From the left, Kelabe Tewolde has officially knocked 27-year-incumbent Sharon Tomiko Santos out of first place. He leads with 51 percent to Santos’s 48 percent. An educator beating the politician who isn’t funding education. That’s going to be interesting in November.
Tewolde is one of several young, progressive first-time candidates challenging Democratic incumbents this year, and he is the most successful of the bunch by a long shot. Overtaking the incumbent in her own primary means he’s now the one to beat, not Santos.
Kshama update! Sawant is still losing badly with 16.83 percent, and 6,681 votes behind Doug Basler, the Republican who will lose to Rep. Adam Smith this November. If less than half of Melissa Chaudhy’s votes went to Sawant, we’d have had an election instead of a foregone conclusion.
Who else is interesting? In the 43rd District, Hannah Sabio-Howell is almost 44 points behind incumbent Jamie Pedersen. In the 46th District, we have Ron Davis with 16.4 percent, Dreher with 30.69 percent, and Gerry Pollet with 52 percent.*
In Friday’s ballot drop, King County Elections added 86,000 new ballots to the vote total. As it stands, there are only 36,000 ballots on hand left to count. Those will come Monday. There are a spare 3,000 ballots with signature issues that voters must rectify in order to count. With those numbers, it’s unlikely the candidates who are behind will make up enough ground. (If you haven’t yet, check your signature by signing up for ballot alerts here.)
At the state level, it looks like Mike Diaz is done, and Jamie Hawk, the former public defender and legal strategy director for the ACLU-WA’s Campaign for Smart Justice, will take on conservative Mason County Superior Court judge David Stevens for Position 3 on the Washington State Supreme Court. Diaz trails 27,148 votes behind Hawk, but Hawk is 21,852 votes shy of Stevens. Though if Diaz voters jump on the Hawk train, it’s looking good for her and for the Millionaires Tax. Conservatives are losing in every other state Supreme Court race.
Democrats are also on track to flip four House seats in the state legislature: Republican Rep. Kevin Waters is 8.5 points behind Democratic challenger Ben Christly in the 17th District covering suburban Vancouver and upriver communities as far as Goldendale. (Look at that, Christly is walking on Waters, which is surely making Waters whine.) Rep. David Stuebe, the district’s other House Republican, is also losing by nearly 10 points to Democrat Diana Perez. It’s a similar story in purple District 18 where incumbent Republican Rep. Stephanie McClintock is losing by 4 points to Democrat Randi Knott, and incumbent Republican John Ley is 7 points behind Democratic challenger Deken Letinich. Democrats have 59 seats in the House right now, and 66 would be a supermajority, so picking up 4 around Vancouver alone would be huge.
*Davis netted 6,819 votes, the exact square footage of the Moretti Grand Ballroom at the Watergate Hotel. Dreher came away with 12,765 votes, which is the exact capacity for Estadio José Alberto Pérez stadium in Venezuela. Pollet leads with 21,619 votes, nearly the exact height in feet of Nanda Khat, a Himalayan peak, or the exact number of tuberculosis deaths in England and Wales in 1912.
