Seattle City Attorney update: Pete Holmes drops to third, trails Nicole Thomas-Kennedy

It’s look­ing increas­ing­ly like­ly that the com­ing Novem­ber runoff for Seat­tle City Attor­ney will not include incum­bent Pete Holmes, who our polling pre­vi­ous­ly indi­cat­ed was in seri­ous dan­ger of being elim­i­nat­ed in the Top Two elec­tion.

This after­noon, in the lat­est drop from King Coun­ty Elec­tions, Holmes slid to third place in the con­test, behind Nicole Thomas-Kennedy and Ann Davison.

Davi­son — a Repub­li­can who pre­vi­ous­ly ran for Lieu­tenant Gov­er­nor but did not make it to the gen­er­al elec­tion — has nar­row­ly led since Elec­tion Night, with Holmes in sec­ond place. Holmes held on to that sec­ond place spot in yes­ter­day’s drop, which was fair­ly small. But now, with today’s much larg­er drop, he has relin­quished that sec­ond place spot to his oth­er challenger.

Hav­ing trad­ed places with Thomas-Kennedy, who is run­ning on a plat­form of abol­ish­ing as much of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem as pos­si­ble, Holmes is now on the brink of elim­i­na­tion. If tomor­row’s count does­n’t at least tilt in his favor, he may be out of luck, because the num­ber of bal­lots left to count will dwin­dle pret­ty rapid­ly after Fri­day. (Accord­ing to KCE’s report, there are 142,000 total bal­lots wait­ing to be count­ed now, not all of which are in Seattle.)

It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that Thomas-Kennedy will sim­ply pull fur­ther away from Holmes in the next few counts. The swing in NTK’s favor was pret­ty pro­nounced today, and that was just a sin­gle drop, albeit a large one.

Here are the cur­rent num­bers in the City Attor­ney race:

Seattle City Attorney, as of Thursday, August 5th, 2021

1. Ann Davi­son: 34.5% (43,859 votes)
2. Nicole Thomas-Kennedy: 33.19% (42,196 votes)
3. Pete Holmes: 32.02% (40,705 votes)

On Elec­tion Night, Holmes was ahead of NTK by five hun­dred and fifty-six votes. Yes­ter­day, the gap shrank ever so slight­ly to five hun­dred and fifty one votes. Today, NTK erased it entire­ly, and over­took Holmes.

NTK’s new­ly mint­ed lead over Holmes is 1,491 votes.

The race is still too close to call, but again, Holmes’ chances of get­ting through just don’t look good at all. That’s a sce­nario Holmes him­self seems to have come to grips with, hav­ing told reporters that he is at peace with what­ev­er hap­pens.