Leftwing activist group says it reserved hundreds of seats at Rep. Baumgartner’s tumultuous town hall

Most of the tickets to U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner’s tumultuous town hall Monday night at Whitworth University were reportedly claimed by members of the Spokane branch of the left-wing activist group Indivisible.

“I don’t know for certain, but I would venture to say probably 400 were Indivisible members,” said Mary Ellen Gaffney-Brown, an administrator for the Spokane Indivisible Group Facebook page. There were 500 general admission tickets to the event with another 300 reserved for students, staff and other groups, though many of those reportedly went unclaimed.

Baumgartner has expressed disappointment with the “unhinged lunatics” in the crowd, as he characterized some attendees in a recent interview with conservative talk radio host Jason Rantz. He told The Spokesman-Review he believes they filled the auditorium to inaccurately portray “that Republicans are somehow unpopular and people aren’t happy with what’s going on.”

But members of Spokane Indivisible, who have called Baumgartner’s comments demeaning and dismissive, said the congressman shouldn’t have been surprised they showed up en masse, since they had been in regular communication with his office for a month beforehand.

“Our local Spokane Indivisible has been very active with Mike Baumgartner’s office asking for a town hall for nearly a month,” Gaffney-Brown said.

In separate interviews, Baumgartner and Gaffney-Brown said the two parties had initially been discussing holding a separate event hosted by Spokane Indivisible.

“We had actually asked a couple of the left-wing groups, why don’t you guys just invite us to something and host something, and as long as it’s a safe and respectful venue, we’re happy to chat with you,” Baumgartner said in a Thursday interview. “I represent everybody, even the folks that don’t agree with us.”

In the end, Gaffney-Brown said the congressman’s office stated he would not be available for any of the suggested times before the end of the congressional recess and instead pointed the group to his Monday town hall at Whitworth.

“So we advertised it,” Gaffney-Brown said. “We tried to cooperate with his office, and we all advertised it earlier than he did.”

Spokane Indivisible members were aware that the town hall was planned to be hosted by Whitworth before the university was even ready to advertise the event. The school had wanted to wait until congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government, and it was certain Baumgartner would be able to make it, said Joe Hughes, associate vice president for marketing and communications.

“We were receiving phone calls about the event before we even made anyone aware of it,” Hughes said. “So we told people, here’s the page on the website that those tickets are going to be available, and we gave the same answer to anyone who called.”

Baumgartner said he warned university officials against releasing the tickets on a first-come, first-serve basis because it would be “95% far-left protest groups” in attendance. He instead suggested a lottery-based system to randomly select attendees.

Hughes said the university didn’t have the capability to do that through its sports ticketing system, particularly on short notice, given they were only certain the event would take place days before. Hughes said the university limited people to two tickets and required registration through emails.

Isabela Schandlbauer, Baumgartner’s press secretary, said she had been informed by Whitworth staff that activists were handing out stacks of tickets to protesters outside the venue. While several people did say they got tickets from people at the door or gave their tickets to friends, Hughes said he had not heard of any large distribution of tickets at the venue, and Gaffney-Brown denied this occurred.

“No, there was no organized effort to sell or scalp or ask for huge numbers of tickets to pack the hall,” but rather people took it upon themselves to patiently refresh the university website until the tickets were available, Gaffney-Brown said.

Both Baumgartner and Hughes expressed disappointment that the crowd was so one-sided – when Baumgartner asked for a show of hands from people who voted for Trump, roughly a dozen went up – and wished the crowd had been more civil.

“These people should just be ashamed that are just making these threats and shouting, ‘Nazi’ and using all this profanity,” Baumgartner said. “It’s really disappointing and a low form of discourse.”

Sami Perry, a member of Spokane Indivisible’s steering committee, called Baumgartner’s characterization of attendees who are “angry or scared” about the federal government’s actions “offensive.” Their concerns were legitimate, she argued, and she believes it was Baumgartner’s “almost taunting” answers that prompted outrage.

She added that the disrupted event “could have been handled differently.”

“But at the same time, we’ve been quiet for so long that I feel like we needed to speak out and say what we needed to say,” Perry said.

Baumgartner has noted that the same group has organized protests outside his congressional office and other events, and its members frequently email and call his office. He argued that, while 200 tickets were reserved for students, faculty and staff, relatively few students seemed to show up because of how heated the venue became.

If attendance was one-sided, Perry thought the reason was clear.

“The people who are concerned are standing in line to get tickets because they need (Baumgartner) to hear from them,” she said. “And maybe the Republicans aren’t concerned yet, except for the ones who lost their jobs, or are about to lose their Medicaid, or their SNAP programs.”

Baumgartner has also criticized “support for some of the antisemitism and some of the entities that were in support of Hamas,” referring to a question from a Whitworth student that compared pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses to the American civil rights movement.