It turns out you dont need Amazons money to win an election in Seattle..
It turns out you don't need Amazon's money to win an election in Seattle. Kelly O

After a surge of votes, Council Member Kshama Sawant is now beating Egan Orion by more than a percentage point, with 50.45 percent of the vote in the latest vote tally from King County Elections. Orion has sunk from holding a 1,700 vote lead over the socialist in Tuesday night's vote count to now trailing by 513 votes.

King County Elections released a batch of 110,000 votes today just before 4 p.m. and the county plans to release a second batch of 50,000 votes tonight at 8:30 p.m. After these two drops, only 5 percent of the votes will remain to be tallied, according to a county spokesperson.

That means time is running out for Amazon and the Chamber of Commerce's slate of candidates to pull ahead. Now that Sawant is in the lead in District 3, Amazon's $1.5 million election spending spree has only been able to net two first-place finishers: Council Member Debora Juarez in District 5 and Alex Pedersen in District 4. The seven other seats of the council look like they will be held by progressives rather than the business-friendly slate the chamber had hoped to elect.

Progressives were still holding onto hope that socialist Shaun Scott would be able to upset Alex Pedersen in District 4, but the chances of an upset in that Northeast Seattle district are starting to fade. Pedersen currently holds 53.49 percent of that vote and is currently more than 2,100 votes ahead of Scott.

Amazon's candidates are continuing to fail hard in other districts. Mark Solomon has already conceded defeat to Tammy Morales even before today's vote tallies, which put Morales at nearly 60 percent of the vote. Council Member Lisa Herbold appears to have secured reelection with over 55 percent of the vote in today's tally. Dan Strauss has pulled in an impressive 55 percent of the vote in Ballard's District 6, despite his Amazon-approved opponent, Heidi Wills, having more than $1 million spent on her behalf (largely by Amazon and the chamber).

Andrew Lewis continues to widen his lead in Downtown's District 7 seat, currently holding over 52 percent of the votes with 1,450 votes separating him and Amazon-approved-candidate Jim Pugel. Pugel had started these ballot drops with 200 votes ahead of Lewis on election day.

If these results hold that means Amazon's slate will be outnumbered 2 to 7 on next year's council.

Referendum 88, which would legalize affirmative action in the state, is now slightly ahead after trailing since Tuesday. The latest statewide totals have the measure winning with 50.03 percent of the vote, with 1,000 votes more than the reject side. That's a narrow gap for a statewide measure but it may widen with tonight's second vote drop. Update 5:00 PM: Referendum 88 is back down to only 49.6 percent of the vote, trailing the reject side by nearly 13,000 votes. It looks like this initiative likely won't be decided till next week at the earliest.

We'll have another update tonight at 8:30 p.m. but for now it looks like the most-watched race in Seattle—the battle between socialists and Amazon on Capitol Hill—appears to have broken in favor of Sawant.