Democratic Party’s Manka Dhingra pads lead over Republican Jinyoung Englund in 45th LD

Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­ate hope­ful Man­ka Dhin­gra has sur­passed 51% in the sec­ond round of Top Two elec­tion vote count­ing, putting more dis­tance between her­self and Repub­li­can oppo­nent Jiny­oung Lee Englund in the fierce­ly con­test­ed race to elect a suc­ces­sor to appointee Dino Rossi in the 45th Leg­isla­tive District.

As of last night, Dhin­gra had 50.51% and a 1,876 vote lead, with 11,928 votes to Englund’s 10,052. Today, her lead expand­ed to 2,556 votes.

If the trend con­tin­ues, Dhin­gra will be nice­ly posi­tioned to head into the autumn hav­ing aced what amount­ed to a manda­to­ry dress rehearsal.

Dhin­gra’s can­di­da­cy is record-set­ting in many ways, includ­ing with respect to per­for­mance. No Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date for the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate in the 45th Dis­trict has led by this many votes against a Repub­li­can oppo­nent before, although Demo­c­ra­t­ic state rep­re­sen­ta­tives Lar­ry Springer and Roger Good­man have eas­i­ly dis­patched Repub­li­can oppo­nents in their House races in recent cycles.

Demo­c­ra­t­ic activists all over Wash­ing­ton State have been cel­e­brat­ing Dhin­gra’s strong show­ing in the ini­tial results since the minute the num­bers dropped last night. Today, they have rea­son to cel­e­brate yet again.

Last night, I not­ed that Dhin­gra may have actu­al­ly been helped by all of the neg­a­tive attacks Repub­li­cans mount­ed against her, part­ly because the attacks were fab­ri­ca­tions that Repub­li­cans sim­ply made up out of des­per­a­tion, and part­ly because Dhin­gra has been all over the 45th intro­duc­ing her­self to voters.

When peo­ple get a mail­er with grainy pic­tures and dubi­ous claims that does­n’t match the impres­sion they formed of a per­son they talked to at their door, they tend not to view the con­tents of the mail­er very credibly.

Basi­cal­ly, Repub­li­cans just spent a boat­load of mon­ey try­ing to influ­ence vot­er atti­tudes in the 45th Dis­trict, but instead of bol­ster­ing Jiny­oung’s can­di­da­cy, they wound up help­ing Man­ka Dhin­gra increase her name recognition.

They’re so des­per­ate to cling to pow­er I expect them to try to come back in the gen­er­al elec­tion with anoth­er tor­rent of mail­ers, robo­calls, and TV ads. How­ev­er, it may all be for be for naught, just as it was in this elec­tion. Mon­ey is potent and tends to be influ­en­tial in elec­tions, but it can’t buy everything.