Senator Sharon Nelson’s successor will likely be either Shannon Braddock or Joe Nguyen

Good evening from West Seat­tle, where NPI is among the media orga­ni­za­tions rep­re­sent­ed at Sen­ate hope­ful Shan­non Brad­dock­’s elec­tion results watch par­ty. Brad­dock, as read­ers may know, is run­ning to suc­ceed Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Sharon Nel­son as the 34th Dis­tric­t’s state senator.

The mood was light and opti­mistic at the begin­ning of the night, as sup­port­ers filed inside the pizze­ria. The cam­paign ordered beers and piz­za and encour­aged a casu­al ambiance that was easy to feel com­fort­able in.

The can­di­date every­one was here to sup­port, Shan­non Brad­dock, has been deeply involved in advo­ca­cy for chil­dren and under-priv­i­leged in her local area.

As Deputy Chief of Staff under King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Dow Con­stan­tine, much of her focus has been on fund­ing for local schools and respon­si­ble firearm laws.

She hopes to trans­late her local expe­ri­ence with some of Wash­ing­ton’s most con­tentious issues into statewide pol­i­cy, plan­ning to teach and learn in the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate, which Democ­rats gained con­trol of last year.

While the mood was always bright, once the results rolled in, the atmos­phere became more and more jovial.

It quick­ly became appar­ent that along with Joe Nguyen, Brad­dock was lead­ing the pack and is like­ly to move on to the gen­er­al elec­tion as one of two Democ­rats on the bal­lot. She stood up on a chair in the mid­dle of the room, hands above her head, ges­tur­ing grate­ful­ly at the packed house that was there to see her.

“Stand­ing for some­one is hard,” she know­ing­ly intoned.

“Thank you for all the sup­port. Thanks so much.”

Her speech was brief, and lacked the sort of grandil­o­quence you might expect from some­one angling for what could be called a pro­mo­tion. She returned again to the sense of cama­raderie and com­mu­ni­ty that has been her strength up to this point, and rather delight­ed­ly added: “To think a sin­gle moth­er could do this.”

Her sup­port­ers cheered and applauded.

Her com­mon refrain of respon­si­ble firearm laws, schools that work for all chil­dren, and inten­tion­al fis­cal prag­ma­tism was well received by every­one in the room. Obvi­ous­ly, her cam­paign has also been well received by a sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of vot­ers in the deeply blue 34th Leg­isla­tive Dis­trict. Brad­dock and Nguyen will face off in the gen­er­al elec­tion lat­er this year, on Novem­ber 6th.

Brad­dock cur­rent­ly has 26.87% of the vote, while Nguyen has 27.69%. The next clos­est can­di­date is also a Demo­c­rat, Lois Schip­per. She’s got just 9.51%.

Eight oth­er can­di­dates were also in the run­ning, but it looks like they will all be out of the hunt when the elec­tion is cer­ti­fied in a cou­ple of weeks.

Check out NPI’s Pacif­ic NW Por­tal for up to date elec­tion results and con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age of the August Top Two elec­tion, the first round of the state’s two part elec­tions sys­tem, which con­cludes with the gen­er­al elec­tion in November.