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NEWPORT – Although Matthew Welde hasn’t run for office before, he recognizes that his opportunity to do so arrived when Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers announced she wouldn’t be running for re-election for Washington’s 5th Congressional seat. “I was expecting to run when it came open, but I wasn’t expecting it this soon,” the Democrat said when he visited The Miner office.
Welde is a domestic violence prosecutor. “I quickly developed a passion for it,” he said. It’s a difficult area to operate in. “Those cases are hard to prosecutor for a number of reasons, so you take your lumps.” He thinks his experience as a prosecutor can help him get work done in Washington D.C.
“In Washington (DC), people don’t get along. There’s too much finger pointing. It’s exhausting and not sustainable,” he said.
Welde explained that when he’s prosecuting a person, there’s an attorney on the other side that has completely conflicting properties than his. “We go to court, we communicate outside of court. We have to figure out a solution,” he said. Most cases don’t go to trial because attorneys get together to find some common ground and come up with a resolution that makes sense.
Even when a case does go to trial, “We don’t go into court and just tear each other apart. We don’t go to court and holler and scream at the judge. If I go to court and the defense attorney argues against a motion, I don’t accuse the defense attorney of supporting domestic violence,” Welde said.
“I’m able to resolve most of my cases in a way that makes sense. I think I can take those skills to Washington and be like look, let’s put our swords away and see if we can find common ground.”
Welde began his prosecuting career in Oklahoma. The state was in financial trouble and Providence of Oklahoma went out of business, where his wife worked. There were too many cuts and they lost most of their clients, he said. “It was a state-wide problem, so we chose the Pacific Northwest. We had friends and family in the area.”
They first moved to Oregon, but they weren’t receptive to hiring someone from Oklahoma. So he broadened his search and found a job in Washington in 2018. He and his wife Susan live in Liberty Lake with their two kids, ages 15 and 13. The had settled in Spokane Valley and then moved to Liberty Lake a couple years ago. Last year he moved over to practice in Kootenai County, Idaho, after five years in Spokane County.
It’s a smaller office and closer to home, he said.
He’s still practicing while running for office. He works four days a week at the prosecutor’s office and spends his weekends, evenings and Wednesdays on his campaign.
Running as a Democrat for a number of reasons, but believes he can appeal to people who wouldn’t normally vote for a Democrat.
He’s worked shouldto- shoulder with law enforcement his entire career and is building relationships with area tribes.
He was not a big fan of trickle down economics, as it does not have a mechanism where any savings on the supply side goes back into the economy. “The money was just siphoned out of the economy and hid under a mattress somewhere,” he said.
When he graduated from high school and started paying attention to global affairs, he said he realized the war in Iraq was completely bogus.
But his being a Democrat isn’t just based on what he disagrees about with Republicans.
“I align with the Democrats on social issues,” he said. For example, he supports unionized labor.
The erosion of collective bargaining has eroded the middle class and increased child labor.
“I generally support the LGBTQ+ community. I don’t see eye-to-eye with Democrats on everything, but I see more eye-toeye with the Democrats than the Republicans.”
He is also pro-choice. He believes the overturning of Roe v. Wade was wrong legally, morally and ethically.
Welde recognizes that fentanyl and problems at the border are big issues facing the country.
He said more awareness about how prevalent fentanyl is in our community, especially at schools. “You have to teach kids that you can’t take a pill from a friend and take it because if it’s the wrong pill, it can kill you.” In his opinion, it overlays with the border problem. That’s one aspect he doesn’t agree with the Biden administration. He talks with his friends in Oklahoma, who have rental properties with people squatting in them. “It’s an every day person problem,” he said of the southern border.
Human trafficking is also a problem.
There’s a lot of people who are coming here looking for work, just ordinary people, he says.
But they don’t have any place to live, so they squat in rental properties.
“There’s an overlay of problems,” he said. He thinks Congress should have passed the Border Bill. He doesn’t agree with Sen. James Lankford, who authored the Border Bill, but he respects the process he went through, working with the Democrats and coming to an agreement. More money for border guards would have been very helpful as well as closing the border. “We don’t have those things because that deal fell through and it’s unfortunate.”
We also need more with the countries to the south of us. “I think we can do more to help them,” he said, specifically Mexico and their problems with drug cartels.
