The Seattle Times versus The Stranger: How their 2023 MLKC area endorsements compare

Today, with bal­lots about to go into the mail to in-state vot­ers, The Stranger released its high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed endorse­ments for the 2023 Top Two elec­tion in Wash­ing­ton State. Like The Seat­tle Times, The Stranger issues endorse­ments for city, port, school board, and coun­ty offices, but it releas­es them all at once rather than one-by-one on dif­fer­ent days as The Seat­tle Times prefers to do.

With each paper’s set of endorse­ments now avail­able to scru­ti­nize, our team thought it would be inter­est­ing to do a com­par­i­son and see where the papers agree and dis­agree. You might think the papers would be far apart in their choic­es, and some­times they were… but not always!

Here’s a grid:

For Seat­tle City Coun­cil, The Seat­tle Times and The Stranger were far apart.

But as you can see, three can­di­dates for three oth­er lev­els of gov­ern­ment (coun­ty, port, school board) were for­tu­nate enough to score endorse­ments from both papers: Jorge L. Barón, Fred Felle­man, and Gina Topp.

Each of them has two opponents.

Felle­man is an incum­bent; Topp and Barón aren’t. Topp and Barón prob­a­bly stand to ben­e­fit the most from going two for two with the newspapers.

Some­thing our team noticed last year is that Seat­tle-area can­di­dates who won the endorse­ments of both papers did well in their respec­tive races.

For exam­ple, Julia Reed got 55.10% of the vote in the August 2022 Top Two elec­tion, while Emi­ly Alvara­do got 54.04%.

In an adja­cent dis­trict, Chipa­lo Street got 41.53% (a plurality).

All of them were run­ning for open seats and did­n’t have the advan­tage of incum­ben­cy. All secured the endorse­ments of both papers last sum­mer and all went on to become state rep­re­sen­ta­tives by com­fort­able margins.

They now rep­re­sent the 36th, 34th, and 37th Dis­tricts, respectively.

We know from our Seat­tle and King Coun­ty polling that news­pa­per endorse­ments and media cov­er­age mat­ter. 50% of King Coun­ty vot­ers sur­veyed last July by Change Research for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute said that at elec­tion time, they go to mass media like The Seat­tle Times, KING5, or KUOW (NPR) to obtain infor­ma­tion about what is on the bal­lot and make a decision.

The only source vot­ers in King Coun­ty count on more is the offi­cial voter’s pam­phlet pub­lished by King Coun­ty Elec­tions — 83% said they use that resource.

In a few weeks, we’ll have data from the Top Two elec­tion to study. We’ll see if the can­di­dates who won the endorse­ments of both papers cruise or not.

Our guess is that they at least well posi­tioned to avoid elimination.