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Republican Tiffany Smiley announced that she will be taking on Democrat Senator Patty Murray, the “mom in tennis shoes” who has been the state’s senator since 1993, having been reelected four times.

Smiley is a nurse, a small business owner, a nationally known veterans’ rights activist, and joined the  Jason Rantz Show on KTTH to discuss her plan to .

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“I’m no stranger to David and Goliath type of battles, she said. “Sixteen years ago this month, I resigned from my nursing job in Washington state, took a one way flight out to Walter Reed Army Medical Center where my husband was soon to arrive after being blinded by a suicide car bomb while in service to our country in Iraq. So I walked into his room about this same day, 16 years ago, and told him he would never see again. That same day, I was brought into a room with military officials, VA officials, military officials, and they asked me to sign the paperwork to medically retire him.”

“I told them no, because I didn’t believe it was the right thing to do,” she said. “They pushed the paperwork in front of me a little bit further and they said, ‘Tiffany, sign the paperwork. Your husband’s blind. There’s no one that will ever serve blind.’ And I said no. I built a coalition of people that believed in the vision, and Scotty went on to become the first blind active duty officer to serve our country.”

Now, she says she’s running for the U.S. Senate to find “common sense solutions to the problems that hardworking Washington families and our brilliant youth here in this state are facing.”

Smiley believes that career politicians are not our future.

“We know that more than ever now, given the global pandemic that we have all been through, it’s an opportunity for a shift. We need change,” she said. “We need new tennis shoes running this state.”

“Partisan politics is not the way of our future, and it’s not what the people in Washington state want, she added. “… If these past few years have shown us anything, it’s that people are frustrated. And career politicians, they say one thing and they do another, if they do anything at all. I think people in Washington are waking up to that fact on a really real level. They want people to stand up for them and to be their voice and, sadly, that’s just not what Patty Murray is doing. She’s spending a lot of time focusing on the wrong Washington, spending a lot of time focusing on Washington D.C.”

How does Smiley plan on doing well in Seattle or areas of the state where a good portion of the electorate will see an ‘R’ next to her name and automatically say, “no, not for me,” Jason asked?

“I can’t wait to get out in the state and visit with everyone and meet them,” Smiley replied. “My VA reform, I worked with Patty Murray, I worked with Secretary Shulkin. It shows my ability to work with others for the greater good.”

“As a mom — and this is where I can relate with a lot of suburban families in that area — is as a mom, I’ve seen our children struggle this last year, going to online learning in a state that was not prepared for it at all, a lack of access to broadband internet. As a nurse, I’ve seen the failures of Obamacare, and we need to expand access and affordable health care, not expand the reach of the government or the bureaucrats into the most personal spaces and decisions that any of us will ever make.”

“And then, certainly, as a Washingtonian, I see economic problems. So it doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, we’re all feeling the economic pinch of what has happened, and the bad policies are affecting us on a real level,” she said. “So the consequences of a faltering economy, increased taxes, increased government control. We need to empower our people, not empower the government.”

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.