Washington state megathread

[Crumpets]

So I just found this lovely excerpt from an interview between Seattle Weekly and Seattle Mayoral also-ran Alex Tsimerman:

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Also, here is what Wikipedia has to say about also-also-ran Lewis A. Jones:

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[Crumpets]

Thoughts on the results (Before the final ballots come in):

-Grant-Mosqueda is the ideal run-off situation for the City Council 8 race and I hope it stays. Very happy with whoever would win here, and it's a big victory for the Democracy Voucher program. Eat s**t Nelson.

-Surprised by Moon's finish (As well as Farrell's), her campaign looked dead until the Stranger endorsement. Moon has apparently stated that she will endorse Oliver if the late returns pull her ahead, and I imagine Oliver will do the same. Beating Durkan is the greater good. In any case, Seattle's next mayor will be a woman for the first time.

-Dhingra currently leads Englund 50-42, with left-wing Independent Parker Harris at 6.9%. A very comfortable lead going into the general election.

First since 1928. Bertha Knight Landes was Seattle's only female mayor.

[Crumpets]

The Stranger just posted some demographic numbers from the primary:

TOTAL VOTES BY GENDER:

Women: 98,801
Men: 87,985
(Average age of Seattle women who voted in the mayoral primary: 51.36. Average age of Seattle men: 50.65.)

And a map of the vote by gender by precinct: https://fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/embedviz?q=select+col6%3E%3E1+from+13qH1DDJPOFki1-fgdHkid0M722klUqLIoZh-IJub&viz=MAP&h=false&lat=47.63310203548851&lng=-122.32174185937498&t=1&z=12&l=col6%3E%3E1&y=6&tmplt=7&hml=KML


TOTAL VOTES BY AGE:

Millennials: 45,613
Generation X: 54,650
Boomers: 59,311
Greatest Generation: 27,400
(The average age of Seattle's Millennial voters: 29. For Generation X: 44. For the Boomers: 62. And for the Greatest Generation: 79.)

And a map of age by precinct: https://fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/embedviz?q=select+col6%3E%3E1+from+1hRhMYcgn6fKz36_AiRpiJ2-2I9BkhzXvF9R93ufT&viz=MAP&h=false&lat=47.62500391869521&lng=-122.29187277978514&t=1&z=12&l=col6%3E%3E1&y=2&tmplt=2&hml=KML

[Crumpets]

Some more precinct-level data from the Mayoral election:

http://crosscut.com/2017/08/who-voted-for-who-a-deep-dive-into-seattles-election-results-data/

[Crumpets]

My ballot:

Mayor: Cary Moon
County Exec: Flavius Valerius Dowbertius Constantinus Augustus
Port Commissioners: Ryan Calkins, Ahmed Abdi, Preeti Shridhar
City Attorney: Pete Holmes
Seattle City Council: Teresa Mosqueda, (Future Senator) Lorena Gonzalez

[Crumpets]

Is there a results page for Washington on the AP?

Not sure about the AP, but this is where I'm getting my results: http://mynorthwest.com/category/election_race_list/

[Crumpets]

Moon losing makes me sad, even though I only really made my final decision in the race while filling out the ballot. Seems like all good news apart from that, though.

[Crumpets]

Just filled out my ballot for the primary - only three offices, and two are Port Commissioner positions. Voted for Shridhar and Felleman for Port Commission and Kerner for City Council. None were really votes of passion, and I just went with whoever's pamphlet blurb impressed me most.

[Crumpets]

Initial results:

* = Incumbent

Seattle City Council District 1 Council District No. 1
Lisa Herbold* - 48.0%
Phil Tavel - 33.8%
Brendan Kolding - 17.8%
WI - 0.5%

Seattle City Council District 2 Council District No. 2
Tammy Morales - 44.7%
Mark Solomon - 24.6%
Ari Hoffman - 13.6%
Phyllis Porter - 6.2%
Chris Peguero - 5.2%
Omari Tahir-Garrett - 3.3%
Henry Dennison - 2.0%
WI - 0.5%

Seattle City Council District 3 Council District No. 3
Kshama Sawant* - 32.8%
Egan Orion - 23.7%
Pat Murakami - 14.2%
Zachary DeWolf - 12.5%
Amy Nguyen - 9.5%
Logan Bowers - 7.0%
WI - 0.2%

Seattle City Council District 4 Council District No. 4
Alex Pedersen - 45.4%
Shaun Scott - 19.4%
Cathy Tuttle - 12.7%
Emily Myers - 11.5%
Heidi Stuber - 3.7%
Beth Mountsier - 3.0%
Sasha Anderson - 1.3%
Joshua Newman - 1.2%
Frank A. Krueger - 0.9%
Ethan Hunter - 0.5%
WI - 0.4%

Seattle City Council District 5 Council District No. 5
Debora Juarez* - 42.3%
Ann Davison Sattler - 27.8%
John Lombard - 13.8%
Tayla Mahoney - 7.8%
Mark Mendez - 6.0%
Alex Tsimerman - 1.9%
WI - 0.4%

Seattle City Council District 6 Council District No. 6
Dan Strauss - 30.9%
Heidi Wills - 22.7%
Sergio Garcia - 14.6%
Jay Fathi - 13.6%
Kate Martin - 3.6%
Jon Lisbin - 3.3%
Jeremy Cook - 3.0%
Melissa Hall - 2.3%
Ed Pottharst - 1.8%
John Peeples - 1.6%
Terry Rice - 1.0%
Joey Massa - 0.9%
Kara Ceriello - 0.5%
WI - 0.3%

Seattle City Council District 7 Council District No. 7
Andrew J. Lewis - 28.9%
Jim Pugel - 26.5%
Daniela Lipscomb-Eng - 10.3%
Michael George - 8.7%
Gene Burrus - 6.3%
Jason Williams - 4.9%
Don Harper - 4.9%
Naveed Jamali - 3.1%
James Donaldson - 3.1%
Isabelle J. Kerner - 2.8%
WI - 0.4%

City of Seattle Proposition No. 1: Property Tax Levy Renewal for The Seattle Public Library
Yes - 73.0%
No - 27.0%

Metropolitan King County Proposition No. 1: Parks, Recreation, Trails and Open Space Levy
Approved - 67.3%
Rejected - 32.8%

County Council District No. 2 Council District No. 2
Girmay Zahilay - 52.1%
Larry Gossett* - 39.4%
Stan Lippmann - 7.8%
WI- 0.7%

County Council District No. 8 Council District No. 8
Joe McDermott* - 82.5%
Michael Robert Neher - 11.9%
Goodspaceguy - 5.0%
WI - 0.7%

Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No. 2
Sam Cho - 28.27%
Grant Degginger - 26.0%
Preeti Shridhar - 17.2%
Kelly Charlton - 11.7%
Dominic Barrera - 6.9%
Nina Martinez - 6.0%
Ali Scego - 3.2%
WI - 0.8%

Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No. 5
Fred Felleman* - 69.9%
Garth Jacobsen - 21.7%
Jordan Lemmon - 7.7%
WI - 0.8%

[Crumpets]

oh god, you voted for Kerner!? She's a real kook.

I must be out of the loop. What's kooky about her? Nothing really jumped out when I Googled her.

[Crumpets]

So I just typed out a bunch of results only to have the site crash on me when I went to post, but here are some interesting things:

- The affirmative action initiative is very close

- Sawant is losing, but might still get very lucky with the late returns

- Eyman's vehicle tax initiative is doing well (yikes)

- A bunch of the Seattle City Council races are very close, and we likely won't know the winners for a few days

[Crumpets]

Copying down some results from the SoS page:

R-88 (Affirmative action)
Reject: 50.43%
Approve: 49.57%

I-976 (Tim Eyman's vehicle tax limit)
Yes: 53.21%
No: 46.79%

Senate Joint Resolution 8200 (Amendment to expand emergency legislative powers)
Approve: 65.36%
Reject: 34.64%

Seattle City Council District 1
Herbold (i): 55.36%
Tavel: 44.28%

Seattle City Council District 2
Morales: 59.85%
Solomon: 39.65%

Seattle City Council District 3
Sawant (i): 50.45%
Orion: 49.09%

Seattle City Council District 4
Pedersen: 53.49%
Scott: 46.20%

Seattle City Council District 5
Juarez (i): 60.08%
Sattler: 39.56%

Seattle City Council District 6
Strauss: 55.05%
Wills: 44.46%

Seattle City Council District 7
Lewis: 52.09
Pugel: 47.45%

[Crumpets]

My hot take: It says a lot about Seattle City politics that Sawant can recover this well from the primary, even if Orion somehow makes a miraculous comeback. It means there are a sizeable chunk of people who probably don't identify as socialists, but who hate Amazon enough to vote for Sawant. Something Democrats should really keep in mind across the country going into 2020.

[Crumpets]

Sawant will never be defeated.

I think Amazon really shot themselves in the foot by going all-in on Orion. It's not like Sawant is a mega-popular juggernaut, but she really typifies the "well, if everyone hates her, so she must be doing something right" aesthetic. Not entirely unlike Trump in that regard.

[Crumpets]

Current ballot return rates by county:

https://twitter.com/Evan_SCN/status/1290326805530816512

[Crumpets]

Unfortunately, The Stranger continues to have an absurd amount of sway in Seattle.  They probably have the most power-relative-to-quality ratio of any publication in the United States.

They have a firm grip on 95% of the 18-35 population here as well as all the aging socialists, potheads and creative types.  Your only alternative is the Seattle Times, which requires you to take life seriously, or a ragtag collection of right-leaning outlets that nobody really takes seriously except for the small Republican pockets in Magnolia and Madison.

And what they do with that grip is simply endorse the most extreme candidate in every race and let a bunch of stoners who never went to J-school write Buzzfeed-style endorsement blurbs.  It's incredibly immature but that's how politics is done in this city.

In Magnolia we don't have Republicans like in your neighborhood... In Magnolia we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this.

[Crumpets]

Initial governor results (I'm not typing up all the candidates):

Inslee (D) - 44.65%
Culp (R) - 22.84%
Freed (R) - 8.21%
Eyman (R) - 7.63%
Garcia (R) - 5.05%
Fortunato (R) - 3.34%

[Crumpets]

Looks like Lt. Gov. will be a two-Democrat race.

First ever in a statewide race here since switching to the top-two primary, if I'm not mistaken. 

Everything else aside, that should lead to an interesting county map in the general, unless one of them runs away with it.

[Crumpets]

Here's the current "turnout" map by county. I put "turnout" in quotes, since more accurately it's a map of current counted ballots as a percent of total registered voters by county and these numbers will change overtime as more ballot dumps come in.

[Crumpets]

Looks like Lt. Gov. will be a two-Democrat race.

First ever in a statewide race here since switching to the top-two primary, if I'm not mistaken.  

Also, the two moderate/traditional Republican gubernatorial candidates did abysmally. WA GOP continues to fade into irrelevancy.

Do you think that the Stranger's endorsement of Liias pushed him through?

It's possible, but I think Habib's endorsement also played a big part. The Stranger is definitely influential in Seattle races, but much less so in statewide races.

[Crumpets]

Here are some maps from the current results. There are a couple things that strike me so far:
1) The Democrats are now consistently winning both King and Jefferson with 70+% of the vote with the obvious exception of the Secretary of State race.
2) The SoS and Treasurer races are almost identical in Eastern Washington. All of the difference between the two comes from the Puget Sound area.
3) Cowlitz County now seems to be a thoroughly (non-Atlas) red county. Grays Harbor and Pacific still seem winnable for a Democrat under the right circumstances, but Cowlitz looks pretty much gone.
4) Liias managed to make the runoff without winning a single county.

[Crumpets]

For the Washington posters, who are you hoping to win, Liias or Heck?

I'm undecided as of now. I voted for Liias in the primary because it was pretty clear Heck would make the general and I was hoping to have a D vs. D general. Maybe risky, but hey, it paid off.

[Crumpets]

For the Washington posters, who are you hoping to win, Liias or Heck?

I'm undecided as of now. I voted for Liias in the primary because it was pretty clear Heck would make the general and I was hoping to have a D vs. D general. Maybe risky, but hey, it paid off.

I’m actually in exactly the same boat. I’m undecided as of right now, but strategically voted for Liias in the primary to give him a slot in the top two.

Same here. Though I think I'll probably end up voting for Heck in the end.

I think there's a decent chance WA-2 ends up D vs D.

Lol. I love to think that Liias's entire electoral coalition is just Atlas-style Dems who strategically overthink everything.

[Crumpets]

Updates of the maps I posted a couple days ago:

[Crumpets]

The city hasn’t “abandoned” all other projects, just because it’s also focused on police reform, which is a serious issue that needs attention.

Go do a poll of Magnolia and ask them if they feel abandoned by the city.  They've been begging the city to fix the crumbling Magnolia Bridge for years and the city's current position is "lol they don't need that bridge anyway."  Meanwhile the council last year handed activists a victory in their fight to turn a section of Discovery Park into a homeless shelter, not for any logical reason (it's a terrible location for a shelter) but just to stick it to the rich people who live there.

As possibly Atlas's only resident Magnolian, I have to jump in here, and I tend to agree with MacArthur here in general, but I don't necessarily draw links between that sense of abandonment with issues like police reform. Magnolia is covered in BLM signs right now, and from the conversations I've had with my neighbors, I don't think anyone really ties calls for police reform to a lack of commitment to fix the Magnolia bridge or figure out what to do with the homeless population in the area. If anything, the issue that seems to come up in tandem with the Magnolia Bridge is the West Seattle Bridge and a sense of West Seattle's bridge of death being given top priority over us, since that's much more of a one-to-one comparison than with other things that might require funding.

My immediate neighbors are mostly middle-aged, with some borderline Karens and even some former Republicans. Absolutely none of them are considering moving away from the Democratic party as a result of the protests. If anything, they attribute the deaths at the CHOP and the rise of Sawantism more generally to the same "populist" tide that brought up Trump. I've also heard lines like "it's terrible that Sawant has tried to make the George Floyd protests all about her." It's pretty common to hear "both sides" sentiments from this crowd, saying that the Anarchists and the Trumpees just need to fight it out somewhere else. But again, absolutely none of them are willing to give the Republicans the time of day because, while they do not see most Democrats as being in league with Sawant and the anarchists, they absolutely do see random local average Republicans (i.e. Jason Rantz and John Curley) as being in 100% lock step with Trump.

But just to close because we're talking about Magnolia and you hit on one of my key local issues, Magnolia is absolutely fed up with the city council in a completely non-partisan way for deciding that all of Magnolia is just Magnolia Boulevard and that we can somehow therefore fix all of our own problems or something. I mean, for pete's sake, look at the regional transit map - we're literally not even on the map:



And this is after McGinn launched his "road diet" on Nickerson, we lost access to Highway 99 via Western Ave when they tore down the viaduct, and they shut down the 15th Ave monorail back in 2006 only to decide we were getting Link after all, but it would take until 2030+ to actually be up-and-running. Next we'll lose the Magnolia Bridge after some minor earthquake, and there'll literally be two roads into and out of a neighborhood of over 20,000 people. There's absolutely no way this will end well, and I see pretty much nobody on either side of the Democrat-leftist divide really caring about it except for the very local politicians with no power to actually enact anything.

It's all part of this grand scheme to try to get people to commute by bike, I'm sure. Of course, nobody realizes that Magnolia is surrounded by incredibly steep hills on every side and nobody is going to want their commute home to end with a strenuous workout.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.