Watch Justice Steve Gonzalez’s challenger run away from KIRO7’s Essex Porter on camera!

Two days ago, I pub­lished a lengthy post here on the Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate lament­ing a lack of cov­er­age of state and local judi­cial races, par­tic­u­lar­ly the con­test for State Supreme Court between excep­tion­al­ly well qual­i­fied incum­bent Jus­tice Steve Gon­za­lez and his chal­lenger, admon­ished attor­ney Nathan Choi.

In that post, I explained that in our research poll last May, we asked respon­dents across Wash­ing­ton State about their pref­er­ences in the Supreme Court race, and found 16% for Choi, 10% for Gon­za­lez, and a whop­ping 74% not sure.

Since the pub­li­ca­tion of that post, two jour­nal­ists work­ing in the broad­cast sec­tor have thank­ful­ly stepped up to shine a spot­light on this impor­tant race at a cru­cial junc­ture: Pub­lic radio’s Austin Jenk­ins and KIRO7’s Essex Porter.

Austin was first up, fil­ing a report ear­ly today for North­west Pub­lic Radio that has been car­ried by many of Wash­ing­ton’s mem­ber NPR sta­tions, includ­ing KUOW and KNKX. It is appro­pri­ate­ly titled: ‘Deep state’ or deep sixed? The Wash­ing­ton Supreme Court race that’s get­ting buried.

Six years ago, Steven Gon­za­lez’s last name like­ly cost him votes in his first race for the Wash­ing­ton Supreme Court. He won nonetheless.

Now he’s hop­ing he can keep his seat as he runs for re-elec­tion in an under-the-radar, statewide race against an oppo­nent, Nathan Choi, who has raised no mon­ey, has no bar rat­ings, and has links on his web­site to YouTube videos about the “Deep State.”

Gon­za­lez’s is the only Supreme Court race with a chal­lenger. And even though he’s the incum­bent, Gon­za­lez fears that vot­ers’ lack of famil­iar­i­ty with judi­cial races will be a strike against him.

“I sus­pect that most peo­ple don’t know either of us,” Gon­za­lez said.

The report goes on to cite our polling:

Gon­za­lez may have cause for concern.

A poll last May com­mis­sioned by the lib­er­al North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute sug­gest­ed that near­ly three-quar­ters of vot­ers didn’t know who they would vote for in his con­test­ed Supreme Court race. Among those who did, the major­i­ty appeared to favor Choi.

Choi refused to talk to Austin Jenk­ins for his sto­ry, instead telling Jenk­ins to go to his web­site and check out the videos post­ed there.

This evening, KIRO7’s Essex Porter had a prime­time seg­ment on the Gonzalez/Choi con­test, mak­ing KIRO the first of the state’s tele­vi­sion sta­tions to cov­er the race.

As Essex explained to anchor Steve Raible and KIRO view­ers, he was able to secure what he thought would be an inter­view with Choi. Choi even vol­un­teered to come to KIRO’s stu­dio loca­tion in Seat­tle to be inter­viewed. But when Choi found out that it was­n’t going to be a live inter­view, he tried to run away. On cam­era!

And no, I’m not kid­ding. See for yourself:

Essex — who is eas­i­ly one of the most sea­soned and hard­est-work­ing jour­nal­ists we have — nim­bly raced to keep up with Choi when he attempt­ed to get away, ask­ing the admon­ished attor­ney why he did­n’t want to talk about his can­di­da­cy and chal­leng­ing him as he tried to back out of the inter­view that he agreed to.

That’s the fun­ny part of the seg­ment. The edu­ca­tion­al part of the seg­ment is the inter­view with Gon­za­lez, where the high­ly-regard­ed jus­tice explains who he is and why he real­ly wants vot­ers to make an informed deci­sion in this election.

Watch the whole thing, lis­ten to Austin’s report­ing, and then share these sto­ries with your friends and fam­i­ly who haven’t vot­ed yet. Make sure they know who the can­di­dates are before they vote in this impor­tant statewide race, which is for a six-year term on the Wash­ing­ton State Supreme Court.