Teresa Mosqueda on track for reelection, with Kenneth Wilson her likely autumn opponent

Incum­bent Seat­tle City Coun­cilmem­ber Tere­sa Mosque­da is hav­ing a pret­ty good night. While fel­low incum­bent City Attor­ney Pete Holmes is in the fight of his polit­i­cal life against two chal­lengers who only emerged dur­ing Fil­ing Week a few weeks ago, Mosque­da is cruis­ing to reelec­tion against a large field of for­get­table chal­lengers who haven’t raised much mon­ey or done much campaigning.

In the first batch of returns, Mosque­da has 54.64% of the vote, a con­vinc­ing major­i­ty. Our polling indi­cat­ed that Mosque­da would eas­i­ly clinch the top spot, but also found a whop­ping 55% of vot­ers unde­cid­ed. Most of those not sure vot­ers appear to have backed Mosque­da. But a sig­nif­i­cant chunk also went to a can­di­date who per­formed very poor­ly in our sur­vey: Ken­neth Wilson.

Wil­son received 1% in the poll, but he has gar­nered 18.27% of the vote so far and is ahead of Kate Mar­tin, who came in sec­ond in our poll.

Mar­tin is pulling in twice as much sup­port as in our sur­vey (12.50% in these ini­tial returns, com­pared to 6% in the poll), but that’s sim­ply not good enough for sec­ond place due to Wilson’s mas­sive and remark­able late surge.

Wil­son is a licensed bridge struc­tur­al engi­neer who owns a small business.

On his web­site, he says that his cur­rent projects include a pedes­tri­an cross­ing over State Route 520 in NPI’s home­town of Redmond.

“As your coun­cil mem­ber, I will lean heav­i­ly on my ana­lyt­i­cal, engi­neer­ing, and infra­struc­ture back­ground to bring ratio­nal deci­sion mak­ing and progress con­trol fol­low up to Coun­cil actions,” he says in a mes­sage to voters.

Wil­son has been cam­paign­ing on reopen­ing the West Seat­tle Bridge to traf­fic.

“King County’s main­te­nance inspec­tion observed sig­nif­i­cant cracks in the Duvall Bridge’s twelve span 1,182-foot rein­forced con­crete box gird­ers. We designed the exter­nal steel strength­en­ing repair that win­ter and com­plet­ed con­struc­tion dur­ing a sum­mer clo­sure open­ing sev­en days ear­ly to its 17,000 vehi­cles a day,” Wil­son writes on his web­site, cit­ing a pre­vi­ous bridge repair project he worked on in East King Coun­ty, in the Sno­qulamie Val­ley, where Duvall is located.

“I have dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing that with 100,000 vehi­cles per day why the West Seat­tle Bridge had not been sim­i­lar­ly pri­or­i­tized for some lev­el of open­ing,” Wil­son goes on to say. “Trucks and bus­es must cross on the low­er West Seat­tle Swing Bridge, but the upper West Seat­tle Bridge should have the heavy cen­tral con­crete bar­ri­er rail removed, the heavy out­er rails replaced with lighter ones, and the bridge opened imme­di­ate­ly to a lane of car traf­fic each way.”

It sure looks like Wil­son was able to some­how break through and con­nect with vot­ers in the days since our poll was in the field last month, despite hav­ing only raised $3,125.00. Accord­ing to the Seat­tle Ethics and Elec­tions Com­mis­sion, Wilson’s cam­paign has just sev­en con­trib­u­tors, and aside from pay­ing the fil­ing fee for office, he has only spent mon­ey on signs and a web­site.

That sug­gests vot­ers found his voter’s pam­phlet state­ment compelling.

Mar­tin has raised $23,900 from 493 con­trib­u­tors and spent $13,550.63.

Mosque­da has raised $180,603 and spent $122,459.82.

Bar­ring an inter­est­ing turn of events dur­ing the count­ing of the late bal­lots, Wil­son looks like Mosqueda’s gen­er­al elec­tion opponent.

Mar­tin def­i­nite­ly has third place locked up with 12.5% — no oth­er can­di­date is even above 2% — but since only the top two can­di­dates will move on to the gen­er­al elec­tion, Mar­tin is on the verge of elimination.

4,774 votes cur­rent­ly sep­a­rate Wil­son and Martin.