UPDATE: A third candidate, Pierce County Councilman Stan Fleming, says he also is in the hunt, running as a Republican.
Heck, who lost to Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler last year in the open 3rd district, put out this news release outlining his support today after the commission announced its draft plans on this web page.
Here is our earlier post about the proposal – which Republican Slade Gorton and Democrat Tim Ceis hashed out and which still needs approval from at least one of the other two voting members of the Redistricting Commission.
Muri is a Pierce County Council member who lost handily to Smith last year, but his campaign chairman Alex Hays said the 10th – which ranges from Shelton to Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater and then north to Lakewood, Sumner and University Place – favors Muri.
“They think they’ve drawn a Denny Heck district but they’ve accidentally drawn the perfect Dick Muri district. It’s roughly two-thirds in Pierce County and he’s a Pierce County councilman …” Hays said by telephone. “Even against Adam Smith who outspent Dick by [five] to one, he prevailed in Pierce County … The voters in the county have a really positive view of Dick Muri.’’
But Democratic Party leaders were declaring the 10th as just right for Heck. State Party chairman Dwight Pelz said: “The newly drawn 10th District provides Democrats our best opportunity to send a true middle class champion to Congress. We are already on our way with Denny Heck, who will stand up and fight for families, fairness and economic opportunity.”
And Stew Henderson, the Thurston County Democratic chairman, said “Muri lost bad to Smith, and he's getting set up to lose big to Heck. If I were Muri, I'd be calling up my Republican friends to see if they could line up a different sacrificial lamb.”
Henderson also said the new 10th Congressional District “will be a huge boost for economic development and job growth for the South Sound. Since Jaime Herrera and her Tea Party Republican friends abandoned our part of the state, we have been without a voice in Washington DC [in Olympia]. It will be critical to elect a strong, jobs-oriented Democrat to this seat, so our region can assert our influence in building the 21st century economy here in
Washington.”
Despite Olympia’s place as seat of state government, it is only the second-largest city in the 10th – behind Lakewood, according to Redistricting Commission staffers. The remaining bigger cities are Lacey, Puyallup, University Place, Tumwater, Shelton, Sumner, and Edgewood.
UPDATE: for more information about the candidates go here for Denny Heck’s campaign, here for Muri’s and here for Flemming’s.
