Washington's 2nd Congressional District hasn't been competitive in a general election for over a decade. Rick Larsen has held the seat since 2001, and in a district now rated D+12, no Republican has broken 40 percent of the vote since 2012. So while voters stifled a yawn for Larsen, the interesting question has been: who will give them a reason to vote in the primary?
This year, Tomas Scheel is giving voters that reason. He's running on the argument that a safe seat has left the district with a representative who's neither accountable to voters nor interested in representing them. Scheel's platform is straightforward: no corporate money, accountability to the people, standing firm on rights, and affordability front and center.
From the Air Force to the Ballot
A U.S. Air Force veteran, Scheel says he enlisted out of a sense of obligation. "I wanted to ensure that I gave back to my country, because I had gotten a lot of gifts from it." After leaving the service, he started his own business but found he missed the camaraderie. In 2016 he also took up volunteer firefighting, and after January 6, 2021, he says he could no longer stand on the sidelines.
Working roughly 300 hours a month on his business, he volunteered his limited free time to a local Democratic organization. But his business struggled as the economy tightened, and when he pursued federal contracts, he says the work evaporated under the Trump administration. At home, he watched Larsen make questionable choices and dodge questions. With the backing of his supportive family, he decided it was time to run for office. Since January, he says, he's worked 10, sometimes 16-hour days, taking time off only for his family.
Political Accountability
The first plank Scheel names is a public-servant accountability standard - a uniform code of conduct for federal officials, modeled loosely on the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He's candid that changes would come incrementally, starting with a narrow set of standards most people could agree on. But the principle behind it is blunt. As he puts it, if you lie under oath to Congress, that is a crime; but Congress can lie to the public without consequence. He wants the same standard of honesty running in both directions, and he says any official who knowingly - or even unknowingly - misleads the public should be obligated to correct the record.
The sharpest single contrast he draws with the incumbent is over money. Larsen has taken contributions from AIPAC; Scheel says he has taken no corporate or lobby money and intends to keep it that way. "I don't take corporate money, I don't take foreign lobby money," he said.
"We didn't land on Iwo Jima quietly." - Tomas Scheel
That same instinct shapes his call to impeach Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump-appointed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Dhillon canceled federal police-oversight agreements reached after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and has redirected a division meant to enforce civil rights towards its antithesis. Asked directly whether impeachment is the right method to remove her, Scheel acknowledged it may not, but the point is "to show solidarity," arguing that he wants people to know that no one in the current administration is exempt from justice.
Comprehensive Healthcare
On health, Scheel's stated goal is universal coverage, and he says he is unwilling to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Pressed for specifics, he described a single-payer framework he wants to eventually include dental and mental health - not as add-ons, but as parts of health care he considers essential from the start. He argues the care people tend to treat as optional is exactly where coverage matters most.
He also frames problems not usually filed under healthcare as healthcare problems. Housing assistance, he notes, can be cheaper than the downstream medical costs of leaving people on the street. It's clear in how he talks about policy that compassionate options and fiscal responsibility don't have to be mutually exclusive - in fact they're often the same.
Building More Affordable Housing
Scheel's signature housing idea is public support for community land trusts - nonprofit organizations that build permanently affordable homes - through low-cost or no-cost construction loans. He argues the approach could be near revenue-neutral, since most homes built would be sold and the money recovered, which in his view should make it palatable even to conservatives wary of new debt. He says homes like these often come with solar panels, good insulation, and shared community space, and are among the nicest in their neighborhoods rather than the cheapest-looking.
Strong on Rights
On civil rights, Scheel's platform is unusually concrete: a constitutional amendment protecting equal marriage rights, employment protections for transgender Americans, and protections for trans youth in schools and healthcare. Asked why he chose to be that specific when other candidates who agree with him keep their commitments vague, he rejected the premise that vagueness is ever safer. "We didn't land on Iwo Jima quietly," he said. He argued that defending a group means saying so plainly and loudly, and that as the list of people needing defense grows, he'll continue to defend them.
Transit Over Stadiums
For Everett specifically, Scheel puts transit first. He notes that the very first call his campaign received after ballots dropped was about the proposed Everett stadium, and he is direct that transit should come first. "The transit system should definitely be a higher priority than a stadium," he said. "Because last I checked, you can't drive a stadium around town".
Light rail to Everett, once promised far sooner, is now scheduled to reach downtown in 2041. Already pushed back by pandemic-era delays and a budget shortfall, transit officials concede the date could slip further. Scheel's closing pitch to Everett residents leans on the same point: he would champion, he says, "the infrastructure of this century, instead of more roads" - and he admitted his "fairly selfish" reason, that a train would let him get to the city faster without battling traffic.
Representation
Scheel wants to show up for the people in his district, including at protests and strikes, where he argues people need to see that a representative is with them not only in solidarity, but physically. He says that as a member of Congress he would physically inspect immigration detention centers that many representatives never visit. ICE custody deaths have reached their highest levels in the system's recorded history, most detainees have no criminal record, and ICE's own internal reviews have documented uses of force and medical failures inside its facilities. Scheel said that he would use his authority to inspect facilities even in districts whose own representatives have not.
Scheel talks about the race in stages - "impossible to improbable to inevitable" - invoking Barack Obama's 2008 run as the model of a candidacy dismissed until, in hindsight, it looked inevitable. But he is unusually frank about defining success in more than one way. He says he believes that a candidate who shows up can be competitive against one with a war chest, and that in a district this blue, the voters get to decide which they value more.