Republican State Representative Ed Orcutt might be a formidable political opponent, but challenging a 12-term incumbent is nothing compared to taking sniper fire in Iraq. IBEW Local 48 member Evan Jones, a thrice-wounded combat veteran, is running against Orcutt to represent voters of Washington’s 20th Legislative District, Position 2.
Jones lives with his wife and daughters in unincorporated Rose Valley, Washington, east of Longview. District 20 is a mostly rural and heavily Republican-leaning district that runs from Ridgefield to Centralia east of I-5. And yet Jones, a Democrat two years into his first term as Port of Longview commissioner, thinks he has a chance to win.
At age 42, Jones has already lived multiple lives.
“That’s always been a problem for me, frankly,” Jones told the Labor Press. “I see something happening and I gotta be part of it.”
Growing up in Beaverton, he started working at age 15 as a computer coder for an early voice over internet program at a company called ITXC. The money was good and he was tempted to drop out of his science and technology high school, but a teacher he admired pushed him to make it through. After ITXC collapsed in the dot-com bust, he taught English in northern China, but was deported after a bar fight gone wrong.
Returning home, it was 2003, and the war in Iraq was about to begin. He joined the U.S. Army and spent a year in Iraq, starting with a light tank unit, then 16 months as an infantryman in Afghanistan in Kandahar and elsewhere training Afghan soldiers. Armor plate absorbed most of the impact of his first bullet. In a later encounter, a bullet pierced his helmet and fractured his skull, but he recovered and returned to active duty. The third bullet hit his pelvis as he crossed a road to retrieve a fallen soldier. Again, he recovered at an Army hospital. But seizures related to the second injury resulted in an involuntary medical discharge and a small disability benefiit.
Jones is the first to admit he went through difficult times after leaving the army. Haunted by survivor’s guilt, he became a problem drinker. He hit a low point in 2009 when he ran his then-girlfriend’s car into an electric pole and earned a second DUI. With the help of a court-ordered treatment program at the VA hospital, he turned himself around.
His big break came in 2018 when his now-wife’s mother’s boyfriend, a superintendent at Omega Morgan, gave him a shot at work as inside wireman. It was specialty “tool move” work — safely and quickly moving expensive and fragile electrical equipment. Sweating down hallways moving 10-ton loads on air skates, he was again part of a crew, and this time, a union.
Jones says he’ll never forget the words of wisdom imparted to him at his new member orientation: “This union is going to be whatever you make out of it,” Local 48 rep Scott Zadow told him. Jones took it to heart, becoming a regular at the union’s satellite meetings in Longview and volunteering to become a union steward.
In 2024, Local 48 rep Mike Bridges was looking to recruit a union member to run for an open seat on the Port of Longview commission, and talked with one of Jones’ coworkers. “Should I do it?” the coworker asked Jones. “What has the union given to you?” Jones remembers responding. “Everything. So if they’re asking you to do something, then you should probably f**ing do it.” When the coworker decided against it, Jones volunteered.
After attending Washington State Labor Council’s Path to Power training program for union member political candidates, he prepared to run a competitive race. Then his only opponent dropped out, and he was elected unopposed to a six-year term.
Joining the commission, part of his agenda was to bring organized labor in from out in the cold.
“When I got there, labor found out about stuff after the fact. I said, ‘This is completely unsatisfactory. How are you guys going to make decisions on the operations of the port without talking to the longshore? What are you thinking?’”
For Jones, a pivotal moment of service on the port commission arrived when he learned that notorious non-union contractor Rotschy had been awarded a $44 million contract upgrading a rail line at the port. Rotschy by then had a reputation for safety violations, and had received a record fine after an unsupervised 16-year old worker lost both legs to a trenching machine. Jones proposed to reject the contract award and put the contract back out to bid, but the other two commissioners disagreed. Within nine months another Rotschy worker was badly injured on another job, and at the port, a Rotschy excavator sank into a log pond.
Responding to the accident involving the 16-year-old, labor unions and allied state legislators promoted a bill to toughen penalties for employers that violate labor laws protecting minors. To Jones’ shock, his own state rep, Ed Orcutt, voted against it. In his 23 years in office Orcutt had voted against organized labor 78% of the time according to votes tracked the Washington State Labor Council. But to vote against child labor laws? That was the moment Jones felt called to run against Orcutt.
Orcutt had faced no opposition whatsoever in his 2016, 2022, and 2024 elections. Jones decided to mount a challenge.
Could a guy like Jones win in District 20? Orcutt has blasted through Democratic challengers before: 70% against John Morgan in 2014, 64% against Brennan Bailey in 2018, and 73% against Will Rollet in 2020.
But Jones thinks he’s got a shot. In his door-knocking and phone banking, his pitch to voters is straightforward: Ed Orcutt is out of step with voters in the district, and more to the point, he’s become irrelevant as a Republican in a legislature dominated for decades by Democrats.
“The best he can do is complain after the fact,” Jones said. “Nobody’s bringing him into the room when they’re writing the legislation.”
To Jones way of thinking, that leaves District 20 voters without any real representation.
“I think that there is a very significant portion of the district that is not Republican or Democrat, and these are voters who voted for Trump, then they voted for Biden, and they voted for Trump again. And those are the voters that I want.”
For Jones, the August 4 primary will be the first round of a two-round match. In Washington’s unusual top two primary, when there are only two candidates, they face each other first in August, and then again in November, when the race is decided.
