said during a CityClub event a couple of years ago. “I think that for the party, we would be more successful with a different candidate.”
Pretty much everyone our team knows in Republican politics says that Heimlich is a warm, friendly, caring person with a big heart — and we don’t doubt that he’s a really nice guy. There’s a reason he kept his job despite the Washington State Republican Party’s awful electoral performance in 2018, 2020, and 2022.
However friendly and big his heart might be, however, he has willingly been a cog in a vicious, malevolent political machine that has been relentlessly assaulting American democracy for years, to the detriment of all Washingtonians.
Unfortunately, his successor will probably also be committed to willfully enabling an ultra MAGA, extreme agenda for Washington and the U.S.
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