The vote totals have not yet been certified, but lawyer and gay-rights advocate Jamie Pedersen has emerged victorious from the swarm of Democratic candidates who piled onto the ballot earlier this year when State Representative Ed Murray announced he was leaving his safe state house seat to run for the state senate. As of press time, the count in the 43rd District (which covers Capitol Hill, Wallingford, the University District, and parts of downtown) put Pedersen ahead of his closest rival, former city council member Jim Street, by just over one percentage point, 23.47 percent to 22.4 percent.
Street, while only 252 votes behind Pedersen, was statistically unlikely to win given the vote-counting trends, and conceded the race on the evening of Monday, September 25. Pedersen said he was thrilled by the outcome, but also said he was intent on reaching out to supporters of the five other candidates. "I'm very cognizant that 77 percent or so of the Democrats voted for someone other than me," he said on Monday after Street conceded.
Lisa MacLean, a partner at the consulting firm Moxie Media who advised fifth-place finisher Lynne Dodson, said building bridges with the other factions in the district shouldn't be hard for Pedersen. "The 43rd was blessed with a great set of choices," she said. "I don't think people voted against candidates so much as they voted for candidates in this election."
Pedersen still needs to win the November general election before he takes Murray's former seat, but it's a virtual certainty that he will. His Republican challenger in the general, Hugh Foskett, is a sophomore at the University of Washington. And Pedersen's other challenger, Linde Knighton of the Progressive Party, is a perennial also-ran.
The next six weeks, then, will be a period of self-definition and agenda setting for Pedersen. He won without the endorsement of any influential local media organizations, and that will lead many to conclude that Pedersen's victory was exclusively a product of the "gay vote" in a lefty district that has the largest concentration of homosexuals in the state. Some further support for that conclusion: Murray himself endorsed Pedersen shortly before the primary, citing a desire to have a gay person in the seat given the recent state supreme court ruling against gay marriage.
But Pedersen said he doesn't think he would have won if his only supporters had been gay. "I don't want to underestimate the importance of having a disproportionate share of the gay and lesbian community's vote," he said. "But one of the things about winning by a very narrow margin is that practically everything you did was necessary." He stressed health-care issues, courted the out-of-the-country vote, and talked about education in addition to focusing on marriage equality for same-sex couples. He also used his comparatively giant war chest of $170,000 to blanket the district with mailers and target particular voters with get-out-the-vote phone calls.
Aside from the question of how, exactly, he eked out his victory, Pedersen also faces lingering curiosity about how he will get along with Murray, who has suggested that Pedersen has some growing to do as a politician and who has also made clear that he intends to remain the top dog on gay-rights issues from his expected new perch in the state senate. Pedersen and Murray have not always seen eye-to-eye on gay-rights strategy, but so far, Pedersen's tone seems to be one of deference toward Murray.
"I've been a lawyer for a long time and I'm a new politician, so it's very helpful to have someone who I think is very good at that be willing to mentor me and bring me along," Pedersen said.
The other big question facing Pedersen is how he'll juggle his responsibilities as a partner at Preston, Gates & Ellis with his responsibilities as a legislator, and whether those two responsibilities will pose any conflicts of interest. Pedersen said he won't do any work for his law firm while the legislature is in session, and has also promised to publicly disclose his current and future client lists. He said his current clients don't have much business before the legislature anyway, and that he has openly advocated for positions opposite those favored by other Preston Gates clients—for example, the Sonics, who this year requested a taxpayer subsidy from the legislature that Pedersen opposed on the campaign trail.
"The idea that somehow the people involved with the firm are going to have some special access to me—it's just not going to happen," Pedersen said. 
