For example: Judy Nicastro, running for her life against ex-Seattle Times columnist (and gadfly-about-town) Jean Godden, polled a measly 25 percent in the seven-way primary in September. In Elway's poll, Nicastro's ranking among "likely" voters (those who've voted in at least three of the last four elections) was identical to her real-life results--25 percent, compared to Godden's 35 percent. (Among all registered voters, Nicastro was still trailing Godden by a point.) "The primary results were pretty much consistent with what we found in the poll," Elway acknowledges. "Being an incumbent is not the advantage that it has been." Two other incumbents--Heidi Wills and Margaret Pageler--were also struggling in Elway's poll. And in nearly every one of the five city council races, "undecided" ranked higher than both challengers and incumbents. According to consultants who spend their time tracking such minutiae, voters who are undecided before a big election tend (as much as 75 percent of the time) to go for challengers. In other words: Incumbents, it's time to tweak those resumés.
The folks Elway polled overwhelmingly disapproved of the council as a whole, which they viewed as "only fair" or "poor" by a margin of four to one. That's not too surprising--pissed-off voters often see "city hall" as a metaphor for everything that ails the city--but the fact that the council's overall rating actually declined 25 percent in the last three years is. Elway's sample also supported the idea of electing council members by district, a statistic Elway says shows that voters feel "the system isn't working." The council's poor rankings may have rubbed off on first-year incumbent Greg Nickels, whose disapproval ratings hovered at 53 percent.
