Susan Hutchison served as Chair of the Washington State Republican Party from 2013 until the beginning of this year. Before announcing her resignation, she joined us to discuss the goal of flipping Washington to Republican control.

What’s at the front of my mind heading in to 2018 is flipping the House, chopping Frank Chopp out of leadership as the one who determines how we’re going to go forward in this state on so many issues. It’s really time to have Republicans in charge and we’re going to have to flip a couple seats in the legislature in order to do that. But we flipped eight seats in the last cycle against the Republicans flipping four in their direction, so we’ve got momentum and I think we’ve targeted some of the seats that could easily flip in 2018.

So, taking the power away from Frank Chopp after some twenty years of his leadership as Speaker of the House is number one on my mind. And we’ve got areas that we could flip seats because they are so supportive of Donald Trump. They used to be Democrat and now because of Donald Trump’s presidency, they voted for him and they want him to be successful. So, the argument against him doesn’t work in some districts. It works in some that are more liberal, but it doesn’t work in others. So, we’ll just see what happens and develops in 2018.

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