New Latino majority voter district in Central Washington stays red

For Manjarrez, R-Wapato, those issues — affordability, education and public safety — were critical to voters, and showing how she could address them contributed to her victory against Democrat Ana Ruiz Kennedy during the general election in November for the open seat.

“I’m embracing … helping the district, learning and understanding what they need and fighting for those needs,” she said. 

Manjarrez’s race and two others in the 14th Legislative District in Central Washington were closely watched due to the district’s new status as a Latino voter majority district.

That status came after U.S. District Court Judge Robert Lasnik ruled in August 2023 that the district boundaries drawn after the 2020 Census violated federal voting rights laws. Lasnik approved the new map in March 2024.

Now, with this year’s election results certified, both parties are calling the election a win. Republicans are celebrating victories in a district they said had a racial gerrymander that unfairly favored Democrats. Meanwhile, Democrats believe a closer look at the numbers illustrates a district that will be in play for them in future elections. 

Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, and Senate Republican Caucus leader, believes the victories reflect that Republican candidates better showed how they could address issues affecting voters in the district, including Latinos.

“The voting shows that [Latino voters] are [independent] and will express their independence at the ballot box based on who is showing they are working on the issues that affect their lives.”

However, Democrats in the state say their smaller margin of defeat in 2024 indicates that the district potentially is now more of a tossup rather than the deep red district it’s been under previous versions of the 14th Legislative District.

They believe that with greater turnout from Latino voters, those 14th District seats could be within reach of Democrats in future elections, said Adam Bartz, director of The Kennedy Fund, the political action committee for the Washington State Democratic Caucus. “I think what we see here gives us hope for the future.”

And for those who originally sued the state over a bipartisan redistricting commission's initial drawing of a Latino voter majority district in the 15th in 2021, the recent election should be deemed a victory for Latino voters, regardless of which candidate they chose.

“Nobody said the lawsuit was going to result in a certain party winning everything,” said Dulce Gutiérrez, a longtime voting rights advocate whose organization, the Southcentral Coalition of People of Color for Redistricting, was one of the original plaintiffs in the 2022 redistricting lawsuit. “What we have seen is that this change has pushed all candidates to engage with Latino voters.”

Breaking down the results

The highest-profile of the three races in the 14th Legislative District was the Senate race, where longtime incumbent Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima, faced Democratic challenger Maria Beltran, a Yakima native who came to the race with considerable backing from party leaders and experience campaigning in state and national races. 

In King’s 17-year tenure in the Senate, most of his races for reelection were uncontested. In King's first election in 2007, months after being appointed to the seat, he easily beat his Democrat challenger with 81% of the vote. His only contested race was in 2016, when King beat his general election challenger Amanda Richards, listed as an Independent Republican, by more than 22 percentage points.

With the new boundaries, King was the only incumbent in the 14th Legislative District. Both Rep. Gina Mosbrucker, R-Goldendale, and Rep. Chris Corry, R-Yakima, were no longer in the redrawn district. Nor was King, but he relocated to remain in the 14th.  Corry decided to run — and was elected — for an open seat in his new district, the 15th.

In November, King still won against Beltran, with 52% of the more than 34,000 votes cast, but with a margin of over two percentage points, much smaller than in the past.

“It’s clear the outcome isn’t what we hoped for,” Beltran said. “If you look at the numbers, they’re very good numbers for a first-time candidate.”

For Beltran, what’s more significant is that she won both Yakima and Franklin counties, which have substantial Latino populations.

In Yakima County, the most populous of the four counties in the 14th District, Beltran won with 52% votes vs. 47% for King. In Franklin, another county with a sizable number of Latino voters, Beltran won by an even larger margin, 61% to 39%.

However, King has sizable margins in the two remaining counties, Benton and Klickitat, with 76% and 69% of the total votes, respectively. In the state representative races in the 14th, Democratic candidates — Kennedy and Chelsea Dimas — won in Franklin and Yakima counties, while the Republican candidates — Manjarrez and Gloria Mendoza — handily won Benton and Klickitat counties.

Republicans downplayed the slimmer margins, noting that was to be expected with a newly drawn Latino-majority district.

The map was drawn to give Democrats victory, said State Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, and chairman of the Washington State Republican Party.

Walsh contends that the Republican victories point to some of the rightward shift happening, including among Latino voters.

“I think the assumption [that] people from the Hispanic culture or of Hispanic descent are Democrats is a false assumption, and that’s what these results proved,” he said.

Beltran and other Democrats are pushing back against the argument that Latino areas in the region are becoming more conservative or that they believed the district was a slam-dunk for Democrats.

“I never made any assumption about anyone’s ethnicity and how their ethnicity correlated with one party,” Beltran said. “I talked to everyone regardless of their political identification,” she said. “I didn’t make any assumptions about anyone’s political identity. I focus on [knocking] doors, a grassroots campaign.”  

Beltran said her positions were misrepresented in attack ads, and she took issue with a last-minute push by a conservative group to send text messages in Spanish that painted herself, Kennedy and Dimas — the three Latina Democrats running in the 14th District —  as radical left-wing candidates who were against the faith and family values of Latino residents.

Walsh dismissed that criticism and defended the substance of the text messages.

“The Democratic party in Washington has drifted far to the left — culturally, fiscally, in every public policy area,” he said. “I think voters of the 14th are not radicals; they’re moderate, they’re middle-of-the-road politically, and they don’t line up with radical agendas.”

Stephen Reed, spokesman for the Washington State Democrats, said that the timing of the text messages might have influenced Latino voters to opt out of the process entirely. That lower turnout might have made the difference between a slim loss and a slim victory.

“Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have time to adequately mount a pushback and get the truth out there,” he said.

Engagement and turnout

One reason that voter-rights advocates pushed for a switch of the Latino voter majority district from the 15th District to the 14th was the timing of Senate elections. For even-numbered districts, those elections fall on a presidential election year, when Latino voters are more likely to participate.

However, voter turnout in 2024 was down statewide compared to four years ago, and turnout was down further in counties like Yakima, which already reports some of the lowest turnout rates statewide.

Among voters with Latino surnames in the 14th Legislative District, turnout was just under 50%, much lower than the Yakima County turnout rate of 67% and well below the statewide turnout rate of nearly 79%.

Lower turnout among Latino voters is not new, and it’s far worse during off-year elections. For example, during the 2022 mid-term election, turnout among Latino voters in the 14th Legislative District was 26%, a fraction of the district’s overall turnout of 52%. 

Democratic candidates and party leaders believe that higher turnout, especially from Latinos, are key to better results, including winning, in future elections.

But getting that higher turnout, they say, remains a challenge and requires substantial organizing and grassroots campaigning, and not just during major election years, voting advocates say.

“There is a lot of apathy,” said Guillermo Zazueta, lead field organizer for OneAmerica Votes, a political organization aimed at empowering immigrants and increasing civic engagement.

There was a concerted effort to reverse that apathy in the months leading up to the general election. During that effort, OneAmerica Votes staff and volunteers knocked on more than 3,800 doors in the Yakima Valley, reaching about 6,300 voters, Guillermo said. And there was an increase in turnout in general from the primary. Internal results organized by the organization showed that a majority of the voters they visited in Latino neighborhoods in the 14th District indicated they would support the three Latina Democratic candidates, which seems to align with the election results.

Guillermo said that for Democrats to win, the level of engagement with Latino voters cannot let up because the general election is over. The next step is continuing to engage Latino voters — both those who voted and those who didn’t — by connecting with them regarding issues that might concern them, such as immigration, child care, and affordability, that will be up for discussion in the state Legislature.

The hope is that engaging voters with issues, not just races, will increase their civic engagement and make them more likely to participate in future elections, including big legislative races, he said.

Bartz said the party also has to develop candidates by supporting liberal-leaning Latino and Latina officeholders  at all levels, such as those serving in the Yakima and Sunnyside city councils, as potential candidates for the state and federal races.

Dulce Gutiérrez, the longtime Yakima Valley voting rights advocate, said it’s too early to conclude if this district will go right or left. She believes what the new district does, contrary to the belief of party officials, is put Latino voters at the center of deciding who gets to represent them and the district. She feels past iterations of the district diluted Latino votes because they were split across multiple districts.

“These new boundaries are far more adequate — a competitive district,” she said. “… The end game is to increase representation. We’re still on track, even if the results on the surface level seem to be the same thing, which is that Republicans won again.”

Legal action

Meanwhile, Republicans hope this district won’t be in its current form in future elections and are still pushing back against the new district boundaries.

Despite the legislative wins in 2024, a group of conservative Latino voters has continued to pursue appeals of the original court decision from August 2023, and the map that was approved in March of this year. They claim the district should not have been drawn on the basis of race in the first place.

The case could go before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judging panel as early as March.

Braun said one of the issues he had with the new map was that Sen. Nikki Torres, R-Pasco, now lives outside of the redrawn 15th Legislative District, which originally was the Latino-voter majority district under the map drawn by the redistricting commission. Torres, a Latina serving her first term, would no longer be able to run in the 15th District when her term expires in 2026.  

“This isn’t a new idea to us [Republicans] that we have a growing and vibrant Hispanic community in Central Washington,” Braun said. “I fully support having folks like Nikki Torres to serve if that helps us better understand what’s important and what makes their lives better.”

Despite the wins in the 14th, Braun hopes the new map gets overturned. “Hopefully, the judicial system will make the correction in the long term,” he said.

Simone Leeper, of the Campaign Legal Center, represented the Latino voters who filed the Voting Rights Act lawsuit over the Commission’s first redistricting effort in January 2022. She said she and her colleagues will continue fighting for Latino voters’ ability to select the candidate of their choice.

“We’re going to continue fighting for this community,” she said. “Nothing in this election affects that.”

Manjarrez, the freshman state representative, said she’d heard from some who believe that the district won’t remain as drawn, but she has not focused too much on it.

She believes that the Republican candidates will be more attractive to Latino voters over time. Manjarrez, who works as a CPA, has dealt with Latino business owners concerned over the fees and taxes they must pay.

“When I see that trend of success in owning a business, home, all of that brings forth those conservative values,” she said.

Meanwhile, Beltran, the Democratic state Senate candidate who lost to King, neither committed to or ruled out trying again for public office.

“Right now, I’m considering all options,” she said. “One thing for sure is that I remain committed to my community and plan to continue to fight for Central Washington.”