SEQUIM — Skip the metaphors. Kevin Van De Wege has probably heard them all.
“A hotly contested race.”
“Putting out fires in Olympia.”
The 29-year-old Democratic firefighter and paramedic for Clallam County Fire District No. 3 — a political novice — is challenging five-term incumbent Rep. Jim Buck, Republican from Joyce, for a 24th District seat in the state Legislature this fall.
He is the only partisan challenger to a state lawmaker in the Peninsula’s legislative district this election year.
State Sen. Jim Hargrove and Rep. Lynn Kessler, both Democrats from Hoquiam, automatically gained new terms when the extended candidate filing period ended last Friday.
Van De Wege, a soft-spoken, congenial public safety worker, says he appreciates the humor of the firefighting puns associated with his candidacy.
But, he insists, his campaign is 100 percent serious.
“I think I’m really ready for this,” Van De Wege said, surrounded by his wife, Jennifer, 3-year-old daughter Allison, and son Jackson, born just last March.
He’d better be ready. He’s taking on a popular incumbent who has managed to beat the odds by becoming only the third Republican ever elected to a 24th District seat — and the only one ever elected more than once.
Unopposed in primary
Van De Wege is unopposed in next month’s Democratic primary election, like Buck is in the Republican primary.
(Partisan primary elections are being reintroduced because of federal court rulings outlawing the open primary that Washington had for more than 60 years.)
Although Van De Wege is backed by his party and encouraged by other firefighters serving in the Legislature, his main source of support, he says, is Jennifer, his wife since April 1998.
