SPOKANE, Wash. — U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner ambled into the Davenport Hotel one morning in September, free from his beltway responsibilities after the week’s work of Congress had been canceled.

Baumgartner, a Republican from Spokane, is seeking his second term in Eastern Washington’s 5th Congressional District.

Speaking in one of the Inland Northwest’s most storied landmarks, he happily touted his record and that of the Republican-held Congress. He pointed to the federal government’s new $1,000 investment account for kids, known as a Trump Account, as well as two tax measures in the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” to reduce taxes on tips and overtime pay. He’s voted for legislation to ban stock trades by members of Congress, and sponsored legislation geared toward restoring salmon populations.

But as hints of a potential Democratic landslide emerge for the Nov. 3 election, his matchup against challenger Carmela Conroy is drawing attention.

Baumgartner’s first reelection campaign comes as polls point toward a Democratic midterm wave election that could upend the GOP-controlled Congress. With an unpopular war in Iran, turmoil over federal immigration deportations and record diesel prices, President Donald Trump’s approval rating is under 40%.

Earlier this month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced the contest was “a race in play,” a signal that the national party thinks Baumgartner could be vulnerable.

In Conroy, he’s got a familiar challenger. A longtime foreign service officer who did stints as a Spokane County deputy prosecuting attorney and in-house counsel for Nissan, she faced off against Baumgartner in 2024. In that race to succeed retiring Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Baumgartner won handily with 61%.

Washington’s 5th Congressional District

Washington’s 5th District spans the state’s eastern stretch from its northern to southern borders. It’s no one’s idea of tossup territory: The last Democrat elected here was House Speaker Tom Foley. He held the seat for 30 years before his ouster in the 1994 red wave.

In this year’s August primaries, however, Baumgartner, the only Republican on the ballot, drew 47% in a 12-person field. Conroy finished second with 19%, while the balance of votes went to a slew of other Democratic and independent candidates.

With more than a decade of state and local elected politics under his belt, Baumgartner also listed accomplishments from his years in the state Senate. He called his legislation to create Washington State University’s Spokane medical school “my favorite bill I ever worked on” and noted his work in 2015 to reduce tuition at the state’s colleges and universities.

“Fit the district, have delivered for the district, able to work well with others, has demonstrated that to the voters,” Baumgartner said in an hourlong interview. “Going up against a candidate that doesn’t have any experience, is pretty radical far-left, out of step with the district. That’s the basic contours of the race.”

President Donald Trump has taken notice, too. The president endorsed Baumgartner in a video from the Oval Office while calling Conroy a “far-left dumb-o-crat.”

In an interview, Conroy reckoned that if elected, her work “will have more in common with Republican members of the House from other rural districts than I will with, for example, AOC,” Conroy said, referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

“The incumbent and the president made a lot of promises to voters, about bringing prices down from day one, ending forever wars — they promised that they would do nothing to undercut Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security,” she added. “And that’s all proved to be completely wrong.”

‘Mrs. B’s son’

Trump’s endorsement came the day before Baumgartner, 50, sat for an interview, and the congressman wasn’t particularly interested in questions about the president.

“Are we here to talk about my race?” he said, after being asked about the president’s endorsement and what his legacy would be. “But it’s going to be a Seattle Times article like Trump-Trump-Trump-Trump, and a little bit of Baumgartner response to Trump?”

During the interview, Baumgartner leaned heavily on his local roots and political history. Born and raised in Whitman County, his father was a professor at Washington State University and his mother a beloved teacher.

“When I’m out in the Palouse, I’m Mrs. B’s son,” he said.

He worked for the U.S. Forest Service in summers during college and early in his career served in the foreign service at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq.

In 2010, Baumgartner defeated incumbent Democrat Chris Marr to take a seat in the state Senate. His tenure had good timing: From the end of 2012 through late 2017, a Republican coalition held the Senate majority. The GOP made the most of it, forcing the Democratic House and then-Gov. Jay Inslee to the negotiating table and spiking big-ticket Democratic priorities.

Baumgartner has found some of his old colleagues for his new team. He counted off a trio of current advisers who are long-established Republican state lawmakers from the district: retired state Sen. Mike Padden of Spokane Valley, Sen. Mark Schoesler of Ritzville, the former majority coalition leader, and Rep. Mary Dye of Pomeroy.

Baumgartner’s been known to buck his party. In 2018, he was one of just seven out of 49 senators to vote against the Washington Legislature’s attempt to sneakily exempt themselves from the 1972 voter-approved Public Records Act. Earlier this year, he came out against Trump’s efforts to reshape vote-by-mail through the U.S. Postal Service.

In the interview, Baumgartner disagreed with some of the president’s approach on tariffs, saying he was “not pleased with this trade war with Canada.”

“Tariffs are taxes, and I’m a small-government Republican, so I like lower taxes, and essentially lower tariffs,” he said, adding: “Everybody is familiar with the president’s negotiating style, but I don’t think calling Canada our 51st state and renaming Lake Ontario is useful on this.”

But he said tariffs are necessary in some cases.

“I have timber guys that have had long-standing issues with the Canadians dumping softwood lumber here,” he said. “I have dairy guys that can’t sell into Canada. Right now, British Columbia won’t buy Washington state potatoes, Japan won’t buy Washington state potatoes.”

On healthcare, Baumgartner touted $50 million set aside for rural hospitals in the “Big Beautiful Bill.” He also said “the American healthcare system will never improve in a substantial way unless we bring price transparency.”

With the public pushing back on new data centers to power giant tech companies’ AI products, Baumgartner introduced a bill in June that would make sure those companies supply their own electricity and water.

“America must win the AI race, but working families should not be forced to subsidize it,” he said in a news release at the time.

A Democratic challenger

Conroy, 64, was raised in the Spokane Valley, went to the University of Washington for undergraduate and law degrees, and learned Japanese along the way.

Conroy spent the bulk of her career in the foreign service, with postings in New Zealand, Pakistan and Japan, among others.

She retired from the service in 2020, and made her way back to Spokane. She signed up to be a precinct committee officer for the Spokane County Democrats, she said, and in a short time was elected chair of the group.

Conroy called the president’s tariffs unconstitutional and antibusiness.

“Let’s restore the schedules that were in place in early January 2025,” she said. “That was the last bilateral set of trade agreements.”

On immigration, Conroy wants to limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement to border checkpoints and ports,“ not terrorizing noncriminals who are in our community, many as essential workers.”

She called for Congress to investigate data centers and AI to “find out what’s going on,” but also wants the federal government to “stay out of the way of state and local legislators that are trying to defend their own communities from taking water and power.”

She took a shot at Baumgartner for not asking enough questions about the release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking network. Though Baumgartner voted to release the files, the Trump administration subsequently released the names of the victims and shielded names of alleged perpetrators.

On the day then- Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before Congress, “when Baumgartner had time to ask questions, he basically congratulated Pam Bondi and the DOJ for doing a great job,” she said. “Nothing about the victims.”

As for Trump calling her a “left-wing dumb-o-crat,” Conroy put it in perspective.

“I’m not even sure if we were in Seattle I would qualify as a Democrat,” she said. “I worked in national security. I think that criminal prosecutions need to happen. Some people do need to be locked up to protect society.”

State of play

Even in a favorable year for Democrats, Conroy has an uphill climb. Washington’s second-largest city Spokane and the college town of Pullman tend to be blue specks in the district’s red tapestry.

“We have that rated ‘Solid R’ still, but I do think it’s a race we’re closely monitoring,” said Erin Covey, an editor and analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. She noted Baumgartner in 2024 outperformed Trump’s win in the district.

“I think this is going to be a much closer race for him, but I am still very skeptical that Democrats will be able to flip this seat,” she said. And while national Democrats are eyeing the race, “whether or not they actually spend here remains to be seen.”

Conroy, however, points to the August primary results with optimism, where Baumgartner drew less than 50%. With one run under her belt, she now has better name recognition, Conroy said, and she’s hearing disgruntlement from farmers over the tariffs imposed since 2024.

As of the end of September, Conroy had raised nearly $723,000 and had about $154,000 on hand, according to federal campaign records. By that point, Baumgartner had raised $2.2 million, and still had more than $807,000 on hand.

“We feel very good about where we’re at,” Baumgartner said. “But we’re not taking anything for granted.”

The congressman said he likes the job and “I like working on these big challenging issues.”

He worries about the long-term effects of political polarization, Baumgartner said, and acknowledged the upside-down nature of modern politics.

“With the rise of social media, the members of Congress the public sees the most are the ones that are most treating it like a reality television show,” he said. “A lot of the work is being done by the people who are not treating it like a reality TV show.”

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