Credit: Lester Black
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Lester Black

It’s Time for Your Daily Ballot Drop Update

Looks like Mayor Jenny Durkan’s analysis isn’t holding up so well. With approximately 95% of primary election ballots counted, District 1 incumbent Lisa Herbold and District 2 candidate Tammy Morales have both cracked 50% of the vote share, putting them in a decent (if not ideal) position to take the general election in November. (Herbold’s at 51% and Morales is at 50%.)

District 3 incumbent Kshama Sawant inched up to 37% of the vote (a four-point increase since election night), while Chamber-backed Egan Orion fell a little to 22%.

In District 4, socialist Shaun Scott also saw his initial vote tally rise four points since election night. He’s currently sitting at 23%. Meanwhile, Alex Pedersen, who opposed ST3, dropped a point and now only has 41% of the vote.

Incumbent Debora Juarez ticked up to 45% while Seattle Times-endorsed / Safe Seattle candidate Ann Davison Sattler held on to her 27%.

In District 6, Dan Strauss now leads former Seattle City Council Member Heidi Wills by 13 points, 34% to 21%. And in Downtown/Queen Anne/Magnolia, assistant city attorney Andrew Lewis also increased his lead. He’s beating reformist cop / upzone-phobe Jim Pugel 32% to 25%.

And Now For the Council Election Round-Up

Thanks for reading: One of the early takes out of Tuesday’s election is that endorsements played a strong role in this year’s crowded primary races, with candidates endorsed by The Stranger and the Seattle Times advancing through in every single race. This is how KUOW summarized it:

Trends we noticed on primary election night in Seattle …
1. Seattle Times versus the Stranger.

This one smacked us in the face.

The two leading candidates in almost every city council race were endorsed by either the Stranger, the alternative weekly in Seattle, well known for its bold, lefty endorsements, or by the Seattle Times, which skews conservative.

We’d just like to add one point: It’s not just that both papers have an endorsed candidate in every race, it’s that The Stranger has a first-place candidate in all but one race.*

Here were our first reactions to Tuesday’s election.

People with the best views have the worst ideas:

Did Burgess’s Strategy Work? Seattle’s shadow Council Member Tim Burgess used rich people’s money to attack moderates (Zachary DeWolf in D3 and Emily Myers in D4) with negative mailers full of fear-mongering nonsense, leaving those races with stark contrasts between socialists and Amazon-backed candidates. Burgess appears to be happy with this outcome, telling Crosscut that “candidates that we did not want to advance did not and actually performed very poorly.”

We’ll see if Burgess’s bet against Shaun Scott, which is also a bet against the power of progressive American politics and against UW students, pays off. Either way we should prepare to see the full brunt of Burgess’s deceptive and maybe illegal mailer campaign aimed at Scott.

We’ve been wanting to talk to Burgess about his election work, but he continues to ignore The Stranger, refusing to pick up or return our calls, but FWIW he told Crosscut that he kind of feels bad about dragging Seattle politics through an evidence-free mudslinging campaign. “It is, in a way, unfortunate,” said Burgess to Crosscut. “But it’s the system we have.”

Checking in on the fear-based vote: The only bright spot on election day for the fear-based voter (the Speak Out Seattle/Safe Seattle/Moms For Seattle crowd) was Ann Davison Sattler’s strong second-place showing in North Seattle’s District 5. Otherwise their candidates failed to make it to second place, and they will now fade into Facebook group obscurity.

However, most of those voters are likely to support the Amazon-backed candidates in their respective districts, meaning there’s now an unholy alliance forming between people who are scared of tents and people who are scared of taxes (to the extent that the distinction ever existed in the first place). Pat Murakami’s voters in D3, bad cop Brendan Kolding’s voters in D1, and Sergio Garcia’s voters in D6 could end up swinging those elections in favor of the Amazon-backed/Burgess-backed candidates.

Safe Seattle Snohomish: Speaking of the fear-based vote, where exactly do the commenters on the feverishly active Safe Seattle Facebook group actually live? Activist and producer @Spekulation caught the group having its own internal soul searching, and it turns out many of those tragedy pornographers don’t actually live in Seattle.

What’s labor going to do? Conventional wisdom in Seattle says that labor plays an outsized role in local politics, but the slate of candidates put forth by the MLK Labor Council had a fairly weak showing in this primary. Emily Myers landed in fourth behind a NIMBY, a socialist, and a diehard urbanist (in that order), and Zachary DeWolf barely is barely holding onto a fourth-place finish in D3. Labor’s only first-place finish in a crowded primary was Andrew Lewis in D7.

Now the question is how the labor groups move in the general election. Rich talked to the labor council’s executive treasury-secretary earlier this week to get their answer. It’s pretty easy to read between the lines: “Seattle is under political siege by the corporation of the richest man on earth, and that this is a company—Amazon—that’s vying for political supremacy,” said Nicole Grant, echoing D3 incumbent Kshama Sawant’s framing of the elections.

*The one candidate who came in second place was Shaun Scott. But we think a black thirty-something socialist getting second place in a sleepy August primary in a district dominated by formerly redlined neighborhoods is actually a pretty big deal.

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com

Lester Black is a former staff writer for The Stranger, where he wrote about Seattle news, cannabis, and beer. He is sometimes sober.