Pedro Celis overtakes Robert Sutherland for second place in 1st Congressional District

Most of Wash­ing­ton’s thir­ty-nine coun­ties have just fin­ished tab­u­lat­ing a fresh batch of bal­lots, and there is sig­nif­i­cant news to report in the 1st Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict: Repub­li­can Pedro Celis, who nation­al and state Repub­li­can offi­cials recruit­ed to chal­lenge incum­bent Suzan Del­Bene, has now moved into sec­ond place after hav­ing trailed anoth­er Repub­li­can, Robert Suther­land, for two days.

Celis is get­ting a sig­nif­i­cant boost from King Coun­ty, where he is ahead of fel­low Repub­li­cans Suther­land and John Orlin­s­ki. Suther­land leads Celis in Sno­homish Coun­ty, while Orlin­s­ki leads both in Skag­it Coun­ty. (Read­ers should note that the 1st Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict only encom­pass­es por­tions of each county).

As of yes­ter­day, Celis was at 15.49% with 14,992 votes. Today, he improved to 16.37%. His total now stands at 18,814 votes. Suther­land is now at 15.63% with 17,974 votes (eight hun­dred and forty behind Celis).

Incum­bent Suzan Del­Bene remains in first place with more than fifty per­cent of the vote over­all. Per­cent­age-wise, she lost a lit­tle ground in today’s count, but not much… she’s still in great shape for November.

If the trend holds Celis’ cam­paign will be able to con­tin­ue on to the gen­er­al; there was spec­u­la­tion Celis might not sur­vive the win­now­ing elec­tion. He need­ed to at least make up ground today, but he did bet­ter than that… he moved into sec­ond place. There are bal­lots still left to be count­ed, so he can’t cel­e­brate just yet, but his cam­paign undoubt­ed­ly is relieved after hav­ing been behind in the first two counts.

The cam­paign has not updat­ed its web­site, Face­book page, or Twit­ter feed yet, but if we get a state­ment from them we’ll update this post.