Sec of State Kim Wyman: ‘I am not planning to leave the Republican Party’

In inauguration week, there were plenty of folks doing some soul searching about the future of the Republican Party now that Joe Biden is in office. Secretary of State Kim Wyman has done some soul searching as well after she and her staff have been hit with some significant threats after the last election, often coming from folks on the right.

It’s got a lot of people wondering based on her comments to KUOW whether or not she’s going to stay a Republican. But she told the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH that her comments were taken out of context.

“No, I am not planning to leave the Republican Party,” she said. “That was in the context of really talking about the January 6 riot on the U.S. Capitol, and I just made the comment that if that’s what my party stands for, I’m out. That’s not what the Republican Party is about. That’s not what Republicanism is about.”

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“It kind of got sliced and diced a little differently than I think my intent was. But no, I am not planning on leaving the party. … I said I would if the Republican Party is about trying to overthrow the government, trying to overthrow our institutions, our democratic institutions, then, yes, then I would be wanting to leave the party,” she added. “But otherwise, no, I am not.”

Wyman says she and her staff were subject to numerous attacks in the lead up to the election, often as a result of how it was being framed.

“It really started six months before the election, when the president and others were making a lot of false allegations, and sharing a lot of misinformation about the election system, and really created this binary choice that if President Trump wasn’t reelected, then clearly it was just a rigged election,” she said. “So what we found is that after election day when that was starting to become a reality.”

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“I think it was easier for a lot of people to accept that there was some sort of massive fraud and rigged election than coming to terms with the fact that our party lost the election, that the lead candidate lost the election,” Wyman continued. “And then it kind of just turned on a dime and, you know, the blame started going around and it kind of just evolved to I’m clearly part of the deep state, and I’m a RINO [Republican in name only], and threats on my staff and myself that we were somehow going to pay for that.”

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.