Former news anchor and GOP chair helps Washington Republicans stay on message at RNC

MILWAUKEE – The Republican National Convention is teeming with journalists eager to interview the thousands of delegates and other party faithful in attendance. Unlike many other states, Washington’s delegation doesn’t include members of Congress or other statewide elected officials with experience talking to the news media, but it does have a secret weapon to help them deliver the message of GOP unity that has defined the convention.

Susan Hutchison, a former news anchor, Senate candidate and chair of the Washington GOP, led a media training when the group arrived in Wisconsin before the convention kicked off. In an interview Wednesday, she said the 45-minute session was paying off.

“When we were at the state convention in Spokane, when I gave my speech to get elected to be a delegate, I said, ‘Hey, look, there is press crawling all over that convention. We need to have at least one person in our delegation who’s media savvy,’ ” Hutchison said. “We have so many people at this convention who’ve never done politics before.”

They ended up with more than one media-savvy attendee. During breakfast at their hotel Tuesday and Wednesday, members of the Washington delegation shared accounts of talking with reporters from around the world.

One Washingtonian said he had been interviewed by the Associated Press, the New York Times “and somebody from France,” and they had all asked the questions Hutchison had prepared the group for.

“It’s amazing how much those topics we talked about during the seminar are pretty much the topics people are being asked about,” Hutchison said Tuesday. “As I said, the media, they go in patterns. And that’s why it was so easy for me to predict what they were going to ask you about.”

Other attendees recounted how they had pivoted from critical questions about former President Donald Trump or divisions within the GOP to talk about President Joe Biden’s policies, the threat of communism infiltrating the United States and how Trump will save the country. Another told Hutchison he had noticed photojournalists standing in front of Trump and wondered if it was “a silent protest,” prompting several delegates to chime in and explain that the journalists had simply been waiting to photograph the Republican nominee as he left the arena.

Hutchison, who spent more than two decades as an evening news anchor for KIRO TV in Seattle, later served as chair of the Washington GOP from 2013 until 2018, when she ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. She was chosen as an alternate delegate to the RNC during a state convention where the party split between gubernatorial candidates Dave Reichert and Semi Bird.

As the attendees shared their stories on Wednesday, Hutchison offered a tip in case they were asked about former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who ran as Trump’s main foil in the GOP primary before endorsing him in a speech at the convention on Tuesday.

“You can say, ‘I think Nikki Haley did a super job and she proved how deep our bench is. We have so many competent, skilled, experienced, exciting people in our party.’ And you can say that over and over and over again, because that’s true,” Hutchison said. “And it’s also a good reminder to the media, who, if they’re Democrats – which, you know, 99% of the time they are – they need to realize the power behind the Republican Party. We are nothing to be trifled with.”

Ramdas Vaidyanathan, a pharmacist and first-time delegate from Puyallup, Washington, who became a U.S. citizen in 2022, said the media training helped some members of the delegation put their guard down, while others needed to stick to talking points instead of “giving their entire life story.”

Vaidyanathan, who said he is the first Indian American to be elected as an RNC delegate from Washington, told the group that he had declined interview requests from two reporters who were looking for supporters of Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – two primary candidates of Indian ancestry – because he had always supported Trump.

Hutchison covered four political conventions as a journalist, she said in the interview, and that career made her a critical thinker who always tries to understand other points of view. Many other delegations don’t encourage their members to talk to the press, she said, “And that’s a shame, because we shouldn’t have that kind of defeatist attitude. We need to speak with confidence.”

She advised them to ask the reporter for their name, ask who they work for “so that you know who your audience is,” and to smile, because “it helps your face look more pleasant, and it makes you feel confident and optimistic when you start talking.”

Tasha Mae, a delegate from Bellevue, recounted being asked by the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA about her perceptions of racism in the United States.

“And I said, ‘Now, I’m not going to ignore the fact that, yes, there is an egregious past in America,” said Mae, who is Black. “However, I believe that anybody that did things here in America, such as Martin Luther King, even Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, would be very upset about what Blacks have done with all the work and all the things we did in our country. And we’re stuck in the past. We all have access to the American dream.”

Jim Walsh, chairman of the Washington GOP, said he had used interviews to inform national reporters about the ballot measures that would lift restrictions on police pursuing vehicles, make it harder for the state to impose an income tax, create a “bill of rights” for the parents of public school students and repeal Washington’s capital gains tax and cap-and-trade program designed to reduce carbon emissions.

“I’m trying to turn the media narrative away from what they want to talk about, which is how much trouble Trump will have in Washington state,” Walsh said. “I’m turning it a lot to the initiatives that are going to be on the ballot in November.”

Hossein Khorram, an Iranian American from the Bellevue area, said he had spoken to a Persian-language news outlet and found that international press seemed less critical than their U.S. counterparts.

“The American media are mean; they set a trap,” Khorram said. “The international ones, they don’t. They really want to hear your stories. So they gave me a couple of minutes, and I really talked about the atrocities that President Biden has committed, or allowed Iran to commit, to American soldiers, to the international maritime and all those things. And it went real well. I’m glad I’m able to serve President Trump in a very small way.”

The delegation applauded, and Hutchison beamed.

“No teacher is happier than when her students get it,” she said. “And it’s so clear that all of you have gotten it.”

Editor’s note: Reporter Orion Donovan-Smith is in Milwaukee this week to cover the Republican National Convention through the eyes of the delegates and attendees from Washington and Idaho. His coverage and this trip have largely been funded by readers and community members who have donated to the Community Journalism Fund and through the newspaper’s Northwest Passages event series, with all stories made available for free to the public. To help support this and other community-funded journalism projects, contributions can be made at www.spokesman.com/thanks.