The Prosecutor's Race: A Real Republican Against a Stolen Label

Yakima County Republican Party

A real Republican against a stolen label

Two names on your ballot for Yakima County Prosecutor. Both carry an “R.” Only one of them earned it.

From the Precinct Committee Officers of the Yakima County Republican Party

That is not a slogan. It is the reason we voted to endorse Tyler Haueter, and it is why we believe this race deserves more of your attention than any other contest on the ballot.

We are not party bosses or paid consultants. We are your neighbors, elected precinct by precinct to represent Republican voters in this county. When we endorse, we put our own names and reputations behind the choice. So let us explain this one in full, because the stakes are higher than most voters realize and the record is worse than most voters know.

What the office actually does

Most people never think about the Prosecutor's Office until the day they need it. Then it becomes the most important office in their lives.

A prosecutor decides which cases get charged and which quietly go away. She decides what plea to offer the man who put his hands around his wife's throat. She decides whether the child who found the courage to walk into a courtroom and testify gets justice or gets sent home with nothing. She decides whether a gang member facing his fourth felony sees real time or walks out the same week to do it again. Nobody appeals those decisions. There is no review board looking over her shoulder. She decides, and this county lives with the consequences for years.

That is why character matters more in this office than in almost any other. A prosecutor's word is the currency of the entire system. She tells a jury what the evidence shows. She tells a victim what the office will do for her. She tells a defense attorney what the offer is. She tells a judge what happened. When that word cannot be trusted, everything downstream of it bends.

Tyler Haueter's record

Tyler Haueter is a working prosecutor. He is in a courtroom this week, trying cases, while his opponent is posing for facebook selfies.

He served seven years in the Air Force as a paralegal. He spent more than three years as a criminal investigator for the Yakima County Department of Assigned Counsel, learning how cases are built and how they fall apart. He earned his law degree at the University of Idaho and went to work for the Yakima County Prosecutor's Office, where he landed in the Special Assault Unit, handling the cases nobody wants: child molestation, rape, strangulation, domestic violence.

That is not a résumé assembled for a campaign brochure. That is a caseload, carried year after year, in the kind of courtroom where the victim sits ten feet behind you and the defendant's family fills the gallery.

Those eight life sentences mean the defendants do not walk out of prison unless the state affirmatively decides they are safe to release. They are on the sex offender registry for the rest of their lives, subject to lifetime no-contact orders that protect the people they hurt. Those orders exist because Tyler Haueter stood up in court and asked for them.

He is an Air Force veteran, married twenty years, and a father of seven raising his family in this valley. He is asking for a job he has already been doing.

Now compare

His opponent, Quinn Dalan, left the Prosecutor's Office in 2013 and has spent the years since in private practice, public defense, and running a civil legal aid nonprofit. Her campaign has publicly bragged about securing a conviction for assault in the fourth degree. That is a misdemeanor. The maximum penalty in Washington is 364 days in jail, and most such cases never see anything close to it.

We do not say that to mock anyone's career. We say it because she is asking voters to hand her the most consequential criminal justice office in the county on the strength of it. Tyler Haueter handles cases like that before breakfast, between a child rape trial and a strangulation sentencing.

It is not how long you have held a bar number that matters. It is what you have done with it.

The first lie

Dalan runs as a Republican. The “R” is on her signs, her website, and her campaign literature. The public record tells a different story.

In both the 2020 and 2024 presidential primaries, she signed the Democratic party declaration. Washington does not register voters by party, but to vote in a presidential primary you sign a declaration, and those declarations are public record. She signed the Democrat one. Twice.

The state Public Disclosure Commission shows she contributed $200 to Jay Inslee's campaign. Governor Inslee appointed her to the Washington State Women's Commission in September 2020. As chair of that commission, she publicly honored Governor Inslee and First Lady Trudi Inslee at a pay equity event in 2024.

On Facebook, she posted a Hillary Clinton quotation alongside a photograph of herself standing beside Clinton at a Hillary Clinton Live event.

Then look at the causes she lists in her own 2026 voters' guide statement: the state Gender and Justice Commission, the Washington State Women's Commission, the Endowment for Equal Justice, the League of Women Voters, Washington Women Lawyers, the YWCA. There is not one conservative organization on that list. She wrote it herself.

Her ballots say Democrat. Her donations say Democrat. Her appointments say Democrat. Her own résumé says Democrat. Only her yard signs say otherwise.

What she says she is proud of

This is the part Republican voters need to sit with.

In 2024 and 2025, Quinn Dalan served as president of Washington Women Lawyers. In that role, she signed a letter to the membership listing the legislation the organization publicly backed that session. Among the bills on that list was the proposed amendment to write reproductive freedom and gender-affirming care into the Washington State Constitution.

Understand what that means. Not a statute a future legislature could revisit. Not a regulation a future governor could rewrite. A constitutional amendment, placed permanently beyond the reach of the voters of this state. Abortion, locked in. Gender-affirming care, locked in. Forever, or as close to forever as our politics allow.

And gender-affirming care is not an abstraction. It means puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries. The amendment she backed drew no line at eighteen. Washington Democrats have already stripped parents out of these decisions, and this proposal would have written that arrangement into the founding document of our state, where no parent, no legislature, and no future majority could touch it.

After listing that slate of bills, she wrote that the organization was “proud” most of them became law.

Proud. That is her word, in her letter, over her signature.

There is no version of that record that belongs to our party. You can hold that view honestly. Plenty of Washingtonians do. But you cannot hold it, celebrate it in writing, and then ask Republican voters to hand you an office because of a letter on a lawn sign.

In our view, her politics tell the same story as her ballot. Dalan has spent her career in the circles of Soros-backed organizations and alongside the most radical Democrats in our valley, and we believe that is where she takes her direction. She is not a conservative. She is not a Republican by any measure, not even a John McCain Republican. She is a Democrat running under a label she took from the Republican voters of this county without asking.

Follow the money

There is one more public record worth your time, and it is the one candidates least like to discuss. State campaign finance filings show who is funding the “Republican” in this race.

None of those donors did anything wrong by giving, and we are not suggesting otherwise. But money tells you who expects something from an office. Tyler Haueter's support comes from the people who work these cases and the families who live with the outcomes. Hers comes from the other side of the courtroom, and from the other side of the mountains.

The second lie

Dalan's campaign website lists attorney Shannon McMinimee among her endorsers.

In June, the Washington Supreme Court disbarred McMinimee. The findings against her describe a pattern of dishonesty that is remarkable even by the standards of bar discipline: false statements to a court, false testimony given under oath in a deposition, false statements to the disciplinary counsel investigating her conduct, and false statements to the Washington Supreme Court itself.

Disbarment is the most severe sanction the court can impose on a lawyer. It is not a suspension or a reprimand. It is reserved for the narrow category of attorneys the court has concluded cannot be trusted with the public's business at all. The court took her license to protect people from her.

Months later, Dalan's campaign website still presents McMinimee to voters as an attorney. She is not one. That is a false statement about the credentials of her own endorser, published on her own campaign site, sitting there for anyone to read. Either she has not bothered to check who is vouching for her, or she has checked and decided you would not notice. Neither answer inspires confidence in a candidate whose entire job would be deciding who is telling the truth.

What it adds up to

She lies to you about her party. She lies to you about her endorsers. And she stands next to a lawyer the Supreme Court found unfit to practice law because she lied. Birds of a feather.

This is not a disagreement about policy. Reasonable people argue about diversion programs, charging standards, and how to clear a case backlog. This is about whether a candidate will tell the voters of Yakima County the truth about herself before asking for the power to decide who goes to prison. She has not, and she will not, because the truth would end her campaign.

Tyler Haueter has put murderers and child abusers away by the dozen. Quinn Dalan has a label she stole from you, a disbarred lawyer vouching for her, and a letter in her own hand saying she is proud of the legislation this valley has spent years fighting.