everyone is focused on the Presidential race, for obvious reasons, and to a lesser extent on control of the House and Senate.
but there’s thousands of downballot races across the country. are there any that you’re watching / particularly interested in?
here in Seattle: the at-large City Council seat (district 8) between Tanya Woo and Alexis Mercedes-Rinck
Woo ran for a different city council seat a year ago, and lost. in the same election, a sitting city councilmember (Teresa Mosqueda) won an election to the King County Council, so she resigned her city council seat. to fill that vacant seat, the other newly-elected city councilmembers appointed Woo, even though she had just lost.
by the rules of the resignation and temporary appointment, the next regular election (now) elects a permanent replacement.
this leads to an unusual scenario - normally, Seattle (and all of Washington state) holds its municipal elections in odd years. the current mayor was elected in 2021, the most recent city council election was 2023. this leads predictably to much lower turnout for the municipal elections, which leads in turn to conservative business interests having an easier time buying the local elections.
Woo is aligned with the “business-friendly”, conservative (by Seattle standards) councilmembers who were elected in 2023. Mercedes-Rinck is significantly more progressive.
based on the primary results and subsequent polls, Woo winning seems pretty unlikely - but the margin of Mercedes-Rinck’s victory will still be interesting, because of what it says about Seattle politics in elections with high turnout. voter turnout in the 2023 elections was a dismal 36%. this year is likely to be in the ~80% range.
it’s also an opportunity for something very funny to happen - Tanya Woo may set a record that will likely never be broken, becoming the first candidate in city history to lose 2 elections in consecutive 2 years, for a seat that normally gets elected every 4 years.