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TagsMayoral candidate Mike McGinn hung on to his slim lead overnight, and even gained a few votes, leading Joe Mallahan by 515 votes. Yesterday he was up by 462. Over 131,000 votes have been counted, and it is unlikely that the remaining ballots contain a surprise Mallahan victory.
It's a squeaker! Mike McGinn still leads Joe Mallahan, but by just 462 votes. City Council races are not so close: Richard Conlin, Sally Bagshaw, Nick Licata, and Mike O'Brien all have comfortable leads over their rivals. Pete Holmes has still soundly thrashed Tom Carr in the city attorney's race. Full results are here. More updating this time tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until the last syllable of recorded time. I don't agree with Susan Hutchison on that much, but waiting for all the mail-in ballots to arrive is anti-climactic.
Shot of the Dow Constantine election party around 10:30 p.m., by Seth Kolloen
As SunBreak editor Seth Kolloen continues making his way through the detritus of 101 election night parties in Seattle, I've returned home to the comforts of hot tea and cats to bask in the warm glow of a good night. While the verdict is still out on both the mayoral race and Referendum 71, Seattleites can at least half-relax in the knowledge that they've done well tonight.
The success of the Mike O'Brien-Pete Holmes-Mike McGinn ticket (should McGinn's lead hold) is good news for Seattle, and not just because I agree with their policies. And the groundwork for their success was laid over the last decade, by a dedicated core of activists who nearly (or actually) burned themselves out fighting the prevailing winds on transportation issues, like Cary Moon and Grant Cogswell.
These candidates' success shows that progressives and environmentalists in Seattle can prevail in a one-party climate, which stands in marked contrast to the rest of the country. No doubt John Corzine's defeat in the New Jersey gubernatorial election is already being used as right-wing fodder to suggest the public is turning against President Obama's policies, when in reality it's owed mostly to the corrupt, ossified political culture of New Jersey Democrats.
The Seattlepi.com's description of McGinn's campaign as "populist," while charming, is a disservice. McGinn's success, like Pete Holmes's and Mike O'Brien's, is owed to the fact that he ran on solid policy positions that both appeal to the city's sensibilities while constituting sound, far-sighted choices. While Mike McGinn has backtracked on his opposition to the tunnel, his potential election signals a departure from the failed tenure of Greg Nickels and breathes new life into the city's liberal political culture.
Susan Hutchinson's once-competitive campaign was owed largely to the public's increasing lack of faith in the local Democrats. She was an attempt to hitch the radical, anti-environment policies of the ex-urban fringe to a candidate with suburban appeal. Dow Constantine's decisive victory should put to rest idle talk of the region swinging to the political right. And while it's unlikely to put to rest the town-country divide and the attendant vitriol that was aimed at Ron Sims for his environmentally sound land-use policies, the fact that Sims's protege has prevailed clearly signals that the majority in the region understand that the value of our natural resources justifies the inconveniences.
Pete Holmes's victory is especially pleasing. Tom Carr was fundamentally out-of-step with Seattle in his longstanding battle with the city's thriving night-life. Not only has Seattle unequivocally stated that it believes there's a better way to balance neighborhood quality-of-life with a thriving bar and club scene, but it has spoken strongly in support of the cultural scene--the theaters, rock clubs, galleries, and literary events--that's so closely tied to night-life.
Tomorrow, most commentators will be talking about how King County's overwhelming support for the Approve 71 campaign (roughly two-to-one in favor) played a decisive role in likely swinging the entire state (where it's tentatively passing 51-49 percent), but that's also unfair. Sixty-five percent of King County voters are not pinko commies. The success of the Approve 71 campaign is owed to great outreach to voters of all stripes, and the ability of gay rights advocates to convince the larger community that gays are your friends, neighbors, and co-workers, and at the very least deserve most of the rights and privileges afforded to their straight neighbors.
Oh, and as for Tim Eyman's failure to pass his latest anti-tax initiative? It means nothing except that the vast majority of Washingtonians aren't stupid.
In H1N1 news, two weeks ago the swine flu vaccine arrived in King County and health professionals got first dibs. This week the vaccine was publicly available...but only for a few days, before supplies of the H1N1 vaccine ran out. Replenishments are on the way. President Obama has now declared the flu variant a national emergency--it's killed 1,000 people across the U.S. so far.
Twists in the race to be Mayor of Tunneltown this week: mayoral candidate Mike McGinn said he wouldn't seek to block deep-bore tunnel construction after all, and Joe Mallahan said he was okay with building it even if Seattle was solely on the hook for any cost overruns. WSDOT was accused of being "in love" with the deep-bore tunnel nyah nyah.
Books were big news: CHS provided a round-up of discussions about the Elliott Bay Book Company's potential move to Capitol Hill: Crosscut's Knute Berger and the Seattle Times' Jon Talton took the bird's-eye view of what the move says about Pioneer Square and Seattle itself.
Then the same week that Barnes & Noble launched the Nook, Amazon puffed up its chest, put the stock market on its back, and flew off in an up-and-to-the-right direction. Jeff Bezos ended the day worth over $2 billion more than when he woke up. Microsoft still lost money, but less than expected, and besides: Windows 7! TwitterBing!
Seattlepi.com tipped me to news from the Dave Ross Show that at least one state lawmaker, Sen. Jim Kastama (D-Puyallup), doesn't think Seattle will wriggle out of deep-bore tunnel cost overruns.
It's a measure of how worried everyone is about the hot-potato tunnel project that no one wants to admit responsibility for its cost. In the face of a study that shows typical cost overruns at 30 percent or more, Seattle tunnel boosters have been downplaying the possibility that Seattle might be, legally, on the hook.
Rep. Judy Clibborn told Ross today the cost overrun requirement wasn't a legal amendment, according to the state attorney general. "...[T]hat would seem to be trying to trick people into thinking that they're protected when they're not," responded a bemused Ross. "It was a way to get three more votes and to get the tunnel bill passed," explained Clibborn. "[...] We did whatever it took to get it."
Ross spoke next with Sen. Kastama, who said that while he had been unaware that the amendment wasn't legal, it didn't make much difference to him, practically speaking. He assured Ross that the Senate Transportation Committee had already committed all it was going to to the project.
Knowing that transportation funds would be trending lower--along with gas tax revenues--Kastama said they "saw the need to cut significant funds in the transportation budget." But while the state cut almost every other transportation project in the face of our $9 billion deficit, it did not cut the original $2.4 billion allocated for the Viaduct's replacement.
The cost overrun amendment was a response to there being no money to pay for real projects across the state, let alone cost overruns on a single one. (For context, 30 percent of $1.9 billion for the deep-bore tunnel alone is $570 million, or a new total of $2.5 billion.)...
With yesterday's announcement that he won't try to block the deep-bore tunnel, mayoral candidate Mike McGinn managed to buy another news cycle while his adversary Joe Mallahan has been campaigning the old-fashioned way: on credit. It also puts into a new light McGinn's statement at a debate last Saturday that, "I might not win this election, and the tunnel still might not get built."
This morning Publicola interviewed McGinn on the strategic reasons for his shift, and McGinn said, "Yesterday, I acknowledged that it’s not the mayor’s job to ignore legislation passed by the council," referring to the City Council's unanimous vote in favor of the tunnel plan.
The Seattle Weekly is scratching its head over McGinn supporters' equanimity following the news--don't they realize that McGinn is a one-issue candidate who only has support because of his tunnel opposition? Strategic preemption and partisan jeering aside, what this means to voters is that they remain faced with a choice of mayoral skills and...
Let me say at the outset, this is a judgment call. While Seattle has been scratching its head over which of the two neophytes to choose for mayor, we can at least be glad that we're choosing between two candidates who are deeply invested in Seattle, and who each represent, in their ways, a lot of what Seattle has going for it.
I've been wrestling with which of the candidates to vote for. Even though McGinn is far and away the more knowledgeable about city politics, I still wanted to know if he could be mayor of all of Seattle, not just The Stranger.
I stopped in at a mayoral candidates debate held over the weekend at Seattle University to get an in-person read. While McGinn's anti-tunnel stance warms my heart, I'm not prepared to vote for him on that basis alone--as McGinn himself mentioned during questioning Saturday, if the deep-bore tunnel is the boondoggle he thinks it is, it may very well stop itself in its tracks.
I want to bring up the very-much-alive ghost of Governor Moonbeam because Jerry...
"I'm thinking of writing in Nickels," writes a commenter on the seattlepi.com recap of the Monday mayoral candidates debate hosted by City Club. "I wonder if people didn't realize how the top-two system worked and thought they were voting for who to run against Nickels, and then forgot to actually vote for Nickels."
At The SunBreak offices, we've been kicking around the idea of a "Write In Nickels" campaign, now that everyone has had their chance to punish the mayor in the primaries. While there are certainly Mallahan and McGinn partisans, another segment of Seattle remains bewildered by the primary results.
If you missed the standing-room-only debate at the Seattle Public Library, you didn't miss much. "Monday night's debate at the downtown Seattle library was a departure from the campaign's focus on the candidates' disagreement over whether to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a $4.2 billion tunnel project," reports the Seattle Times.
That meant the evening focused largely on management style and ducking...
You haven't read much here about Joe Mallahan, Seattle's other mayoral candidate, and that's because Mallahan has seemingly adopted a "loose lips sink ships" policy to this point. While Mallahan never misses a chance to tout his "progressive values," his demeanor is archetypically conservative. He projects himself as an authority, and bridles at being asked to go into detail. If he says he'll do it, he'll do it.
But the Seattle Times reports that Mallahan is now searching for ways to fund the $191 million dollar Mercer Street redevelopment, after coming out strongly against the project in the primary. The Times quotes Mallahan as saying earlier that the project was "stealing" from Seattle's neighborhoods.
The new Mallahan says things like: "I think the Mercer Street project is a very good neighborhood development project and it will do great things for South Lake Union. If it were properly financed, I would be in favor of it."
Vulcan, South Lake Union's 800-lb. gorilla, would very much like Mallahan to reconsider...
I keep hearing people talking with stunned surprise about the fact that Greg Nickels lost in the mayoral primary. McGinn and Mallahan fans alike seemed to be picturing their guy running against Greg--with the unspoken "safety" option of voting Nickels if their initial crush faded. So let's take the temperature of the room. If you had to vote today, who would it be?
Seattle had its first mayoral debate, hosted by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. So far as debating goes, Mike McGinn won handily on points; Joe Mallahan tied, I think, with Admiral Stockdale. If you want a deep-bore tunnel like you might just die if you don't get it, McGinn's performance will have mattered little to you. But if you were looking for a hyper-competent business perspective, Mallahan made you wonder what goes on, exactly, over at T-Mobile. Here's the political wonk recap at Publicola. Joel Connelly takes a closer look at Mallahan's bona fides here.
Muggers have been working Green Lake, a story My Green Lake has been covering closely. This reminds me of my post reminding our mayoral candidates about rising crime city-wide.
CHS has an enjoyable profile of local chef-entrepreneur Becky Selengut. West Seattle Blog reminds you that it's harbor seal pup season and to watch for the little bundles of cute when casting for salmon.
We here at The SunBreak had a great first full week of existence. We talked...
Last night two men had a shoot-out with a third man, firing at each other across 23rd Avenue at Jackson. (The bullets lodged in a Bank of America building, but it's not likely meant to have been a statement.) The city has recently launched a sweeping Drug Market Initiative that aims to reduce the open-air drug trade. Across town, in Belltown, there's been a high-profile series of assaults, and crime of all kinds is on the rise. Capitol Hill generates a steady stream of theft and assault. Oh, and there's an arsonist in Greenwood.
In the meantime our two mayoral candidates are squaring off over a streetcar. Mike McGinn is excited about getting government on your iPhone. Joe Mallahan is trying to become visible in daylight. One of the pitfalls of having accidentally selected two neophytes in the mayoral race (I know I was counting on Greg Nickels testing the primary winner's mettle) is that they don't have ingrained a sense of the job's fundamentals.
The Seattle Times is gamely trying...
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