Kshama Sawant is now prevailing over the right wing backed campaign to recall her

Social­ist icon Kshama Sawant came from behind to win in not one, but two out of her three suc­cess­ful bids for Seat­tle City Coun­cil in the 2010s.

Now, fol­low­ing a sec­ond favor­able drop pub­lished this after­noon, it appears that she’s done it again. Sawant is on the verge of defeat­ing a right wing backed cam­paign to recall her from office, which means she will remain the Seat­tle City Coun­cil’s most senior mem­ber and win a fourth con­sec­u­tive elec­tion in Seattle.

With 40,629 bal­lots now count­ed, Sawan­t’s posi­tion (Recall No) has a slim two hun­dred and thir­ty-two vote lead, not unlike the small two hun­dred and forty-six vote lead that the pro-recall camp had yesterday.

How­ev­er, unlike that lead, Sawan­t’s is like­ly to stick.

King Coun­ty Elec­tions does­n’t list any bal­lots as await­ing tab­u­la­tion, which means that we’re down to a trick­le of incom­ing ballots.

That just leaves the chal­lenged bal­lots (as of this evening, there were 591 bal­lots with sig­na­ture chal­lenges that still need­ed to be resolved) and Sawant is backed by the best bal­lot cur­ing oper­a­tion around these parts.

Sawant won an impres­sive 67.3% of the bal­lots in today’s bal­lot drop. That is even bet­ter than Sawan­t’s per­for­mance in yes­ter­day’s drop. And those chal­lenged bal­lots aren’t going to swing the out­come. “Even if they were all cured, Yes would have to win 70% of them to take the lead, when in fact they’re like­ly more than 60%-40% No,” Civic Ven­tures’ David Gold­stein point­ed out this after­noon.

While we can’t say with total cer­tain­ty that Sawant has won yet, we do feel com­fort­able pro­ject­ing that a Sawant vic­to­ry is the most like­ly outcome.

If Sawant pre­vails when the recall is cer­ti­fied, it will be her fourth straight vic­to­ry in a city-lev­el elec­tion… and her nar­row­est yet. Here’s how the recall com­pares to the oth­er times Sawant has been on the ballot:

Yes­ter­day, as the pro-recall camp was los­ing ground, The Seat­tle Times report­ed some of recall orga­niz­er Hen­ry Bridger II’s com­ments from Elec­tion Night:

Recall Sawant cam­paign man­ag­er and chair Hen­ry Bridger II, who also wasn’t avail­able for com­ment Wednes­day, said Tues­day night he was not wor­ried about the bal­lot-count­ing results skew­ing toward Sawant as the count goes on because he believed the ini­tial results are the sen­ti­ment of the district.

Here’s what we had to say about that:

Ridicu­lous.

The impli­ca­tion of this state­ment is that some peo­ple’s votes mat­ter while oth­er peo­ple’s votes don’t. Wrong.

This is not that far off from the non­sense we hear from the Trump camp about how we should stop count­ing bal­lots on Elec­tion Night (so long as they’re ahead, of course!)

Every vote counts, and this recall is once again demon­strat­ing that. The ini­tial results were par­tial and incomplete.

And not even the offi­cial, cer­ti­fied results will tell us how all the vot­ers col­lec­tive­ly feel because we won’t get to 100% turnout.

Any­one can engage in this kind of cherry-picking.

Hen­ry Bridger log­ic: Today’s results cap­tured the “sen­ti­ment of the dis­trict.” They demon­strate that Sawant is mas­sive­ly beloved by her con­stituents. Look at all of the D3 vot­ers who turned out to sup­port her in the final hours!

Bridger did not have any com­ment on today’s lead flip either; Sarah Grace Tay­lor report­ed that no reac­tion was offered when she reached out for a state­ment. That’s just as well: we’d prob­a­bly have got­ten anoth­er vari­a­tion of yes­ter­day’s non­sen­si­cal dec­la­ra­tion that the “ini­tial results are the sen­ti­ment of the district.”

NPI does not endorse can­di­dates or engage in elec­tion­eer­ing for or against any can­di­date. Accord­ing­ly, we had no posi­tion on the Sawant recall and were not involved in either the Recall Yes or the Recall No campaigns.