Rittereiser Is The Candidate With Feet On Both Sides Of Cascades

ELLENSBURG, WA - Jump in your car and drive 85 miles east along I-90 from Issaquah and you'll find yourself in Thorp. With a population of 240, Thorp is a collection of cow pastures and barns with the straw-colored foothills of the Cascades lingering in the distance.

It's in Thorp or thereabouts that you start to see the Trump/Pence signs, the same ones used during the 2016 campaign. You're far from lefty Seattle, but you're still in the 8th Congressional District. If a Democrat wins the WA-8 race in November, they'll be representing people across the left-right spectrum.

Candidate Jason Rittereiser says he's the Democrat who can most fairly do that. Unlike competitors Dr. Kim Schrier and Dr. Shannon Hader, Rittereiser has deep ties to both sides of the Cascades.

"There is an urban-rural divide," Rittereiser told Patch. "If [Democrats are] going to win the 8th as for the first time ever, we have to have someone who's going to unite both sides of the Cascades."

Rittereiser, 34 (the only millennial in the race), grew up in Ellensburg. His father was police chief, his mother was on City Council and helped open the city's children's museum. He crossed the Cascades for college at the University of Washington and decided to stay. After earning his law degree, he got a job as a King County prosecuting attorney. He helped prosecute Ricky Lee Lewis, a sex offender who failed to register, but was released in 2014 by a judge only to commit a rape in Seattle. More recently, Rittereiser has worked in employment law at HKM Employment Attorneys.

He calls Trump "one of the corrupt presidents in history," but Rittereiser says his campaign has made a special effort to reach Trump voters. The parts of WA-8 in Kittitas County and eastern Pierce County largely voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. He calls Trump a symptom of a large problem, one he thinks he can solve.

"I think part of the reason the country elected Trump is because people are tired of the status quo," he said. "We've in large part build a gov that doesn't focus on the interests of regular people."

On policy, Rittereiser toes the right-left divide, but shares a lot with Hader and Schrier. He's for a single-payer healthcare system (Schrier supports opening Medicare for everyone to buy, Hader supports states that want to do single-payer), but he's also makes sure to point out he "believes in the Second Amendment."

If he faces Dino Rossi (a known Trump supporter), Rittereiser says he's looking forward to a "generational debate" - meaning that he's probably more appealing to the 235,000 odd people in the district under age of 44.

Asked whether it matters in 2018 that he's a white guy asking for a job in a Congress with lots of white guys (of the 435 members of the 115th Congress, 339 are white, only 83 are women), he essentially says no. The new representative has to reflect the values of the district, he says. Facing two accomplished women in the race, he says the best candidate will win Tuesday.

"I think we need robust primaries and we need tough races because the best candidates tend to come out on top," he said.

Photo courtesy Jason Rittereiser