It’s a three way race, all right: Seattle City Attorney contest is simply too close to call

Per­haps the most impor­tant find­ing from NPI’s July 2021 sur­vey of like­ly August 2021 Seat­tle vot­ers was that incum­bent City Attor­ney Pete Holmes was in trou­ble… big trou­ble. Despite hav­ing served in the posi­tion for twelve years and hav­ing been reelect­ed four years ago by enor­mous mar­gins, our poll found Holmes in a dead heat with two chal­lengers who are very dif­fer­ent ide­o­log­i­cal­ly from him as well as well as from each oth­er — and most vot­ers undecided.

Tonight, about the only con­clu­sion we can make is that NPI’s polling was spot on about the close­ness of this race. 

With 84,884 votes cast over­all — 3,428 few­er than in the may­oral race in this first drop — the can­di­dates each have close to one third of the vote.

Davi­son is the cur­rent leader, with 34.64% and 29,401 votes.

Holmes is in sec­ond place with 32.80% and 27,844 votes.

Thomas-Kennedy is in third place with 32.15% and 27,288 votes.

Only five hun­dred and fifty-six votes sep­a­rate Holmes from chal­lenger Thomas-Kennedy as of this first drop. And Holmes and Thomas-Kennedy are each less than 3,000 votes behind Davi­son. This con­test will go down to the late ballots.

It is entire­ly pos­si­ble that by week’s end, we could see a lead change for City Attor­ney, or maybe even mul­ti­ple lead changes.

If Thomas-Kennedy (who was backed by The Stranger) improves in sub­se­quent drops, she could move into sec­ond place, which would leave Holmes locked out of a spot on the gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot this autumn.

The order in which the can­di­dates land­ed in this first batch of elec­tion results is the inverse of how they stack up against each oth­er with respect to dol­lars and cents. Davi­son has raised the least, yet is cur­rent­ly in first place. Thomas-Kennedy has raised the most, yet is in third place. Here are the numbers:

• Thomas-Kennedy: Raised $116,232.04; spent $14,535.93 so far
• Holmes: Raised $104,701.26; spent $92,653.13 so far
• Davi­son: Raised $32,679.26; spent $11,062.84 so far

The fact that Holmes isn’t in first place in this first drop is anoth­er omi­nous sign for his can­di­da­cy. In our poll, he was bare­ly ahead of his two chal­lengers. His lead was with­in the mod­eled mar­gin of error, mak­ing it sta­tis­ti­cal­ly insignificant.

Now, almost three weeks lat­er, he is behind one of his chal­lengers and on the verge of falling behind the oth­er. Not a good posi­tion for an incum­bent to be in.

Seat­tle vot­ers have oust­ed city­wide incum­bents in elim­i­na­tion rounds before — most mem­o­rably, two-term May­or Greg Nick­els in 2009.

Twelve sum­mers ago, Nick­els was eclipsed by two chal­lengers: Mike McGinn and Joe Mal­la­han. McGinn went on to win the gen­er­al elec­tion and served one term as May­or of Seat­tle. He was defeat­ed in his reelec­tion bid by Ed Mur­ray, who became embroiled in scan­dal towards the end of his own first term and abrupt­ly resigned after hav­ing decid­ed not to seek reelec­tion. Mur­ray was suc­ceed­ed by Jen­ny Durkan, who also decid­ed not to seek reelec­tion as Mayor.

Pete Holmes, mean­while, has been City Attor­ney for all that time. He has served along­side McGinn, Mur­ray, inter­im may­ors Bruce Har­rell and Tim Burgess, and most recent­ly Durkan. But his chances of get­ting to serve along­side Seat­tle’s new may­or are look­ing increas­ing­ly slim. Holmes has acknowl­edged in recent inter­views that his time could be up, telling Cross­cut’s David Kro­man and The Seat­tle Times’ Jim Brun­ner that he is pre­pared to lose.

“I don’t know what to say. I am six­ty-five. We’ll see what hap­pens. I am at peace with what hap­pens next Tues­day,” he remarked to Brun­ner last week.

We have now seen the ini­tial results, but they don’t tell us who will be mov­ing on in this race. We’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out how this dra­ma ends.