Why Spokane Can’t Save Carmela Conroy

The numbers don’t lie, but they certainly do expose the persistent delusion currently governing the Democratic strategy in Washington’s 5th District. We are watching a slow-motion replay of a movie we’ve already seen, and the ending hasn’t changed. In 2024, Carmela Conroy stood in the center of a rare political vacuum—the first open seat in twenty years—and proceeded to lose by a staggering 84,545 votes. That isn’t just a loss; it’s a total systemic failure. Yet, despite this nearly 21-point chasm, Conroy is running back the same “Spokane-only” playbook, seemingly convinced that doing the exact same thing twice will somehow yield a different result. History suggests otherwise. We’ve seen this before with Joe Pakootas, who ran a second time only to see his vote share stagnate with a pathetic 1.1 % increase. In a district where the Republican incumbent, Michael Baumgartner, is already fortifying his position, a second-time challenger who refuses to expand the map isn’t a threat; they are a known and defeated quantity.

The most galling aspect of the current Conroy campaign is the tactical arrogance. She has explicitly told people she won’t spend her resources outside Spokane, effectively treating the rest of Eastern Washington like a flyover zone. This translates to a campaign of “glomming on”—showing up for free photo ops at parades or expecting rural county parties to provide the labor and booths she refuses to pay for. It is a parasitic strategy that ignores the fundamental economic and cultural link between Spokane and its surrounding agricultural heartland. Rural voters are not stupid; they know when they are being treated as a secondary character in someone else’s vanity project, and they punish that neglect at the ballot box. You cannot bridge an 85,000-vote gap by standing in a free parade in Spokane while ignoring the very people in Walla Walla and Whitman Counties who actually have the power to shift the margins.

While Conroy claims “momentum” through a fundraising haul of roughly $350,000 over sixteen months, the reality is that this figure is sad and pathetic when compared to the gold standard set by Lisa Brown. Brown understood that to make the GOP sweat, you have to be ubiquitous. She raised over $5 million to narrow the gap to 30,000 votes, proving that you either buy the vote or you build it. Conroy has raised just enough to keep a small staff in lattes but not enough to actually communicate with a district of 700,000 people. With less than $150,000 currently in the bank, she is functionally a ghost candidate. She has no money to buy the reach and, more importantly, no organization to build it. If she were truly the powerhouse of the Inland Empire, she would at least be packing rooms in her own backyard, yet reports from the ground tell a different story: while Conroy struggles to turn out a few dozen people in Spokane, David Womack is drawing hundreds.

The contrast is as sharp as it is urgent. In 2024, Walla Walla County was the only county in Washington to trend blue, signaling a massive opportunity for a candidate who actually knows where the district is headed. David Womack is that candidate. Despite having less than $100,000 in the FEC books right now, he is doing the hard, unglamorous work of building a district-wide army. He isn’t waiting for a handout or a free ride on a float; he is training hundreds of volunteers from Spokane to the Oregon border in effective, door-to-door canvassing. This is the “Build the Vote” model that Lisa Brown pioneered and that the current frontrunner has abandoned. Womack, a man who has lived and worked in the very communities Conroy treats as an afterthought, understands that you don’t earn a vote by being polite—you earn it by being present.

Primary voters who are desperate to see Michael Baumgartner defeated need to wake up to the math of neglect. We are currently funding a controlled demolition of our chances in 2026. By clinging to a “Spokane-centric” echo chamber, the Conroy campaign is essentially surrendering the 85,000 votes we need to find. If we send a candidate into the ring who has no money to buy the vote and no organization to build it, we aren’t fighting a campaign; we are participating in a ritual of defeat. The Walla Walla signal is loud and clear: the district is ready to move, but it won’t move for a candidate who is afraid to leave the city limits. It’s time to stop replaying the failure of 2024 and start supporting the only campaign that is actually doing the work to bridge the gap.

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May 20, 2026

UPDATE: The Velocity of Momentum

A note on the math of this race: When this piece was first published, the Womack campaign actually reached out, worried I was overselling their reality. On Monday, May 18th, the campaign supplied what was already an impressive figure: 524 active, trained volunteers across the district. But by Wednesday, May 20th, the campaign manager caught up with me to correct the record. In just 48 hours, that number had already spiked to 585.

That isn’t just a routine data entry update; it’s a demonstration of velocity.

Adding 61 fully onboarded volunteers in less than 48 hours is what real-time momentum actually looks like in a grassroots campaign. It means people are actively signing up faster than internal spreadsheets can keep up. In a sprawling district of 700,000 people, volunteer growth of that speed indicates a network effect—where neighbors are recruiting neighbors, and the “Build the Vote” model is organically catching fire outside the Spokane echo chamber.

While the frontrunner’s camp relies on static, top-down name recognition from a previous 84,000-vote defeat, the Womack campaign is demonstrating the fluid, exponential growth required to actually flip a district. The numbers don’t just show that Womack has an army; they prove his army is actively growing in real-time while the competition stands still.