In 2024, Amanda McKinney Made an Ad Against Trump's Candidate. She Now Says She Spent Years Working to Retire Dan Newhouse.

In the fall of 2024, Amanda McKinney appeared in a television commercial supporting Rep. Dan Newhouse's reelection. The ad praised the Sunnyside Republican's experience and clout in Washington, D.C., and attacked his primary challenger, Jerrod Sessler, as an outsider who did not understand central Washington.

Sessler was, at that moment, the candidate Donald Trump had endorsed. Trump split his 2024 endorsement between Sessler and another Republican in the race. Newhouse had voted in 2021 to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting insurrection, one of only ten House Republicans to do so, and McKinney was among the few elected Republicans in the district who stood with him afterward.

Fourteen months later, in December 2025, McKinney told an audience at AmericaFest in Phoenix that she had been working for years to remove Newhouse from office. After her congressman voted to impeach Trump, she said, she knew she needed to find a way to retire him — and spent a couple of years finding a pathway to do it.

Both statements are hers. Both are on the record. Ballots for the Aug. 4 primary went out to voters last week, and McKinney is now the only candidate in the race with Trump's formal endorsement — an endorsement her chief rival is publicly contesting on precisely these grounds.

What the record establishes

January 2021. Newhouse votes to impeach Trump. Nine other House Republicans do the same. The vote makes him a target of Trump-aligned activists, and he survives Republican challenges in 2022 and 2024.

2024. Trump endorses Sessler. McKinney appears in a commercial backing Newhouse and attacking Sessler. Newhouse finishes second in the top-two primary but wins the general election, with help from moderate and left-leaning voters.

March 2025. Newhouse invites McKinney to attend Trump's address to a joint session of Congress as his guest — a gesture widely read in the district as signaling her as his preferred successor.

Dec. 17, 2025. Newhouse announces he will not seek another term.

December 2025. At AmericaFest, McKinney describes a years-long effort to retire him.

2026. Trump endorses McKinney. She leads the field in fundraising and consolidates support from national Republican figures.

The March 2025 appearance is the part of this sequence that has drawn the least attention and carries the most weight. It falls squarely inside the period McKinney describes as a search for a pathway to retire Newhouse, and it is not a passive association. It required an invitation from him and acceptance from her.

Her explanation

McKinney has not disavowed the 2024 ad. Asked about it, she has said supporting Newhouse then was a deliberate choice because she believed he was the best candidate in that particular race — that choosing a representative is not a permanent commitment — and that she stands by the decision. She has also said it became clear to her after the 2024 election that the district was ready for new leadership.

That second statement places her decision to seek the seat after November 2024 and near Newhouse's retirement announcement, not in the aftermath of the impeachment vote.

Her campaign has largely declined to assess Newhouse's record directly. She has described him as a reserved statesman and said voters want a fighter who can still build coalitions.

The strongest case for her account

Two defenses are available to her, and both deserve to be stated plainly.

The first is that her AmericaFest remarks are ambiguous about when the clock starts. If the "couple of years" she describes runs from late 2024 through Newhouse's retirement announcement, the 2024 ad sits awkwardly beside it but does not contradict it. On that reading, she is describing a late conversion, not a long conspiracy — and late conversions are ordinary in politics.

The second is structural. A county commissioner has institutional reasons to back a sitting congressman that have nothing to do with personal preference. Newhouse sat on the House Appropriations Committee and worked on agriculture, Hanford funding, water, and the Lower Snake River dams — all of them Yakima County interests. A commissioner who publicly worked to unseat him would have been risking her county's access for the length of a campaign she might lose.

Neither defense is unreasonable. What neither does is reconcile the AmericaFest framing, which locates the origin of her effort in the impeachment vote itself, with an ad made three years later against the president's own candidate.

What the record does not show

Reading the Record has not located any public evidence — party resolutions, precinct organizing, endorsements of his challengers, donations, or public statements — that McKinney worked to replace Newhouse at any point between the impeachment vote and the 2024 general election. If such evidence exists, we will publish it and correct this account. Absence of a public record is not proof that no private effort occurred. It is, however, the only record voters can check.

The same fight, happening now

The dispute is not historical. McKinney and Sessler are both claiming Trump's endorsement in the current race. The White House says the endorsement belongs to McKinney. Sessler points to a text message he sent Trump after the 2024 election, which he says Trump printed and signed on Dec. 9, 2024, and argues that constitutes a personal endorsement.

Sessler's argument for why he is the authentic Trump candidate rests on the same 2024 ad this article examines: that McKinney backed Newhouse through the impeachment fight and he did not.

McKinney's answer is blunt. Sessler is not being honest, she has said, and she is the only candidate who has earned the president's endorsement. Her campaign has published a memo stating that he is lying about the endorsement and cannot produce proof of it.

The field and the money

Eleven candidates filed for the seat: six Republicans, one Democrat, one Cascade Party candidate, one independent, and two who listed no party. Three Republicans — McKinney, Sessler, and state Sen. Matt Boehnke of Kennewick — lead in fundraising and visibility. Democrat John Duresky, a retired Air Force major from West Richland, is the only Democrat, which means Democratic votes will not be split the way Republican votes will be.

Under Washington's top-two system, the two highest finishers advance regardless of party. In a field this size, a place in the general election may require barely a quarter of the vote.

McKinney leads the money race by a wide margin. She raised $523,892 through March 31 and reported an additional $401,638 in the second quarter, according to her campaign, bringing her cycle total to roughly $925,000 ahead of the primary. She entered the second quarter with more than $450,000 in cash and close to $121,000 in debt to consultants. Sessler has taken a different approach, loaning his own committee roughly $358,000 since 2021; his campaign carries more than $480,000 in total debt.

Questions voters deserve answered:

1. When did you first decide Dan Newhouse should be replaced in Congress?
2. What specific actions did you take between January 2021 and November 2024 to find a pathway to retire him?
3. Who paid for the 2024 commercial in which you appeared, and were you compensated for your participation?
4. You attended President Trump's address to a joint session of Congress in March 2025 as Rep. Newhouse's guest. Was that invitation extended and accepted while you were seeking to replace him?
5. Have you ever contributed financially to Rep. Newhouse's campaigns?

McKinney may answer these questions through her public platforms. Reading the Record will link to or accurately incorporate substantive public responses through a dated update.

Why this matters

McKinney's political rise has drawn on two kinds of credibility. Her support for Newhouse established her as a pragmatic local Republican able to work across the party's factions. Her current campaign asks Trump-aligned primary voters to see her as one of them.

Voters do not have to decide whether she was sincere in 2024 or sincere in 2025. They do have to decide which account describes what actually happened — and, with ballots already arriving, they have about two weeks to do it.

Sources

Primary documents

• Amanda McKinney, FEC candidate ID H6WA04216; committee, Amanda McKinney for Washington. Statement of organization filed Jan. 29, 2026 (docquery.fec.gov).
• Dan Newhouse for Congress, FEC committee ID C00559393.
• McKinney campaign memo, mckinneyforwashington.com/memo [archive copy on file].
• McKinney campaign second-quarter fundraising announcement, December [date] [archive copy on file].
• 2024 television commercial [link and payer disclaimer to be added].
• AmericaFest remarks, Phoenix, December 2025 [video link and timestamp to be added].

Reporting

• Washington State Standard, "As barbs fly and Trump wades in, a central WA congressional race heats up," Jan. 7, 2026.
• Washington State Standard, "Dollars flowing into a pair of hotly contested WA congressional races," April 17, 2026.
• Tri-City Herald, first-quarter fundraising analysis, April 2026.
• The Spokesman-Review, "Trump looms large as 11 candidates vie to replace Dan Newhouse," June 7, 2026 (updated July 8, 2026).
• The Center Square, coverage of the disputed Trump endorsement, July 2026.
• The Spokesman-Review, Newhouse retirement announcement, Dec. 17, 2025.