This Sleeper Senate Candidate Thinks She Can Turn Washington State Red

Elections

In the weeks before Election Day, Tiffany Smiley takes her campaign against Sen. Patty Murray on the road

Republican Washington State Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley speaks as Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) looks on / Getty Images Josh Christenson • October 27, 2022 12:30 pm

COVINGTON, Wash.—When Republican Tiffany Smiley saw two young girls alone outside the Safeway, she knew something was wrong.

The girls told the Senate hopeful they were homeless and living out of a car with their mother, who was inside trying to buy them something to eat. To Smiley, the family was a perfect example of how Democrats have failed the people of Washington.

“That woman doesn’t need Patty Murray’s electric vehicle voucher,” Smiley told voters in Covington on Wednesday. “That woman needs gas prices to be lower. She needs the cost of living to be lower. She needs her groceries to be affordable. … That’s who I’m fighting for.”

Smiley’s remarks came at the kickoff event for her statewide bus tour, the last leg of her campaign to unseat Sen. Patty Murray (D.), whose 30-year career in the upper chamber, Smiley says, has been long on promises but short on results. Smiley reminds voters that on Murray’s watch, crime has spiked in Washington State, and the economy has tanked.

It’s a message that resonates with Debbie Bussell, a retiree who lives in Covington. Bussell says inflation is “killing” her family and that she has to “put things back on the grocery shelves.” Her husband, Kirk, said Christmas for their grandchildren was “going to be a little skinny this year.”

Born and raised in rural Washington, Smiley was working as a nurse in 2005 when her husband, Major Scotty Smiley, was severely injured and blinded by a suicide bomb in Iraq. Smiley quit her job to care for Scotty and became a full-time advocate for veterans and their caregivers. When she speaks to voters, Smiley says she wants to fight for Washington families as aggressively as she fought for Scotty after he returned from Iraq.

As far as she sees it, Washington needs a fighter. After leaving for another stop in Issaquah, Smiley told the Washington Free Beacon that a woman had approached her to say she doesn’t even feel safe pumping gas by herself and asks her husband to go instead.

Smiley blamed President Joe Biden,

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