IN AN OCCASIONAL SERIES this year, The Times will examine the politics and profile the candidates in each of the state's nine congressional districts.

KENNEWICK - Businessman Rick Locke has the easy manner and good looks of a successful young politician as he moves easily through a crowd of people who shake his hand and genuinely seem pleased to see him.

The occasion is a fund-raiser for GOP state Sen. Patricia Hale.

Locke, a Democrat, has accidentally stumbled upon the gathering and is making the best of it even though the room is filled with those who wouldn't, in a million years, vote to send a Democrat to represent the 4th District in Congress.

Two years ago, Locke ran a credible campaign against incumbent U.S. Rep. Richard "Doc" Hastings, a Pasco Republican, and state Democratic Party leaders had hoped he would try again. But last spring, after studying the results of a poll commissioned by the party, Locke concluded he couldn't win and didn't want the label of a two-time loser.

"I don't know what Democrats did to these people, but it sure must have been bad," said Locke, assessing the party's standing in Central Washington.

That explains why Gordon Allan Pross, who keeps the weeds under control on his parents' farm in Ellensburg, wound up being the only Democrat - sort of - in these parts who was willing to challenge Hastings.

"I was running as an independent for two months," said Pross, who finished Tuesday's primary election night with about 25 percent of the vote. "For pragmatic reasons, we got on the Democratic ticket."

Pross and the Democratic Party seem not to care much for one another. The party has decided not to endorse the 43-year-old former Army veteran, who served nearly a week in jail in 1996 for simple assault and is under a court order to pay legal bills totaling $30,000.

"We had several people approach us who were like Mr. Pross who we discouraged from running (as Democrats)," state party Chairman Paul Berendt said. "I didn't want a weak candidate on the ticket who we had recruited. I didn't want someone just to fill the ticket in that district."

Pross, who says he has been wrongly accused, returns the contempt. Pointing out that great men in the Bible spent time in jail, he sees his candidacy as something of a crusade to clean up a corrupt government that spends too much and has lost touch with the electorate.

"If you think I want to go sit in that pit of vipers, you're wrong," Pross said, that pit of vipers being the U.S. House of Representatives. "But somebody's got to go straighten this mess out."

Pross's use of the word "mess" could pretty much sum up the Democratic Party's standing in Central Washington. Two years ago, Locke got a taste of how folks here really feel about Democrats when vandals burned some of his yard signs, along with the parched yards they were planted in. Good friends told him to his face, "Rick, I support you, but I just can't put one of your signs in my yard."

In the arid land just east of the Cascades, Democrats border on being evil. They began to lose their appeal in the late 1960s as the anti-Vietnam War movement began turning Democrats into the party of peaceniks and nuclear disarmament. The last time Benton County voters supported a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1964.

The last Democratic governor to win their hearts was Dixy Lee Ray.

The 1980s became a low-water mark for Democrats in Benton and Franklin counties, where the majority of voters live in the Tri-Cities: Pasco, Kennewick and Richland.

Democrats lose big

In races for governor and president, Democratic candidates lost by a ratio of 2 to 1, and the point spread stayed that large for the entire decade. The absolute low point came in 1988, when Republican Slade Gorton, running for the U.S. Senate, won Benton County with 77 percent of the vote.

Berendt calls the 4th District the most Republican district in the state, a claim borne out by his unsuccessful attempt to recruit a congressional candidate to run against Hastings.

"I just had a heck of a time finding someone who would do that," he said.

One reason for the Democrats' poor standing is that for several decades, two of the party's most prominent members routinely made points with Seattle liberals by beating up on the Hanford nuclear reservation.

"The names Brock Adams and Mike Lowry became lightning rods here," said Kennewick City Councilman Tom Moak, former chairman of the Benton County Democratic Party. "Brock and Mike helped poison for a lot of folks the Democratic Party."

No help for region

Sam Volpentest, head of governmental affairs for the region's industry development agency, Tridec, said of the former senator and former governor: "They never helped us, I'll tell you that."

Brett Bader, a GOP political consultant who is a close friend and political adviser to Hastings, says Democrats vilified people in the Tri-Cities for two decades and are now paying the price.

"Folks over there are proud of what they do and where they live," Bader said. "It was breathtakingly stupid how Democrats treated them during the Lowry era. That was a big mistake, and it's taken them absolutely years to overcome that."

The lack of a viable congressional candidate this year would seem to indicate that Democrats aren't anywhere close to recovering.

But despite the absence of someone to challenge Hastings, there are reasons to believe the climate is right for Democrats to attempt a comeback in a region that is in the midst of transforming how it defines itself.

Democrats still win in Yakima. There, the party is trying to build on the support it has in the Hispanic community, which makes up nearly 36 percent of Yakima County's population.

In the Tri-Cities, Adams and Lowry are gone from the political scene. So is the Soviet Union. Hanford's reactors are being dismantled. Defense spending no longer drives the economy, and it doesn't define the nation's two major political parties.

One thing that does distinguish Republicans from Democrats is the environment. And whether they like environmentalists or not, that is an issue that is becoming increasingly important to the people who work at Hanford - the single most polluted, expensive and difficult-to-clean-up nuclear site in the nation.

"Fifteen years ago, Hanford's mission was defense-oriented, power generation and nuclear research," Berendt notes. "Now it has totally shifted to the environment, with the possibility of health research. I think that will change the value system of people there, and that will change the culture.

"Fifteen years ago, it would have been unthinkable that there would be a major debate about preserving the Hanford Reach - that environmental interests would win over developmental interests. Yet they seem to be winning, with public support."

A driving force behind the effort to preserve the 50-mile stretch of the Columbia River that runs through the Hanford reservation has been U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who has made protection of the Hanford Reach the environmental cornerstone of her re-election campaign.

Although the question of local vs. federal protection of the Reach hasn't been settled, Murray has dealt with the Tri-Cities differently than Adams, her predecessor. In her work on the Reach, she has built considerable support in the Tri-Cities. She has even confounded some supporters in the Seattle area by her willingness to at least consider restarting a weapons reactor at Hanford.

"If one looks at the people involved in economic development in the Tri-Cities, I think they see her as an ally," Volpentest said.

"I think she'll stand in pretty good stead with a lot of folks who understand what it takes to be in politics. She, to a lot of peoples' surprise, has actively worked Hanford issues. I think people see her as a player and as an ally."

It remains to be seen whether Murray's efforts in the Tri-Cities will pay off on Election Day, but there's no questioning the fact that Democrats, overall, have cleaned up their act in Central Washington.

Since losing Benton County in 1996, Gov. Gary Locke has made numerous trips to the Tri-Cities to talk about economic development.

A recent Democratic poll put his approval rating there at 68 percent. Murray's was 54.

Moak says the changing mission at Hanford has created new sets of allies and opponents and a new set of challenges - mainly to wrest money out of Congress for cleanup.

Tim Peckinpaugh, a Pasco native who lobbies for Central Washington issues in Washington, D.C., says he's pretty sure the district's conservative politics won't change anytime soon.

But there's no question that Hanford's status as an environmental project has lessened opposition to the region.

"The delegation now all supports Hanford cleanup," he said. "We don't have any polarizing issues. Nobody's bashing it. There is no polarizing element that divides the state."

Whether Democrats can take advantage of that remains to be seen. Rick Locke says that while Hanford's mission has changed, the people haven't.

People are the same

"I do believe the political landscape out there will change, but I don't know when," he said. "You're not getting different people out there. The same people who built the bombs are doing the cleanup. They are very conservative people with a strong religious base."

Because the people at Hanford aren't likely to change, perhaps it's the Democrats who should overhaul their message. Bader says people in the Tri-Cities aren't so much Republican or Democrat as they are conservative, and whoever runs for public office needs to understand that all the way to their bones.