Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) comfortably won over 50% of the vote in a Tuesday top-two primary for the congressional district covering the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
Newhouse received 50,599 of 89,274 votes in the 4th Congressional District primary, 56.7% of the total, according to unofficial results from the Washington state Secretary of State. He will face the No. 2 vote getter in the Nov. 3 general election: Democrat Douglas McKinley, who received 24,599 votes, 27.6% of those cast.
The other candidates were Libertarian Ryan Cooper, Republicans Tracy Wright and Sarena Sloot, and Independent Evan Jones.
Newhouse, a former state official and lawmaker, has served in the House since January 2015, succeeding Rep. Doc Hastings in representing nearly 700,000 people in Adams, Benton, Franklin, Grant, Okanogan, and Yakima counties and sections of Douglas and Walla Walla counties.
Like his predecessor, Newhouse has pressed for funding to advance environmental remediation at the Hanford Site, a former plutonium production complex dating to the Manhattan Project in World War II. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he has also this year criticized the Trump administration’s decision this year not to seek funding to resume licensing of a nuclear waste disposal facility under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The geologic repository would receive waste from Hanford, along with other federal defense nuclear sites and commercial power reactors.