Oliver and Thomas-Kennedy
An unprecedented number of last minute voters delivering Election Day ballots to the county’s drop boxes just in the nick of time Tuesday has boosted the August primary turnout. The count of later ballots has solidified many of the trends seen in Seattle’s races in the first tally Tuesday night including big trouble for one of the city’s longest serving incumbents.
While the new tallies have solidified primary victories for candidates Bruce Harrell and Lorena González to lead the city, the other big story from Election Night continues to get worse for incumbent City Attorney Pete Holmes who has seen his totals now slip out of the top two slots in the race. Holmes, who has held the position since 2009, is being pushed aside by tough on crime-talking Ann Davison, and police abolitionist candidate Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. Thomas-Kennedy has been one of the biggest gainers since Election Night adding more than a percentage point to her total to vault over Holmes with her 33.19% of the vote into the second slot behind Davison.
UPDATE: Holmes has conceded the race. Following Friday’s latest update of ballot counts, the incumbent City Attorney’s campaign said it was time to face the facts.
“After two decades of public service to Seattle – the last 12 as your City Attorney – it’s time to acknowledge that my opponents will be advancing to the general election,” Holmes said in a statement. “While defeat is difficult to accept, it’s inconsequential compared to the collective pain we’ve suffered as a City throughout this pandemic.”
Holmes wished his victorious challengers “best of luck.”
“With a city so ideologically splintered, whoever wins will certainly need it,” Holmes said.
Thomas-Kennedy, who worked as a public defender for four years before opening her own firm last year, is a self-styled abolitionist, who would lead the office to stop prosecuting most low-level misdemeanors, except for DUIs since the potential for danger from them is higher. Even DUI prosecutions, however, “could be more focused on what’s going to help this person not do this again as opposed to this person did a thing, now we must punish them,” she said.
Davison, who came up over 20 points short in a city council run in 2019 before becoming a Republican and finishing third in the lieutenant governor primary last year, has pummeled Holmes in a “Seattle is Dying” style campaign.
He seems unlikely to recover. Turnout in the county has jumped from being on track for the lowest primary total ever to a relatively strong showing with 34% across the county and Seattle voters now at the 42% ballot return level. Numbers from King County Elections posted by Seattle City Council Insight show massive jumps for most of the drop boxes in the city including a more than doubling in the number of ballots dropped off at the Broadway location at Seattle Central compared to the 2019 primary.
With this summer’s primary voters in Seattle an even later than usual arriving crowd, experts believe there may not be as large of a swing toward progressive and left candidates as we typically see in later vote counts.
That may not be the case. Two of the biggest gainers since Election Night are Thomas-Kennedy and activist Nikkita Oliver whose campaign has declared victory with 36.5% of the vote and is making plans for a November battle with brewery owner Sara Nelson, 42.1%, in the citywide City Council Position 9 race.
“This is a people-powered movement, and our victory is the people’s victory,” Oliver said, thanking supporters. “Thank you to the volunteers, organizations, and unions that helped power us through, and thank you to the many years of organizing tha made this campaign viable.”
“I’m elated to hold first place in my race but not entirely surprised because my message of pragmatic, progressive, and accountable leadership resonates widely,” Nelson said on Election Night. “I tapped into a desire for change and translated it into hope.”
| Race | Candidate | E Night % | Th % | Gain |
| City of Seattle City Attorney | Ann Davison | 34.64 | 34.50 | -0.14 |
| Nicole Thomas-Kennedy | 32.15 | 33.19 | 1.04 | |
| Pete Holmes | 32.80 | 32.02 | -0.78 | |
| Write-in | 0.41 | 0.28 | -0.13 | |
| City of Seattle Council Position No. 8 | Teresa Mosqueda | 54.64 | 56.33 | 1.69 |
| Kenneth Wilson | 18.27 | 17.67 | -0.60 | |
| Kate Martin | 12.50 | 12.40 | -0.10 | |
| Paul Felipe Glumaz | 5.69 | 5.63 | -0.06 | |
| Alexander White | 1.56 | 1.41 | -0.15 | |
| Bobby Lindsey Miller | 1.32 | 1.25 | -0.07 | |
| Jesse James | 1.31 | 1.15 | -0.16 | |
| Write-in | 1.25 | 1.13 | -0.12 | |
| Jordan Elizabeth Fisher | 1.07 | 0.97 | -0.10 | |
| George Freeman | 1.12 | 0.95 | -0.17 | |
| Alex Tsimerman | 0.67 | 0.56 | -0.11 | |
| Brian Fahey | 0.58 | 0.52 | -0.06 | |
| City of Seattle Council Position No. 9 | Sara Nelson | 42.36 | 42.10 | -0.26 |
| Nikkita Oliver | 34.96 | 36.47 | 1.51 | |
| Brianna K. Thomas | 14.29 | 13.88 | -0.41 | |
| Corey Eichner | 4.19 | 3.85 | -0.34 | |
| Lindsay McHaffie | 1.80 | 1.66 | -0.14 | |
| Rebecca L. Williamson | 1.09 | 0.95 | -0.14 | |
| Xtian Gunther | 0.86 | 0.74 | -0.12 | |
| Write-in | 0.44 | 0.35 | -0.09 | |
| City of Seattle Mayor | Bruce Harrell | 38.23 | 36.92 | -1.31 |
| M. Lorena González | 28.55 | 29.63 | 1.08 | |
| Colleen Echohawk | 8.32 | 9.29 | 0.97 | |
| Jessyn Farrell | 7.49 | 7.38 | -0.11 | |
| Arthur K. Langlie | 5.83 | 5.90 | 0.07 | |
| Casey Sixkiller | 3.57 | 3.45 | -0.12 | |
| Andrew Grant Houston | 2.59 | 2.50 | -0.09 | |
| James Donaldson | 1.66 | 1.58 | -0.08 | |
| Lance Randall | 1.49 | 1.40 | -0.09 | |
| Clinton Bliss | 0.95 | 0.84 | -0.11 | |
| Bobby Tucker | 0.25 | 0.21 | -0.04 | |
| Write-in | 0.26 | 0.21 | -0.05 | |
| Omari Tahir-Garrett | 0.24 | 0.20 | -0.04 | |
| Henry C. Dennison | 0.22 | 0.19 | -0.03 | |
| Stan Lippmann | 0.23 | 0.19 | -0.04 | |
| Don L. Rivers | 0.13 | 0.11 | -0.02 |
Updates are scheduled to be posted by 4 PM each weekday through August 17th when the primary election is certified. The top two candidates in each race go through to the general election on Tuesday, November 2, 2021 to join a ballot with a vote on the Compassion Seattle homelessness initiative and, possibly, the recall of District 3 City Councilmember Kshama Sawant.
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Oliver and Thomas Kennedy are ideological zealots. The far left has come to mirror the extremism in the Republican Party. There are major systemic issues in this country and city, but that doesn’t mean anarchy and a Marxist revolution are the answer to these problems. I have been a progressive my whole life, but their politics cross a line for me.
Marxism and anarchy are polar opposites as ideologies. It makes no sense to mention them together in this manner.
I didn’t misspeak. The Seattle far left is a jumbled mix of both anarcho-communist and recycled Marxist bs. It doesn’t make sense to me either. Lol
What Marxist policies do Oliver or Thomas Kennedy promote?
Yes they certainly are. And the prospect of either or both of them winning in November is truly scary. Far-left candidates gaining power in our city government would be a huge step backward for moderate yet progressive governance.
The extremism in the Republican party? Are you kidding me? These 2 make the Tea Party look like a high school prom selection committee! Citizens of Seattle, who number nearly 800,000 are already living in a 2-tier justice system. Adding these extremists to the legislative and judicial bodies will only further harden those tiers. We have 2,000 homeless people and their elected handlers running rough shod over the rest of us. Republicans have nothing to do with it, having been an impotent element in Seattle politics for several decades.
Thomas-Kennedy is an experienced public defender, and knows first hand that people are being jailed for things like poverty and addiction. These cases can be scaled way back and referred to other agencies. Want to talk about ideological zealots? How about members of the SPD attending a rally to overthrow the government?
As I said in my initial post I think the Republican Party is a bunch of ideological zealots. The more moderate voices were drowned out and Republican voters in the primaries kept electing the most ideologically pure candidate. This culminated in the election of Trump as the Republican nominee, further erosion of democracy and institutions, and ultimately the insurrection at the Capitol. I fear this is now happening on the left in places like Seattle, fueling extremism and the egos of false prophets like Sawant, Oliver and Thomas-Kennedy.
Before Trump was elected, there was a bipartisan movement to end mass incarceration. We are a “free” country, yet we have the highest jail rate in the world. This has torn up families and communities, and disproportionately, BIPOC communities. This movement mostly vanished in the Trump era, but local leaders like Thomas-Kennedy can keep it alive.
I would be interested to hear what Thomas Kennedy intends to change about DUI prosecutions. Many people do not do any jail time for DUIs. The system focuses quite a bit on mandating treatment for offenders found to have substance abuse problems. The biggest punishment for most is losing their drivers license for three months to one year, and those penalties are often imposed through a civil process handled by the Department of Licensing. She cannot change that process, and as I said, it is often the most meaningful penalty imposed on DUI offenders.
Most are solid returns on moderate candidates.
Please remove my comment. You have changed the story it is attached to, and it no longer applies.
This is genuinely pretty frightening. Oliver and Thomas-Kennedy seem to live in a fantasy land that’s completely divorced from reality.
I’ve seen some of Thomas-Kennedy’s tweets where she celebrates property crime and arson. I’ve also seen tweets of hers where she seems to think the main job of city attorney is to prosecute people for minor crimes like jaywalking. In reality, the misdemeanors regularly committed in this city are things like assault, theft, property crime, harassment, and other crimes that severely impact our quality of life.
In particular, it seems to have become an orthodoxy in Seattle that theft is generally ok because all theft is driven by need. Even if that were true, with it’s not, the solution isn’t to simply legalize stealing from each other. It’s to strengthen the social safety net so that nobody “needs” to steal.
The sad reality is that a lot of this orthodoxy isn’t driven by a genuine desire to help the poor so much as a desire to help the poor at the expense of everyone else, where someone smashing in my windows to steal my stuff is considered a victory because I’m bourgeoisie enough to own property. When you delve into conversations with people who support Oliver, Sawant, Thomas-Kennedy and their ilk, that’s the foundation of their worldview and their way of defending the indefensible.
I really feel like Oliver and Thomas-Kennedy should put their money where their mouths are.
If Oliver thinks we can abolish the police and replace them with counseling visits, I would invite her to work with the SPD to go along on their next violent crime call and try to resolve the situation without police involvement. I think she will find that, contrary to her ideology, hardened criminals aren’t just waiting for a sympathetic voice to talk them out of their lifestyle.
If Thomas-Kennedy thinks most of the crime prosecuted in this city is “oppression”, I would invite her to go through a list of all the crimes prosecuted in the last month under the Holmes administration and mark which ones she wouldn’t prosecute. I think she will find that, contrary to her ideology, the vast majority of crimes prosecuted by the city attorney’s office are serious issues that the city can’t reasonably solve with legalization.
Of course that will never happen. Seattle voters are going to put Oliver and Thomas-Kennedy into office because it feels good to vote for an extremist who uses flowery academic language and promises the moon. Then when things keep getting even worse, they’ll continue blaming anyone but themselves.
Do people voting for NTK know anything about her actual positions?
From a May 24th profile of her in the stranger:
“She described domestic violence, however, as a “thorny issue.” While she’s not “running on a platform of decriminalizing domestic violence,” she thinks the prosecution process and punishment in those cases can often do more harm than good.”
If your position so far to the pro-criminal side of things that you actually have to stop and clarify that your not running on a platform of decriminalizing domestic violence, you’ve probably gone too far. And despite saying she’s not running on platform of decriminalizing domestic violence she does say “prosecution process and punishment in those cases can often do more harm than good” which when combined with her actual platform of not prosecuting any misdemeanors outside of DUI sounds a lot like she pretty much will de facto be decriminalizing domestic violence.
That is how far off the rails this city has gone. It’s like the city is experiencing some sort of collective mass hallucination that causes people to view their hard working law abiding neighbors as the cause of all problems, while the criminals that are robbing our homes, stealing from our businesses and oftentimes engaging in violent and destructive behavior against us, are the ones that need protecting. It’s madness and I can’t wait to leave at watch it burn from the other side of the lake when my house closes later this month.
The best thing that will come out of behaving a council with sawant, mosquida, herbold, and oliver with NTK as prosecutor will be that the resulting explosion in encampments, crime, and new taxes will be such an utter failure that I won’t have to worry about this seattle dogma of ‘all businesses bad, encampments and criminals good’ spreading to surrounding communities. Seattle can serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when children with no real world experience and craven activist hucksters combine to take over a city. Enjoy!
What a choice we are left with: Someone who proudly aligns herself with the white supremacist, Capitol Building-torching, voter surpressing, anti-women, anti-science GOP or someone who will perpetuate the lawlessness on our streets and give a pass to criminals preying on local businesses and families. I’m as liberal as they come but these extremist views will just spell more misery for Seattle. We are f&^% regardless of the outcome.
You can be a Republican and not align with the items you listed. You can also be a Democrat and/or Socialist and not agree with much of what Thomas Kennedy supports. Davidson was a Democrat who left the party because she believed it did not support diversity of thought/belief. She is certainly not running on a radical platform. More like back to basics city attorney work. So take a moment to understand there is nuance here and make the choice that makes sense to you.
I wouldn’t put it that way. I’m no Republican either, and I’d say the extremism lies only with NTK. I’ll proudly vote for Ann Davison (as I did in the primary), bc her stance on crime makes sense to me, regardless of any affiliation with the GOP.
Any guesses how much worse the parks will be when the Socialists take over come completely? We are looking at a daily assault on people and property, cheered on and assisted by woke activists.
Thomas-Kennedy is correct that most petty crime is directly traceable to various social pathologies (such as widespread food insecurity, wage theft, housing/employment discrimination, and the myriad forms of systemic racism) that aren’t the fault of the perpetrator and thus generally shouldn’t be dealt with in the usual punishment-focused, non-therapeutic, non-holistic way. I don’t disagree with her on that at all. Where she and I differ is that I don’t entirely share her optimism that a mere city attorney, using only the powers of selective prosecution, can mitigate those social pathologies to a degree that will lessen the overall level of street violence and instability (or, perhaps more important, the public’s perception of same) and thus avoid intensifying an already strong “law and order” backlash. This is why, after considerable vacillation, I voted for Holmes in the primary. I don’t particularly like him but all things considered, I thought he struck the best balance between those opposing dynamics.
Now it’s down to a much starker choice. Will I put aside my reservations and vote for Thomas-Kennedy over Davison? Yes. The traditional lock-em-up approach, under which the lives of the poor (especially African American boys and young men) have virtually no intrinsic value to the rest of society and disadvantaged neighborhoods are simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected, is what brought us to the volatile situation we are now experiencing. It did not arise from Holmes’s (partial and tentative) abandonment of that paradigm, and simply returning to it full-bore, as Davison advocates, will make things worse overall, not better. Anyone who understands what I’m saying here has to support Thomas-Kennedy. But realistically, the only way to bring about the real social transformation she seeks is to elect, defend and maintain a durable progressive governing majority at both the federal and state levels for at least a generation. I hope to see, and help accomplish, that feat in my lifetime, but we sure haven’t done it yet. So I wish her luck not just in the election but afterward — that’s when she (and those of us who share her vision) will need it most.
“The Devil Made Me Do It” – 2021 Edition
No, the devil just made me wear this dress.
Everything shaping up to be about sound bytes that make people feel special. González is better at that game than Harrell — because he’s not playing it. So we’re going to get a platitude-spouting mayor and a bunch of dreamers who don’t deserve to run this beautiful city. Can’t wait.