King County’s 3rd District looks ready to flip Democratic: It’ll be Lambert vs. Perry this fall

There once was a time in King Coun­ty pol­i­tics when Lake Wash­ing­ton rep­re­sent­ed some­thing of a demar­ca­tion between two polit­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent geo­gra­phies: Demo­c­ra­t­ic Seat­tle and its inner sub­urbs, and Repub­li­can Belle­vue and its fel­low East­side sub­urbs. How­ev­er, over the course of the last twen­ty years, the East­side has under­gone a mas­sive polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion, shed­ding its rep­u­ta­tion and his­to­ry as a Repub­li­can strong­hold and becom­ing a Demo­c­ra­t­ic bas­tion instead.

Tonight, it appears that trans­for­ma­tion is on the verge of being ful­ly com­plet­ed. Kathy Lam­bert — the only promi­nent Repub­li­can elect­ed offi­cial who still rep­re­sents the East­side in the King Coun­ty Cour­t­house — is being col­lec­tive­ly out­vot­ed by two Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lengers, Sarah Per­ry and Joe Cohen, who think it’s time the East­side had more pro­gres­sive representation.

In King Coun­ty’s first drop, Lam­bert has 41.33% of the vote, Per­ry has 34.03%, and Cohen has 24.05%. Only the top two move on, so the gen­er­al elec­tion will almost cer­tain­ly be a matchup between Sarah Per­ry and Kathy Lambert.

Per­ry and Cohen agreed before the results came in that they would enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sup­port who­ev­er got the most votes against Kathy Lambert.

Per­ry was able to gar­ner the most votes of the two, so she will car­ry the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s stan­dard in the gen­er­al election.

(All coun­ty posi­tions, includ­ing this one, are offi­cial­ly “non­par­ti­san” thanks to a char­ter amend­ment pushed by Joe Fain and oth­er Repub­li­cans many years ago, but prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, there is no such thing as a non­par­ti­san elect­ed office, and the dynam­ics of the race aren’t much dif­fer­ent than they would be if there were par­ty labels on the bal­lot to dis­tin­guish Lam­bert and her challengers.)

The effort to flip the 3rd is rem­i­nis­cent of the push six years ago to oust Repub­li­can Jane Hague in the neigh­bor­ing 6th Coun­ty Coun­cil Dis­trict.

Like Lam­bert, Hague had been on the Coun­cil for an extreme­ly long time, and was hop­ing to earn reelec­tion to anoth­er term. How­ev­er, she was hand­i­ly defeat­ed by Belle­vue City Coun­cilmem­ber Clau­dia Bal­duc­ci, who made sure that vot­ers knew that she was a Demo­c­rat and Hague a Republican.

Only Bal­duc­ci filed to oppose Hague, so the race did not appear on the Top Two bal­lot. In the Novem­ber 2015 gen­er­al elec­tion, Bal­duc­ci dis­patched Hague with ease, win­ning % of the vote. Many observers had expect­ed the race to be clos­er, but Bal­duc­ci proved that East­side vot­ers were ready to turn away from the Repub­li­can Par­ty at every lev­el, not just fed­er­al and state.

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s takeover of the East­side has been grad­ual, but effective.

The par­ty first found suc­cess with leg­isla­tive can­di­dates like Lau­ra Rud­er­man, Judy Clib­born, and Ross Hunter in the ear­ly 2000s. In 2004, the par­ty suc­cess­ful­ly held on to Lau­ra Rud­er­man’s seat with Lar­ry Springer and oust­ed road war­rior Joel Horn with Bri­an Wein­stein. In 2006, the East­side elect­ed anoth­er group of Demo­c­ra­t­ic leg­is­la­tors to the state­house, most notably Roger Goodman.

Between 2006 and 2008, two Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors aban­doned the Repub­li­can Par­ty and joined the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, strength­en­ing the East­side’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­tin­gent in Olympia: Fred Jar­rett and Rod­ney Tom.

Both suc­cess­ful­ly jumped from the House to the Sen­ate as Democ­rats, though Tom would lat­er defect back to the Repub­li­can Par­ty at the end of 2012 as part of a self-serv­ing pow­er coup. Jar­rett, mean­while, moved to coun­ty pol­i­tics and became Deputy Coun­ty Exec­u­tive fol­low­ing the 2009 local elec­tion cycle.

From 2006–2008, Democ­rats also sought to unseat Dave Reichert in the 8th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict, but Reichert suc­cess­ful­ly sur­vived two con­sec­u­tive chal­lenges from Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty nom­i­nee Dar­cy Burner.

Reichert pre­vailed again over Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee Suzan Del­Bene in 2010.

2010 was also the year the King Coun­ty and Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can Par­ty enjoyed a tem­po­rary resur­gence in East­side leg­isla­tive races.

Repub­li­cans were able to defeat incum­bent Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Eric Oemig and Randy Gor­don with Steve Lit­zow and Andy Hill, briefly leav­ing Rod­ney Tom as the only Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tor from the four main East­side leg­isla­tive dis­tricts (the 41st, the 48th, the 45th, and the 5th). Tom, as men­tioned, defect­ed back to the Repub­li­cans in 2012 in a pow­er-shar­ing deal with Mark Schoesler.

In the years since, Democ­rats have not only recap­tured those lost leg­isla­tive seats, but have gone fur­ther and flipped seats that have been in Repub­li­can hands for eons, includ­ing in South King Coun­ty as well as the Eastside.

Here’s a time­line of major gains, begin­ning in 2012:

• 2012: Demo­c­ra­t­ic small busi­ness own­er Mark Mul­let is elect­ed in the 5th Leg­isla­tive Dis­trict fol­low­ing Cheryl Pflug’s appoint­ment to the Growth Man­age­ment Hear­ings board by Gov­er­nor Chris Gregoire.
• 2014: “Born-again” Repub­li­can Rod­ney Tom is replaced by Cyrus Habib as State Sen­a­tor in the 48th Leg­isla­tive Dis­trict, with Kirk­land City Coun­cilmem­ber Joan McBride tak­ing Habib’s place in the House; the 48th reverts to hav­ing all-Demo­c­ra­t­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion again.
• 2015: Clau­dia Bal­duc­ci defeats Jane Hague and becomes the new King Coun­ty Coun­cilmem­ber in the 6th Dis­trict, rep­re­sent­ing the Belle­vue — Kirk­land — Red­mond area in the coun­ty’s leg­isla­tive body.
• 2016: Lisa Well­man defeats Steve Lit­zow in the 41st Leg­isla­tive Dis­trict, flip­ping a key Sen­ate seat back to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, while the State Sen­ate remains in Repub­li­can hands by a mar­gin of one vote.
• 2017: In a water­shed spe­cial elec­tion to deter­mine con­trol of the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate, Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date Man­ka Dhin­gra tri­umphs over Repub­li­can Jiny­oung Lee Englund in the 45th Dis­trict, result­ing in Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­trol of the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate for the first time since Rod­ney Tom’s coup in 2012. Vot­ers in the neigh­bor­ing 48th Dis­trict, mean­while, retain Pat­ty Kud­er­er as Habib’s successor.
• 2018: The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty sweeps away most of the Repub­li­cans still hold­ing office in King Coun­ty, includ­ing in all of the par­ti­san races. The 8th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict turns blue for the first time in its his­to­ry as Kim Schri­er pre­vails over Dino Rossi. The 5th Dis­trict elects Lisa Callan and Bill Ramos to the Wash­ing­ton State House to serve with Mark Mul­let. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty also flips Sen­ate seats in South King Coun­ty with Mona Das and Claire Wil­son, in the 47th and 30th Dis­tricts, respec­tive­ly, while Pat­ty Kud­er­er trounces Rod­ney Tom’s come­back bid.

The rea­son I men­tion all of this his­to­ry is because it shows the tra­jec­to­ry the East­side is on. Kathy Lam­bert has cer­tain­ly had a good run on the Coun­cil going back decades, but it looks like 2021 could well be the end of the road.

The 3rd Coun­ty Coun­cil Dis­trict is a Demo­c­ra­t­ic dis­trict now, and a major­i­ty of its vot­ers under­stand­ably want it to be rep­re­sent­ed by a Demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­cilmem­ber, just as in the 6th Dis­trict to the west six years ago.

Sarah Per­ry isn’t a shoo-in, of course. Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns are used to hav­ing to work hard and orga­nize to win on the Eastside.

If any­one can defeat Lam­bert, though, it’s Perry.

She is a superb orga­niz­er and was a dri­ving force behind the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s vic­to­ries in the 5th Leg­isla­tive Dis­trict three years ago, which saw her spouse Bill Ramos and Lisa Callan elect­ed to the Wash­ing­ton State House. (Ramos, Callan, and Mul­let were all reelect­ed last year, with Muilet’s oppo­si­tion com­ing not from Repub­li­cans, but from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s pro­gres­sive contingent.)

The Novem­ber 2021 gen­er­al elec­tion will take place in only three months. The race in the 3rd will def­i­nite­ly be one to watch.