Election Day 2023 Preview Part III
The West
For Part I, covering the Northeast and the South, click here; for Part II, covering the Midwest, click here.
Albuquerque, NM City Council
District 2 (Downtown)
Loretta Naranjo-Lopez vs. Moises Gonzalez vs. Joaquin Baca
Hydrologist Joaquin Baca is running on a standard liberal platform, with the added benefit of some nice commitments local politicians don’t always say out loud, like wanting to build more housing and expand non-police emergency response. Labor unions and most Democratic politicians in the area have endorsed him.
Loretta Naranjo-Lopez sits on the state pensions board, which is currently investigating her for allegedly trying to use its funds to pay for her campaign ads. It wouldn’t be the first time—the rest of the board censured her in 2018 for trying to get reimbursement for ineligible expenses, as well as harassing other members and staff, up to and including filing an actual criminal complaint over seating arrangements.
Teacher and neighborhood association member Moises Gonzalez is an urbanist who says some promising stuff about densifying the city’s urban core and building more public transportation, but we’d feel better about him as an alternative to Baca if he didn’t also pitch himself as a nonpartisan option.
District 6 (Southeast)
Nichole Lillian Rogers vs. Jeffery Aaron Hoehn vs. Kristin Greene
Financial services specialist Nichole Lillian Rogers is running a poverty-focused campaign, even saying she’ll push for a basic income program if elected. She’s likely to be—just about the entire Democratic Party has endorsed her at this point. Her opponents are nonprofit director Jeff Hoehn, who is running a tough-on-crime campaign, and Kristin Greene, who is running to reduce homelessness but opposes fare-free buses, a program Rogers supports.
Also on the ballot will be Abel Otero, who had centered his campaign around his past as an incarcerated man, and may be the first candidate to ever drop out after the press discovered he hadn’t done any time.
Fort Collins, CO City Council
District 2 (Near southeast)
Julie Pignataro (i) vs. Eric Hamrick
Fort Collins is a new city in the scope of things, growing by thousands of people per year since the post war era, and the 2020 population of 170,000 is double the number of people who lived there in 1990. Growth, and managing it, have been hot topics in Fort Collins’s politics since as long as anyone alive can remember. Recently, partly driven by COVID-era relations, rents have skyrocketed even further from their already above-average levels. That’s what makes it especially galling, if predictable, that Eric Hamrick’s issue with the city’s current development path is that it’s building far too much housing, direly warning about “higher density and forced urbanization” as well as “wholesale upzoning and densification of existing neighborhoods.” Incumbent Julie Pignataro, a self-identified YIMBY and member of the progressive faction on the city council barely won a plurality of the vote in 2019, and could quite possibly lose if the cranky homeowner vote mobilizes in this election.
District 4 (Southwest)
Shirley Peel (i) vs. Melanie Potyondy
Earlier this year, incumbent Shirley Peel was the deciding vote against raising the city’s minimum wage. She earned the right to be that deciding vote during a 2021 special election that she won with 30.4% of the vote, beating appointed incumbent Melanie Potyondy by just 43 votes. The two are now facing off again for a full term, and the stakes are clearer than they’ve ever been. District 4 has drawn the greatest focus of any election in the city, and the unspoken reason is that because minimum wage is indirectly on the ballot.
District 6 (Northwest)
Emily Francis (i) vs. Alexander Adams
Emily Francis is a normal Democrat who seems like she’d be a fine voice to keep on the council. Let’s do a quick google search of that other nice young fellow running, and what he’s all ab-
“I’m Not A White Supremacist Anymore, Says Council Candidate” [Colorado Pols]
Oh, cool, alright then. Emily Francis it is.
Washington state
Seattle City Council
District 1 (West Seattle)
Round 1: Maren Costa 33.1% - Rob Saka 24.1%
Activist and former tech worker Maren Costa stood up to Amazon when it was her employer, advocating for the company to adopt a climate transition plan and eventually getting illegally fired in retaliation for publicly supporting Amazon warehouse workers’ organizing efforts. It’s a safe bet that she’ll stand up to the tech industry on the council if she gets there. Actually getting there might be a problem, however. Rob Saka, an attorney for the social parasite formerly known as Facebook, has the support of the Seattle Times and the city’s moderate establishment, and is impressively reluctant to answer any questions about what he wants to…do, exactly, which is a massive red flag. Saka may have finished well behind Costa in the first round, but he wasn't running against Costa then, he was running for the other runoff spot against Phil Tavel, a more clearly conservative candidate. Tavel took 20% of the vote, meaning the combined moderate vote share in the first round was 44%, a hefty lead over Costa's 33%, which represents the entirety of the progressive vote. The remaining 23% was divided among five other candidates who all fell somewhere in between Costa and Saka.
While the first round usually is usually highly predictive in these elections, something distinctly unusual is happening in District 1: all five candidates defeated in the first round endorsed Costa. Apparently we weren't the only ones put off by Saka's "consultancy speak"—the man must have seriously pissed off the other candidates too. Instead of people supporting him in the runoff, Saka has been supported instead by cold, hard cash. A PAC going by the name Elliott Bay Neighbors (which is very clearly a Chamber of Commerce front group) has spent roughly $200,000 on the race, mostly attacking Costa.
District 2 (Chinatown-International District, South Seattle)
Round 1: Tammy Morales (i) 52.3% - Tanya Woo 42.6%
The only outright progressive member of the Council running for reelection, Tammy Morales has a history of commanding electoral performances, to the point we began our coverage of the initial round wondering whether it was even possible for her to lose. By that standard, taking only 42% of the initial vote has to be somewhat disappointing, but given how predictive the first rounds tend to be in Seattle, she's still in the driver's seat. Though landlord Tanya Woo has the support of the city's moderate faction (how could she not when she's arguing that she shouldn't have to wait until homeless people commit a crime before sending the police after them?) they're obviously not fighting as hard for this seat as for some others, and Woo has had to deal with the self-inflicted wound of repeatedly lying to the press about her voting history and apparently just assuming no one would check (someone did).
District 3 (Capitol Hill, Central District)
Round 1: Joy Hollingsworth 36.9% - Alex Hudson 36.5%
District 3 is being vacated by Socialist Alternative Councilmember Kshama Sawant. Sawant and SAlt aren’t attempting to elect a successor, which led to a wide field of progressives in the first round. Nonprofit director Alex Hudson won the endorsement of progressive standard bearer The Stranger, and easily outran every other progressive in the primary. Moderates had no trouble unifying behind a candidate, but their choice, business owner Joy Hollingsworth, performed disappointingly in the primary: though she narrowly took first place, she failed to even crack 40%, while almost all of the rest of the vote went to progressives (1.6% of of the vote went to Shobhit Agarwal, who wasn’t really in either camp.)
Since the primary, Hudson has consolidated support easily, even picking up the official Democratic Party endorsement. Kshama Sawant had to fight like hell in every election, but those narrow wins weren’t a sign that District 3 had a closely divided electorate—rather that its electorate was so progressive that someone willing to wage war against the city, state, and national Democratic Party establishment and call for radical policy changes in the city could still win despite being a step too far for some otherwise reliable progressive voters. Hudson is a clearly less radical politician than Sawant—she doesn’t even consider herself a socialist—which means that the odds are stacked against Hollingsworth.
District 4 (University, Wedgwood, View Ridge)
Round 1: Ron Davis 44.8% - Maritza Rivera 31.8%
District 4 is the inverse of District 3—a generally moderate-leaning district where a progressive finished first because he was the only candidate running in that lane, while the moderate candidate finished behind, likely only because she was also facing another candidate in her lane. While progressive urbanist Ron Davis got far closer to 50% than Hollingsworth did, moderate city official Maritza Rivera should have a much easier time consolidating the rest of the vote. While Martiza Rivera could be pretty terrible in office—accused of fueling an abusive work environment by a majority of her staff at the city’s arts department, looking to recriminalize public drug use and hinting at cutting the city budget to avoid raising taxes—the third place candidate, who took 21.2% of the vote was Kenneth Wilson, an outright Trump-supporting Republican who progressives were not-so-secretly hoping would make the runoff instead of Rivera.
Davis is now clearly on the defensive and signaling an openness to drug recriminalization as well. He isn’t, however, totally cooked—if he were, this wouldn’t be the contest with the most outside spending in the city, with over $270,000 spent between the Chamber of Commerce front group University Neighbors Committee and National Realtors Committee both on attack ads against Davis and support for Rivera. Unite Here Local 8’s $17,000 for Davis pales in comparison. While Davis does have more union support than Rivera, this race has split labor, with LiUNA, the building trades, and the firefighters breaking away to support Rivera. One important endorser Rivera doesn’t have, however, is Wilson, who has refused to endorse anyone. Unlike most competitive elections in Seattle, where the two final candidates fight over supporters of their defeated opponents, District 4 is going to be more of a turnout race. Davis won't be able to win over any Rivera or Wilson voters, so he needs to push additional young and working class voters to show up, while Rivera won't be able to win over any Davis voters, so she needs to convince Wilson voters, who backed an outright Republican, to show up for a more liberal candidate than they wanted.
District 5 (North Seattle)
Round 1: Cathy Moore 30.7% - ChrisTiana ObeySumner 24.4%
Imagine, for a second, that there is an election in a city council district which spans three legislative districts, and each district has an official Democratic Party organ which endorses one of the two runoff candidates. Imagine that one of those runoff candidates is a former judge affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the other is an activist affiliated with the Green Party. Which of them do you think has the support of two of those three Democratic legislative district committees as well as the county Democratic Party?
Somehow, it’s the Green. ChrisTiana ObeySumner, a consultant and activist, has the Democratic committees of King County and LDs 36 and 46 in their corner, plus two of LD-36’s three legislators. Cathy Moore, the former judge, has Mayor Bruce Harrell, County Executive Dow Constantine, the LD-32 Democratic committee, outgoing incumbent Debora Juarez, two of LD-46’s three legislators, and one of LD-32’s three legislators in her corner. Thanks to Seattle’s Democracy Voucher public-financing system—which allots four $25 vouchers to every voter to donate to the candidate of their choice—ObeySumner’s campaign has brought in more money from other people than Moore’s. To overtake ObeySumner in the money race, Moore had to pour $25,000 of her own money into her campaign. (ObeySumner has contributed just $435 of their own money to their campaign.) Moore also has outside help from a PAC, Greenwood Neighbors Committee, that’s dropped more than $50,000 boosting Moore and more than $100,000 attacking ObeySumner. Moore has also gotten the endorsements of three first-round rivals and the Seattle Times, and she’s definitely the most progressive-sounding moderate candidate in the city—while she hews to the moderate line on policing to an extent, wanting a massive increase in the number of officers, she also criticizes the council for weakening accountability measures in the city’s last police contract, and on issues other than housing (where she’s a tiny bit cautious about single-family neighborhoods) and policing, she’s not afraid of new taxes—she wants to expand the city’s social safety net, and she knows it costs money. Between Moore’s handy super PAC help and lack of over-the-top conservative pandering, and ObeySumner’s more radical positioning, ObeySumner is an underdog to flip this presently moderate-held seat, but their campaign is by no means doomed; Nilu Jenks, a less sharp-edged progressive urbanist, split progressive organizations and voters with ObeySumner in the first round and placed third with 18%. Additionally, leftist Tye Reed collected a mid-single-digit percentage share that’s likely to flow almost entirely to ObeySumner.
District 6 (Magnolia, Ballard, Green Lake)
Round 1: Dan Strauss (i) 51.8% - Pete Hanning 29.3%
Much like Tammy Morales, Dan Strauss should feel good about the second round based on how he did in the first. While Strauss isn't a loyal member of the progressive faction, he has at least been a swing vote on the Council, and Fremont Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Pete Hanning was supposed to be Seattle moderates’ best shot at taking him out. Redistricting shifted wealthier, whiter, more conservative neighborhoods into Strauss’s district, and Hanning outraised the incumbent—only for Strauss to get a majority. Adding insult to injury, Hanning failed to clear the low bar of 30% of the vote despite being the only serious challenger. Granted, the candidates who siphoned off so much of the non-Strauss vote were likewise to Strauss’s right, but even if Hanning consolidates all of the non-Strauss vote, he still loses unless he can also pick off Strauss voters or inspire a wave of anti-Strauss turnout from voters who sat the first round out.
District 7 (Magnolia, Queen Anne, Downtown)
Round 1: Andrew Lewis (i) 43.5% - Bob Kettle 31.5%
It really baffles us how different the outlooks are for Dan Strauss and his colleague Andrew Lewis. Both are vaguely progressive swing votes who represent not-particularly-progressive districts, and yet Strauss is gliding to reelection while Lewis is in deep trouble, a state of affairs that is especially hard to understand given that Strauss was the one who got fucked over in redistricting, not Lewis. Veteran Bob Kettle is personally endorsed by ringleader of the moderates Alex Pedersen, and is a real piece of shit: he’s spent years fighting new housing being built, has used footage of an actual homeless person to scaremonger in his ads, and touts endorsements from Republican politicians. Lewis’s only real hope is that a third of the other 25% of voters prefer him over someone with basically identical policy views to the candidate they voted for in the first round.
King County Council
District 4 (Northwest Seattle)
Round 1: Jorge L. Barón 50.7% - Sarah Reyneveld 28.7%
In the first round of this election, one of the most repeated observations we read about this race was how similar the three candidates were. Immigration lawyer Jorge Barón took just over 50% once the votes were tallied, far ahead of assistant AG Sarah Reyneveld, leading to the impression that he was set for the runoff. We have to assume that's what's led to Reyneveld suddenly deciding that she has differences of opinion with Barón after all. She's since remade herself into the tough-on-crime candidate, calling for Seattle to start locking up more drug users, and implying that Baron supports defunding the police. Simultaneously, she's managed to secure, for reasons that are unclear to us, endorsements from organized labor and the King County Democrats. The result is that while Reyneveld has a huge hill to climb, she is actually going about climbing it, and progressives shouldn't assume Barón will glide to victory.
District 8 (Southwest Seattle, Burien)
Round 1: Teresa Mosqueda 57.6% - Sofia Aragon 37.6%
Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda has been easily elected citywide twice now, but the decline of the council's progressive wing has led her to seek county office, a campaign that's so far gone well for her in this Seattle-based district, earning well over 50% in the first round.
Her runoff opponent is Burien City Councilmember Sofia Aragon, who has attempted to make her entire campaign about Mosqueda’s calls to defund the Seattle PD. It's going well for her in the sense that she has successfully made the entire campaign about policing, but whether she can actually handle a prolonged discussion of the subject is another matter—she recently wrote a letter to the editor of a local paper telling people to stop the "divisiveness" of criticizing the way she was publicly blaming a man for getting killed by the police because he had drugs in his system.
The normal progressive vs. centrist battle lines have been drawn here as well (Mosqueda is the Stranger candidate, Aragon is the Seattle Times candidate) but Mosqueda also benefits from most of the heft of the state establishment, including Gov. Jay Inslee and AG/2024 gubernatorial frontrunner Bob Ferguson, who weigh in much less frequently than the endorse-in-every-race mentality of the progressive and centrist-aligned organizations in Seattle.
Port of Seattle Commission, Position 5
Round 1: Fred Felleman (i) 56.5% - Jesse Tam 25.6%
Fred Felleman is a boring but reliable incumbent who has performed well enough in a specialized office to get himself on very few people's bad sides. He won his first first reelection in a landslide and didn't even face a challenger in his second, but his third was shaping up to be only slightly tougher after he was endorsed organized labor and by both The Stranger and The Seattle Times, and subsequently easily cleared 50% in the first round. If there's any reason why he should expect November to be rockier, it's the recent conclusion of an ethics investigation into his behavior towards the Quiet Sound Leadership Committee. In short, Felleman wanted some official role despite the decision of the Committee not to allow any elected officials to have one, and pursued retaliation against a member when he was rebuked. Though he was out to seek personal satisfaction, not monetary gain, the story is still potentially damaging just by virtue of how little Port Commissioners get news coverage in the first place.
Unfortunately his runoff opponent isn't a progressive, or at least a dedicated public servant, but instead ex-Greater Seattle Chinese Chamber of Commerce chair Jesse Tam, who feels that his main selling point (based on how often he says it) is "extensive experience in the banking industry". A banker who wants to run the government more like a business is a hard sell in the liberal Seattle area, and it doesn’t help that the one actual policy difference he seems to have with Felleman is opposing congestion pricing, while Felleman supports it. While Tam has support from many Asian King County politicians, including former governor Gary Locke, the broader Democratic establishment has stuck with Felleman, who will probably survive this bumpy reelection year.
Kent City Council, Position 3
Round1: John Boyd 37.6% - Kelly Wiggans-Crawford 22.1%
Could there be a clearer contrast here? Let’s read off a list of paralegal Kelly Wiggans-Crawford’s endorsers: the Rental Housing Association of WA, Seattle King County Realtors, and the Kent Police Officer Association*. Her website greets visitors with a video of her giving a public comment on the subject of homelessness, where she complains that “the homeless are trashing what was once a beautiful scenic area[...]the next time someone advocates for the homeless, remember, they have an agenda.” Meanwhile, retired Boeing engineer John Boyd’s endorsers include the Democratic Party, the Working Families Party, and just about every official elected at the state or federal level that covers Kent. His approach to homelessness is one of “affordable housing, mental health and addiction services, and job training programs”, in his own words. You would think he’d be the obvious frontrunner in a Democratic city like Kent, but there’s a Wiggans-Crawford endorser we didn’t mention: Jamie Lee, the third place finisher in the primary, who took 21% of the vote. The reactionary backlash over homelessness may carry her to victory, even if Boyd is currently the favorite.
*Wiggans-Crawford has been endorsed by the police union, but she’d really, really like you to believe she was endorsed by the Kent Police Department itself. Her website uses the official department logo to describe the endorsement instead of the union’s logo, and all her yard signs read simply “Endorsed by Kent Police”.
Tacoma City Council
At-Large Position 7
Olgy Diaz (i) vs. Kristen Wynne (two candidates, no Round 1 vote)
Appointed incumbent Olgy Diaz is a career legislative and state government staffer who’s been a mainstream progressive on the council—not a fire-breathing lefty, but also not a pain. The appointed incumbent is an easier target than popular deputy mayor Kristina Walker, so the city’s business community is backing small business owner Kristen Wynne to the hilt. Maximum allowable contributions from dozens of businesses, business owners, landlords, and real estate enterprises have filled Wynne’s campaign coffers, allowing her to outspend Diaz. Wynne is singularly focused on tough-on-crime politics from the perspective of business, which means that every word she says that isn’t buzzword-laden HR-brained gibberish relates to crime in some way. It’s not much of a surprise that very few in Tacoma politics are lending her their support; it’s mostly businesspeople, retired electeds, and the police union. Diaz has the backing of her council colleagues, Mayor Victoria Woodards, organized labor, progressive groups, and both of Tacoma’s US Representatives, moderate Democrats Adam Kilmer and Marilyn Strickland.
At-Large Position 8
Round 1: Kristina Walker (i) 69.5% - Todd Briske 18.0%
In one of the least exciting races of the night, Tacoma Vice Mayor Kristina Walker is going to demolish former Forward Party candidate Todd Briske.
District 3 (Central and South Tacoma)
Round 1: Jamika Scott 42.1% - Chris Van Vechten 31.3%
Former mayoral candidate Jamika Scott and criminal defense attorney Chris Van Vechten both surprised with their first-round performances—Scott had seemed locked in a three-way battle with a pair of union leaders, and Van Vechten had seemed like an afterthought. Instead, Scott ended up way out in first with a healthy lead over Van Vechten, while other seemingly strong candidates fizzled out. In the runoff battle lines have been hastily redrawn as Van Vechten has fallen into a familiar role for our readers—a stock character of local politics, the business-backed and moderate-minded Crime Candidate™—that is evidently awkward for a criminal defense attorney. Van Vechten can’t help himself from praising nonviolent responder programs as he criticizes them, or from saying cops lie to put people like his clients in jail while calling to give them more power. One has to appreciate that unlike most candidates who want a police crackdown, Van Vechten also frames the issue as a systemic problem and calls for policies that address underlying social ills, like social housing to combat housing unaffordability and criminal legal reform to keep low-level offenses from ruining the lives of people like his clients. But his first priority is a buildup of policing and the prison system, so the cognitive dissonance on this one is a doozy. Scott, on the other hand, doesn’t try to be on both sides of the same issue—the cofounder of the Tacoma Action Collective has been a vocal activist against police brutality, and she doesn’t argue with herself when explaining her positions. Endorsements sharpen the contrast significantly: Van Vechten has traditionally conservative building trades unions, the Tacoma Business Council, the hotel and hospitality industry trade association, and the moderate-to-conservative side of Tacoma Democratic politics behind him, including DINO former state Rep. Steve Kirby, best known for being one of the few Democrats to vote against legalizing same-sex marriage in 2012. (Even some Republicans voted yes.) Scott’s supporters include local and national DSA, Indivisible Tacoma, UFCW Local 367, and ILWU Local 23, which represents workers at the Port of Tacoma, alongside many of Tacoma’s progressive politicians, including state Rep. Sharlett Mena, a progressive who nearly retired Kirby via primary challenge in 2020 and won his seat when he retired in 2022. State House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, a Tacoma representative who backed more establishment-friendly progressive Malando Redeemer in Round 1, is also on Team Scott now.
Snohomish County Auditor
Round 1: Garth Fell (i) 40.1% - Cindy Gobel 32.3%
Garth Fell was elected Auditor in 2019 by a narrow 2% margin over none other than Cindy Gobel, who is running again this year. Like in 2019, the actual difference between the two on the issues is fuzzy, but progressives, and the actual county Democratic Party, support Gobel, which means there’s probably some reason to support her. Robert Sutherland, a Republican election denier, took the balance of the vote in the first round. We honestly have no idea who’s in a better position to pick it up, since both candidates are firmly against election denial.
Gobel says Snohomish County’s voter turnout is too low; on the one hand, it saw voter turnout roughly in line with the state overall, but on the other hand, you’d expect Snohomish, a suburban/exurban county north of Seattle with similar educational attainment and substantially higher median income than the state as a whole, to see higher turnout than the state average. The election is mostly turning on personal attacks, since both candidates agree on the broad strokes and have experience in election administration (Gobel has worked in the auditor’s office and for the Washington Secretary of State.) Gobel has gone after Fell for his signature of a false mail-in ballot report while working for King County’s elections office in 2004, while Fell’s surrogates have charged Gobel with inflating her resume and claiming more election administration experience than she actually has.