Washington state congressional candidate Elizabeth Kreiselmaier visited Grays Harbor County on Saturday, joining other state and local candidates at a political rally in Aberdeen organized by the Grays Harbor County Republican Party.

Kreiselmaier, who is running against incumbent Democrat Derek Kilmer for Washington’s 6th District congressional seat, said she is a “mom on a mission to clean up the House (of Representatives).”

”It’s been rife with dirty tricks, foul play and stinkin’ thinkin’,” said the educational researcher and program specialist graduated in the top two percent of her class at the University of Oregon. “I’m here to put a stop to that.”

It was her time spent working in several roles in the educational field that turned Kreiselmaier from what she dubbed a “Bay Area blue liberal” to a “fire-engine red conservative Republican.”

“I’ve worked in the federal, state and local education levels,” she said. “I’ve seen from the inside how bureaucracies don’t come through. There is bloat and fraud and fluff.”

Kreiselmaier wrote and directed federal grants for both general and special education programs; taught developmental courses for professional and university personnel; was a consultant to the National Science Foundation as well as multiple universities, state education departments, school districts and nonprofits; and has spent time developing and evaluating programs for children with disabilities in her 17-plus year career after graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Ph.D. in special education, management and counseling psychology.

A wife and mother who lives with her family in Gig Harbor, Kreiselmaier expanded on her political positions in an exclusive interview.

“As a person, I tend to be very results-driven and use common sense. … We want our kids to be educated and prepared to be contributing members of society. So we have to have programs in place that reward good behavior and consequate behavior that takes us off course,” she said. “So that has made me a believer in school choice. I believe the money should follow the child. The best thing to salvage a flailing system is to introduce elements of competition where parents will have choice as to whether they want to go to home school, a private school, vouchers or charter schools as well as public schools. … Parents, ultimately, are the best experts on their children and they are the ultimate authority in their children’s lives and I think education system needs to respect that and reflect that.”

Kreiselmaier has been making the rounds throughout the six counties in the district while campaigning and said she enjoys getting out and discussing the issues with the constituency.

“It’s lovely to be here again. … It’s a pleasure to me because it’s part of the job to meet people, hear their concerns and share where I’m coming from and what I have to offer.”

Kreiselmaier said that on top of the minds of many she’s spoken with in Grays Harbor and throughout the district is getting the economy opened up to a point where businesses can be profitable once again.

“All over the six counties, and here, particularly, there is a desire to reopen safely and quickly. That’s something that differentiates me from my opponent and (Gov.) Jay Inslee. They are aligned with keeping us closed as long as possible and other agendas served by that that are not serving the people,” she said. “The incessant focus on the (COVID-19) virus itself and waiting, waiting, waiting for a vaccine. There are things we know now that we did not know at the beginning about this virus that certainly indicate it is safe to open our schools and our businesses while also protecting those that are most vulnerable in those high-risk categories, and do it safely and quickly, and save our livelihoods. That has not been done adequately enough and we are hanging by a thread in many cases. And I know around here, that is true as well.”

Kreiselmaier stated she decided to run for Congress after President Trump’s impeachment by the House in 2018, a process she stated was a “hoax and a waste of time and $43 million dollars of taxpayer money.”

“That was just egregious and a dirty trick in my book,” she said. “We see a lot of those dirty tricks coming out of Congress.”

According to Kreiselmaier, that includes a Democrat-led House not approving the most recent coronavirus relief package, money she said needs to get into the hands of those that need it and not be held ransom for large government bailouts.

“There needs to be a reckoning for those poor practices that have resulted in those kind of shortfalls and difficulties in those states that have been run by Democrats and have got them into hot water, financially. This is not that day.” she said. “We need to be focusing any aid effort to specifically target those most in need and get that money to them quickly and not get tied up in, as we’ve had in our state, Nigerian scam artists skimming the money. We need to get that money out to the people that need it now, if not yesterday.”

Kreiselmaier also proposed that if elected she would work at loosening federal and state restrictions that directly affect the local timber and fishing industries, and offered alternative ways of doing so than her opponent.

“Under Democrat control and rule we’ve seen the hollowing out of the middle class and jobs shipped overseas. In the timber and fishing industries we see in the boreal economies of our state, we were seeing a slow recession under Biden and Obama, and Kilmer was there during that time (since 2013), and they were doing nothing to help those rural economies recover,” she explained. “During the booming Trump economy, (Grays Harbor, Clallam and Mason) counties were experiencing unemployment that was twice as high as the rest of the state and nation at that time (pre-COVID). They were suffering. They weren’t getting results because there was such an emphasis on environmental interests and regulations and that is a problem.”

Kreiselmaier believes poor Democratic leadership is why those aforementioned counties flipped from Democrat to Republican in the 2016 presidential election.

“Kilmer, Inslee and the Democratic party as a whole see pretty much every problem through the lens of climate change. They attack things in really bizarre and non-common sense kinds of ways,” she said. “For example, the salmon industry is faltering and, in my opinion, Derek Kilmer wastes a lot of time and money on studies and talking about the acidification of the ocean instead of looking at the predation problem — the rising populations of seals and seas lions eating the salmon — and why is that? Well, because there is a sea mammal protection act at the federal level that has prohibited the culling of the seal and sea lion population and has resulted in a burgeoning of those populations. So where we once had about 20,000 seals off the coast of Washington, now it’s closer to 100,000 to 300,000. … (Democrats) just get off course and don’t look at the root causes of problems. They tend to look at every problem through a smudgy lens of a particular mindset, in this case climate change.”

Another key point Kreiselmaier is campaigning on is working on solutions forcing Congressional members and the media to play by the rules.

“I would like to propose, once elected, legislation or a rule that would require Congress members to live and abide by the very rules they set for others,” she said. “Even with the shutdowns, career politicians like to see the rules as for thee, but not for me. … I am somebody who values fairness, consistency, the rule of law, equal justice under the law and none of the favoritism we see happening and certainly not self-enrichment, self promotion and abuse of the public trust.

“This shield of censorship the mainstream media has been engaged in, it leads to people, myself included, not trusting them very much because they are not presenting the facts to the American people that will help them make an informed decision this election. For example, with Hunter Biden’s laptop being discovered with very damming and incriminating evidence on it that shows a linkage between Hunter Biden and foreign governments and enriching himself by selling access to the White House (through his father, Joe Biden). … These things get ignored by the media even though that laptop and the evidence on it, and subsequent people coming forward with additional evidence, is credible.”

Kreiselmaier said she believes the reported actions of the Biden family are “egregious” and pose a risk to national security. She plans to pursue action to hold media companies accountable if they practice censorship of news stories for the purposes of benefiting one candidate/political party over another.

“They are trying to protect Joe Biden and Democrats up and down the ticket,” she said. “That is a partisan effort to influence an election and, with them being supposedly impartial purveyors of news, that is not okay. I would pursue legislation to prohibit or consequate that, if they are in fact providing millions if not billions of dollars worth of in-kind contributions to a candidate by censoring information and keeping it from getting into the public’s hands, there should be some very severe consequences for that.”

Ultimately, Kreiselmaier sees this election as a “stark contrast” between two ideologies: Pro-American conservatism or Marxism/socialism.

“People need to be aware that that is what is at stake here,” she said. “We have a direction that would be very dark for our country to go down if Democrats were to win control at the Presidential level and on down, or we have a grand (economic) recovery coming if we re-elect President Trump and elect Republicans on down the ticket that also value the Constitution, economic prosperity and the safety and security of our citizens. To me, it’s a no-brainer.”