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RICHLAND — Amanda McKinney walked near the Columbia River on the last day of September, about an hour before she stood on a stage to debate her opponent, John Duresky, in the race for a U.S. House seat with no incumbent for the first time in a decade.
A staffer spotted some animal tracks near a bench, which McKinney quickly clocked.
“It’s a raccoon, you can see by the way its prints are, and the paws,” she said, to their surprise, and then explained how she knew: “Well, when you are raised to hunt and fish.”
A Republican and Yakima County commissioner, McKinney is leaning into her Central Washington roots as she seeks the open 4th Congressional District seat. She describes herself as an “America First” conservative who grew up around farming, who is backed by President Donald Trump and national GOP leaders, and who is a supporter of the conservative group Let’s Go Washington and its three initiatives on the November ballot.
In a crowded August primary, McKinney won the highest share of the vote and dispatched two serious GOP challengers seeking to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside. Newhouse is one of only two Republicans remaining in office who voted to impeach Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Now, McKinney faces Duresky, a Democrat and U.S. Air Force veteran who worked at the Hanford Field Office and took an early buyout, as the president’s self-proclaimed Department of Government Efficiency staffers ran a scythe through the federal government. Duresky, whose website notes he could be out fishing instead of running, hopes to become the first Democrat elected to the seat since 1992, when a young Jay Inslee served a single term, long before becoming a three-term governor.
The contest comes with the country mired in an on-and-off war against Iran that has snarled global fuel production, leading to rising prices for fuel and other goods. Two of the administration’s other biggest priorities have roiled the agriculture-heavy 4th District, with tariffs driving up costs and aggressive federal immigration enforcement hitting the workforce.
Meanwhile, Americans of all political persuasions have banded together to question and oppose AI data centers that some of the world’s powerful companies are trying to shoehorn all over the country, including in the 4th District.
For Duresky, 58, just being in the general election in Washington’s most conservative district is a good start. Democrats didn’t even make it through the top-two primaries in 2014, 2016 and 2024, leaving voters a choice those years between two Republicans.
In an interview, Duresky said Republicans have shown up at his town halls, claiming their party has left them.
“The thing that’s happening with agriculture in this district with the tariffs and with the labor shocks to immigration is creating a genuine opportunity here,” said Duresky in an interview. “There are a whole bunch of agriculture people, who would normally not be voting for a Democrat, who are gettable.”
Before her election to the Yakima County Commission in 2020, McKinney, 48, worked in real estate finance. Sitting for a brief interview at Leslie Groves Park in Richland, she talked about how both of those vocations require problem-solving she finds incredibly rewarding.
For example, “helping people finance a property or their dream home, or downsizing, all the options,” she said, ticking off subjects that are also important to county commissions. “And then through that, learning about land use and water law, not only from my ag perspective but from a development perspective, and property rights.”
She supports the president’s hard line on immigration and deportations, but wants to expand the H-2A visa program that brings workers to Washington to work on apple, cherry and other fruit farms.
But “as much as we really rely on these folks to come in and provide this service, we do expect these folks to go home,” she said. “We don’t want them to stay here illegally.”
She hopes farm technology advances enough to where seasonal workers are no longer needed, and “local, American workers (are) working on the robotics, working on the drones, more technical jobs that are higher-wage earning jobs,” McKinney said.
In 2024, McKinney told Spokane’s Spokesman-Review that she supported Newhouse in his reelection, despite disagreeing with his vote to impeach the president. She cut a video ad in support of Newhouse that year, too, as he faced a challenge by Republican Jerrod Sessler.
But a quote attributed to her on the Yakima County GOP website, described as an excerpt from a 2025 Turning Point USA rally, she also said Newhouse’s impeachment vote was a “betrayal” that spurred her to run.
“That was really easy — it happened when there really was a betrayal to President Trump, my congressman voted for impeachment,” McKinney said in a blurb. “And I knew that I needed to find a way to retire him.”
Newhouse announced his retirement on Dec. 17. McKinney launched her campaign two days later in a video on Facebook. Trump endorsed her on Jan. 6.
McKinney fought through an 11-candidate field that included Jerrod Sessler, a Republican who had Trump’s endorsement in the 2024 general election against Newhouse.
In the primary, Sessler claimed multiple times that McKinney or her supporters donated $150,000 to Turning Point USA, which then played a role in securing an endorsement for her by Trump’s team. Sessler said the president himself had endorsed him a second time, in a private letter.
Asked about Sessler’s allegations, McKinney campaign manager Freddy Ortiz wrote in an email: “Amanda’s focus is on the future of the district, and she has made it clear through her hard work that she has very well earned her endorsement.”
“The President speaks for himself,” Ortiz added. “And we wish Mr. Sessler the best of luck in his future endeavors.”
As of mid-July, McKinney had raised $981,820, had spent about $766,000 and still had $215,000 on hand. Updated campaign finance reports are expected in October.
The week before their Sept. 30 debate, Duresky took a table at Moonshot Brewing in Kennewick, with a pint of Oktoberfest lager, and pointed outside the window.
“You see that tree, you see how it’s barely moving? It would be an ideal day to be on the boat right now,” Duresky said. “I’ve had hundreds of smallmouth bass days this time of year. And of course my campaign schedule is bananas right now, so there will be no fishing for me.”
Early in his Air Force career, Duresky served at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane County. By the time he retired as a major, Duresky was working in Nebraska at U.S. Strategic Command, whose mission is to deter strategic attacks and guarantee the nation’s security. After retiring from the military, he returned to Washington with his family, taking a job at the Hanford Field Office.
Duresky critiqued the president’s attack on Iran, which has led to higher fuel prices at home and forced the retreat of American forces out of bases in the Middle East as those facilities were damaged.
“The fact that the Pentagon was hiding how much damage was done to some of our bases was a huge deal, and so I’m super concerned that we haven’t thought hard enough about how to defend distributed forces,” he said.
He’s also campaigned on an anti-corruption platform and has made a pledge along with other Democratic candidates called Take BAC Congress.
The pledge includes term limits, a ban on stock trading for sitting Congress members, a moratorium on lobbying by departing Congress members, an enforceable code of ethics for the U.S. Supreme Court, and overturning the high court decision known as Citizens United that unleashed unlimited political spending.
“We’re going to have some demands on whoever wants to be the next speaker of the House,” he said. “Because the ban on stock trading and the moratorium on lobbying, they can happen today. We don’t need a law, we don’t need to go through President Trump.”
Regardless of platform, having that “D” by Duresky’s name may as well be short for “difficult to win.”
“Washington’s 4th really is close to impossible for a Democrat to win given the partisan lean,” said Erin Covey, an editor and analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “This is a seat Trump won with 59% in 2024.”
The Duresky campaign is undeterred. The Democrat has raised $179,000, with $34,000 on hand as of July 15, and added a full-time organizer in Yakima. The state Democratic Party is bolstering Central Washington candidates, Duresky’s campaign manager Gabe Apodaca said. The campaign even aired a TV commercial during a recent Seahawks game.
Duresky wants to land the big political fish in the Yakima Valley that Democrats have chased for years: a turnout in the Latino community big enough to flip farm country blue.
Generally aligned with the Democratic Party, Latino voters nationwide in 2024 backed Trump by a larger margin than usual for a Republican, with the GOP hoping that shift becomes regular. Democrats are hoping for a reversal, and also for a larger share of the Latino population to vote in the Yakima Valley.
“The district’s 40% Latino,” Duresky said. “If we can get the Latino vote to show up, this is not a conservative district, and we are walking into Congress.”
The candidates share some common ground.
When it comes to AI data centers, McKinney and Duresky both suggested using one of the 4th District’s unique features: the Hanford site, the vast swath of federal property that could hypothetically host both data centers and nuclear power to operate them.
Duresky went further: “We should not be paying higher electricity rates for them to build data centers for themselves.” He also said he supports a ban on “nondisclosure agreements between public utilities or city councils or really anybody, and the companies building the data centers.”
He took a shot at the AI products the companies are building the centers for, saying government needed to put “serious guardrails” around the use of AI.
“It kind of doesn’t make sense to me to build these giant machines that consume a ton of resources, both to build and to operate, to then make a whole bunch of oligarchs and billionaires a lot richer,” he said.
McKinney said she thinks about large data centers the same way she does about solar and wind farms, which have drawn opposition by her and others east of the Cascades. She believes locals should have a say in their siting and construction. She criticized the state’s Democratic leadership for using an unelected commission, the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, to fast-track projects like two solar farms in Yakima County.
“Who knows what the next thing will be 20 years from now?” she said. “Whatever it is, the local community has to be at the table and their voice has to count.”
On healthcare, both candidates support higher Medicaid reimbursement rates to support rural hospitals. (Washington ranks near the bottom of states in a key reimbursement metric.)
McKinney wants Congress to require states like Washington to raise their Medicaid reimbursement rate in order to get federal dollars for healthcare.
They split on government subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance coverage that have lapsed under Republican control in Washington, D.C., which one estimate said has caused 3 million Americans to lose health insurance.
Duresky wants those subsidies restored, and even calls for universal healthcare. McKinney wants more competition, perhaps by allowing more hospitals to be built in Washington.
Like Duresky, McKinney supports a ban on stock trading among members of Congress.
If elected, “I do own individual stocks,” she said. “I will be transferring that over so that I no longer have the ability to make daily trades or any trades.”
Minutes later, McKinney rose from the park bench, cutting the interview short. There was a debate with Duresky to get to, and some county business popped up, she said, and she needed to be on a call.
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