It was night filled with policy, intrigue, and trigger-happy texters.
  • Goldy | The Stranger
  • It was night filled with policy, intrigue, and trigger-happy texters.

Cancel the election, don't bother printing up the ballots—the race to replace retiring State Representative Mary Lou Dickerson is all but over after 28-year-old Sahar Fathi cleared the field last night at The Stranger's totally binding and official 36th Legislative District Candidate Forum. Who knew Cienna was such a power broker?

Okay, not really.

A panel of six Democratic candidates whose positions on most issues couldn't be separated by a putty knife, drew a standing-room-only crowd at the Spitfire last night for a Survivor-style forum in which the audience would vote a single candidate off the island after each round of questions. But this is politics, so if you thought this was about the issues you had another think coming.

Early on, before the first question was asked, it was clear that Seattle Port Commissioner Gael Tarleton would be the first to go. No matter how many times we cleared the results and explained to the audience that no votes would count until we opened the poll, the text messages kept coming in to give Tarleton the boot... presumably from the many "Noel Frame"-stickered boosters who had packed the room. And so she was.

But Tarleton had her own smaller if equally partisan army in the room, and they were determined to pay Frame back in kind. Frame survived the next couple rounds, but just barely, ultimately leaving Fathi and Brett Phillips to duke it out for the final honors. It was no contest, with Phillips getting the thumbs down from 67 percent of the audience.

As for the candidates' positions on the issues, surprise: they are all progressive Democrats! They all support women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, sustainability and all those other good things, and they all support raising new revenue. In fact it was on that latter issue that there was at least a little specificity and thus daylight between the candidates, with Tarleton generating a few jeers when she called for a temporary half-penny hike in the sales tax to deal with short term problems now, and Fathi generating some cheers when she proposed giving municipalities a local option income tax.

All the candidates said they support implementing an income tax to fix the lack of both fairness and sustainability in our tax structure. The question for voters ultimately is which one do they believe is most capable of providing the leadership needed on this and other issues? And if the Spitfire audience was a statistically representative demographic and ideological sample of the district as a whole (which it wasn't), Fathi was the voters' clear choice, if only for one brief night.