Vote Now. It Might Be Your Last Chance. by Stranger Election Control Board Alright, alright, stop panicking over the swing state polling for one second and listen up. The most important election since the last one is upon us, and the choice between voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and the worst American in recent memory is only one of the extremely consequential decisions you will have to make on this hell ballot.  Right off the bat, you’ll have to face the Four Initiatives of the Apocalypse. They’ll cut billions in education funding, billions in funding for transit and clean energy programs, completely destroy a long-term health care benefit that we’ll all rely on sooner than we think, and ensure that Washington remains forever dependent on fossil fuels. Not good! Not good at all!  After we reject all that bullshit, we need to pick members of Congress who will either help Harris deliver for the people or else serve as a bulwark against the last President of the United States.  At the state level, we need to build a blue wall of executives to shield against attacks from a possible Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress, or, if our better angels prevail, to effectively implement the laws our lawmakers pass.  Speaking of those lawmakers, we have the chance to give Democrats supermajorities in the State Legislature, which they could use to fix some major problems for once in their lives! That’s fun! As is the prospect of voting for a State Supreme Court Justice who isn’t a barely closeted Republican!! And down at the municipal level, we have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. We can replace an ineffective conservative city council member with an effective progressive city council member and show the current council that they only achieved their conservative majority thanks to big checks from corporations and the voter suppression inherent in holding city elections on odd-numbered years. Oh, and there’s a hugely important transportation levy we need to pass so that we can have sidewalks to walk on, to roll on, and to chalk up with abolitionist slogans.  That’s a lot to consider! But that’s why the Stranger Election Control Board is here. We spent the last few months grilling candidates, analyzing platforms, digging up dirt, reading with great interest about the particulars of forest management and utility planning practices, and writing strongly worded emails, all to help you fill out your ballot swiftly and correctly.  As ever, below you’ll find all the arguments we marshaled in support of our endorsements. If you don’t have time to read all of our bratty hectoring, then just jump straight to the Cheat Sheet.   Your ballot should land in your mailbox soon. If you do not see it by October 21, then contact King County Elections as soon as possible to find out what the hell is going on. (You can reach them by phone at 206-296-VOTE [8683] or by email at [email protected].) If you’re not registered to vote, then register online or by mail any time through October 28. If you’re unsure about your registration status, then check VoteWA.  Once that big, thick ballot arrives, rip it open, select your favorite pen–any color will do!—and fill in the bubbles we tell you to fill in. Then slide the ballot into its funny little Hot Pocket sleeve, stuff the whole thing into the envelope, and then drop it in the mail by November 1st—no need for a stamp. If you’ve always wanted to be a mail carrier, or if you just like a little walk through the neighborhood, then skip the snail mail and slide your ballot into a nearby drop box no later than Tuesday, November 5 at 8 pm. And if all of this love and support and information makes you feel good on the inside, then please consider sending us a nice little tip! We know we just got bought by a rich guy, but he’s kind of banking on continued financial support for our readers.  The Stranger Election Control Board is Hannah Krieg, Vivian McCall, Charles Mudede, Ashley Nerbovig, Megan Seling, Rich Smith, a working family, and Hannah Murphy Winter. The SECB does not endorse in uncontested races or in races we forgot.  Initiative Measure No. 2066No Before we dig into the particulars of each of these initiatives, you need to know a couple things up front. First, all of these measures more or less repeal laws that your duly elected officials passed in the last few years. Second, none of the laws are as cool as "Let’s Go Washington" makes them out to be.  What is Let's Go Washington? Let us briefly explain.  After the Republicans sold their brains to Donald Trump, they discovered that they could not win majorities in Washington State government. In an attempt to assert minority rule here, a wealthy hedge fund manager named Brian Heywood grabbed the torch from convicted campaign finance violator Tim Eyman and decided to try burning the government to the ground via the state’s easily gameable initiative process.  So Heywood founded a PAC called "Let's Go Washington" and dropped a few million dollars to fund signature-gathering campaigns to kill several laws that he and his rich friends didn't like, mostly because they cut into the profits that he and his rich friends do like. Four of those initiatives ultimately made it to the ballot.  Now, Heywood and his industry backers probably know they can’t win their arguments on the merits, but they might be able to use their considerable wealth to trick 50.01 percent of the state’s voters into believing a whole lot of bullshit, and so here we are voting on I-2066, an electrification ban that they’re framing as the repeal of a gas ban. And if these absolute virgins win ANY of these initiatives, then they will keep spending their pocket change to gum up the political process in this state until the end of our days.  For that reason alone, you should vote NO on I-2066 and the rest of these initiatives on this ballot, but if you need other reasons, then let’s get into it.  As we mentioned earlier, conservatives spin I-2066 as a repeal of a “natural gas ban” that state lawmakers passed earlier this year. We fucking wish state lawmakers banned “natural” methane gas this year, but they did not.  Here’s what happened. Back in 2008, legislators passed a law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by certain amounts over the course of a number of years. In 2020, they updated that law. All told, the law says we need to reduce emissions by 95 percent in about 25 years.  If Heywood and his buds really wanted to repeal a “gas ban,” then they would try to repeal that old/updated law. But even they know they’ll lose if they try to tilt their lances at our pollution reduction goals, so instead they’re trying to stop the state from actually doing anything to achieve that goal.  One of the many things the state actually did to help achieve that goal was pass a bill to require Puget Sound Energy (PSE), “one of the largest producers of greenhouse gas pollution in the state,” to “plan for a plan” to do its part to reduce emissions in a way that doesn’t screw over poor people, to quote the bill’s sponsor, Democratic state Senator Joe Nguyen.  The nerdier summary of the legislation will mean even less to you, unless you work in middle management at a utility company: Instead of forcing PSE to continue sending regulators separate plans to manage its electric and gas lines, this bill streamlines that process by allowing the company to send along a joint gas and electric plan. It’s classic, incremental, business-friendly climate policy.  The bill came about because, though the initiative-backers don’t want to admit it, decarbonization is already happening. According to PSE, natural gas use is already “down 7% for residential and 3% for commercial customers in 2023 and forecasted to continue to decline over the next five years.” Accordingly, "Electricity use is increasing and forecasted to continue to rise."  The utility needs to plan for this decline in a way that doesn’t leave people with low incomes in the lurch. If they don’t make those plans, then prices for some people hooked on natural gas could shoot up as much as 900 percent, according to one former California utility commissioner, as everyone else switches to more energy-efficient appliances.  I-2066 would repeal key parts of the law that give PSE some tools to prevent those kinds of crazy price spikes, better serve customers, and protect the environment all at the same time. For instance, the initiative kills a provision that allows the PSE to ask regulators if it could pretty please offer incentives to customers in certain areas to switch to electric appliances rather than, say, having to replace a bunch of costly, aging gas infrastructure just to serve a few people.  Because the bill gives PSE tools like that to decarbonize, initiative-backers are calling it “a gas ban,” but it’s just not. Unfortunately, state law requires PSE to provide natural gas to any customer with gas hookups who wants it. The law that I-2066 partly repeals does not change the utility’s “obligation to serve” those customers, so it’s not a fucking gas ban, and every time they say it’s a fucking gas ban, they’re betting you’re a fucking idiot who doesn’t know how to read.  Anyway, the initiative does something worse than making PSE more climate friendly: It actually adds language that forbids the state from doing anything to “in any way prohibit, penalize, or discourage the use of gas for any form of heating, or for uses related to any appliance or equipment, in any building.” In other words, this initiative would prevent the state from trying to electrify anything in any building, despite the fact that emissions from buildings represent a quarter of our greenhouse gas pollution. It’s pure climate arson.  But this initiative’s supporters don’t want you to focus on that reality. They want to keep you hooked on fossil fuels. To scare you into thinking that’s a good idea, they fearmonger about the upfront cost of electric appliance conversions. However, as we’ve mentioned, the state isn’t forcing anyone to electrify their homes or businesses. It does offer lots of generous subsidies for those interested in doing so, but if this initiative passes, then those subsidies will be just one lawsuit away from evaporating–along with our dreams of a cleaner, greener Washington. Vote no.  Initiative Measure No. 2109No This crackpot initiative would repeal the state’s new capital gains tax and cut $2.2 billion for education, early learning services, and child care at a time when schools across the state face huge deficits.  Aside from dramatically reducing funding for schools, passing this initiative would help restore Washington’s status as the state with the most unfair tax code for poor people, all in the service of helping our wealthiest residents dodge a tax that their accountants might mistake as a rounding error.  The capital gains tax skims 7 percent in profits from stocks and bonds and other assets over $262,000. Unfortunately, the tax doesn’t apply to the sales of homes, small businesses, farm land, farm equipment, livestock, timberland, commercial fishing, and auto dealership sales, so it hits fewer than 4,000 people in a state of 8 million, a little less than half of whom file taxes. If you’re reading this, then there’s a 99.9% chance that you do not pay this tax.  The arguments that right-wingers use to support this initiative match the ones they used against the tax as it ping-ponged around the Legislature for ten years, but let’s rehearse them again for old times’ sake. They argue wealthy people “may relocate” due to the tax, but studies have shown that people don’t often move as a result of state taxes. That makes a lot of sense for this tax in particular, given that 41 other states also impose a capital gains tax. The right also says the tax “makes our state less competitive.” That doesn’t seem to be the case. In 2024, Oxford Economics ranked Seattle the 4th best city in the world based on our “economics.” The top three cities were located in California and New York, both of which levy capital gains taxes.  Finally, Republicans also argue that the capital gains tax is a slippery slope to an income tax. Again, WE WISH. Last session, the Democrats, who control all branches of government, adopted a Brian Heywood-funded initiative that banned the passage of an income tax in Washington state. So state lawmakers can’t even do the cool thing and pass an income tax to put the question to the State Supreme Court anyway. Fuck that. Vote no.  Initiative Measure No. 2117No This initiative would repeal the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) and prohibit the state from ever implementing a similar law, cutting billions of dollars in funding for transit programs, ferries, clean energy projects, air quality improvement, and a bunch of other stuff that’s good for the environment and for the organisms who live in it, including the filthy rich psychopaths who got this initiative on the ballot.  The CCA established a cap-and-trade system similar to the ones run by a collection of northeastern states, the European Union, and California-Quebec. Our version aims to lower Washington’s carbon emissions by 95 come 2050 in accordance with state law. To help hit that target, the state sets an emissions cap and then regularly holds auctions where polluters can buy and sell permits that allow them to comply with the cap while continuing to pollute. As the cap lowers, the price of these allowances rises, which incentivizes polluters to find ways to lower their emissions. Voila, a market-based way to curb carbon emissions.  Since this system launched in 2023, it’s generated more than $2 billion, which the state plowed into a bunch of accounts and subaccounts that are too boring to describe. Importantly, 35 percent of the money must “provide a direct benefit to vulnerable populations within overburdened communities” and “10 percent of auction funds must be used for projects with Tribal support.”  So far, proceeds from this bill have funded free transit for all Washingtonians under the age of 19, electric school buses, electric vehicle chargers, air quality monitoring, and a $200 electricity bill rebate for thousands of Washington families. The rest of the spending plan, which is quite long, includes grants to fund public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, solar projects, and green infrastructure jobs. There’s also millions to help people weatherize their homes and switch to energy-efficient heat pumps; millions for fish passage projects, habitat restoration, and Native land-back initiatives; millions for shore power electrification and electric ferries; and half a billion for clean buildings.  The right’s entire argument in support of setting a match to all that goes like this: 1) We think the CCA raised gas prices by 40 cents, and we cannot abide such a horror. 2) We shouldn’t fight climate change in Washington because our carbon emissions amount to a drop in the bucket compared to China and India and blah blah blah.  To support their first point, they cite a Seattle Times analysis of numbers from the Oil Price Information Service showing gas prices steadily climbing from Jan 2023 and spiking in June of 2023 at 50 cents more per gallon. Washington’s prices ran higher than Oregon’s during that time period, and so the Oil Price Information Service blamed the CCA for the rise. It may be true that fossil fuel companies passed along some, all, or much more than all of the compliance costs to consumers while raking in huge profits in 2023, but we can’t know for sure because the Legislature failed to pass a bill that would have given us insight into those numbers. However, the Clean and Prosperous Institute looked at WA’s gas prices for all of 2023–not just the first six months like the Oil Price Information Service did–and found that the 50-cent spike was an outlier, and that “the full-year average (including July) was just 13.4 cents per gallon.” And, according to AAA, Washington tallied its highest-ever recorded gas price in 2022–a year before the state implemented the CCA.  But let’s accept for the moment that oil companies saddled consumers with higher gas prices because they’ll take any and every excuse to do that. Repealing this law will blow a massive hole in the state’s 16-year transportation budget, and state lawmakers will absolutely raise the gas tax to help fill that gap because they sure as hell aren’t going to refrain from buying the ferries they need to buy or from fixing the bridges they need to fix just because some rich people didn’t want fossil fuel companies to pay to pollute. With the CCA intact, at least we get investments in transit options that will help us stop using our cars so much, plus more energy-efficient appliances that will save us money, oh, and CLEANER FUCKING AIR TO BREATHE.  As far as the right’s baby-brained comparison between emissions in Washington and China goes: Sure, yeah, it’s true, Washington’s current emissions amount to a drop in the bucket compared to China’s. But obviously, greenhouse gasses are cumulative–it actually does help not to put more of that shit in the air. Moreover, we set the pace for other states and smaller countries around the world. If we prove that this model can work to curb emissions, then others will catch on, and we’ll have a cleaner, greener world for all. Vote no.  Initiative Measure No. 2124 No Though our present gerontocracy suggests otherwise, we’re currently wading through the largest wave of people hitting the retirement age in American history. This “silver tsunami” wildly increases the demand for long-term health care, which is a nice way of describing the kind of care that involves paying someone to come wipe asses, pull up pants, and generally help our sick and dying family members age with dignity while the rest of us toil away at our jobs.  Seventy percent of us will need this care after age 65, but less than 5 percent of us buy it on the private market because the premiums are sky-high and growing higher, the coverage is skimpy and getting skimpier, and people with serious pre-existing conditions are, for the most part, ineligible. People assume Medicare will cover this kind of care, but it doesn’t really. Medicaid kinda does, but to access that care you need to spend down your life savings and literally impoverish yourself, which isn’t exactly ideal. Moreover, if a bunch of our elders impoverished themselves just to qualify for Medicaid, they’d basically bankrupt the state.  That’s where WA Cares comes in. At this very moment, around 3.9 million working Washingtonians are paying 58 cents on every 100 dollars we make for a first-in-the-nation long-term health care benefit. Come 2026, the state will grant anyone who pays into it $36,500, which will increase with inflation, to deal with stuff that medical insurance doesn’t normally pay for.  If an auntie comes over ten hours a week to help dad get around, then he can use this money to pay her for that. If mom’s getting too old to cook for herself, then she can use this money to have meals delivered. And if your bright and youthful self needs money to pay for a temporary caregiver and an ADA-compliant home after getting hit by a car while crossing E. Olive Street and Harvard Avenue because the Seattle Department of Transportation took its SWEET ASS TIME painting a crosswalk there, then you can tap this benefit to pay for all that, too.  But not if this initiative passes. Rather than automatically paying into the benefit, just like Social Security or anything else, I-2124 would force all workers to voluntarily opt into it. Imposing this new rule would likely lead to lots of people dropping from the benefit or never signing up to begin with, which will kill the whole thing. An analysis from the Office of State Actuary ran five different scenarios if this initiative passes, and every one of them led to the insolvency and elimination of the benefit by 2027. But we wouldn’t just lose the benefit that so many of us are paying into. The state would have to hire people to slowly tear down the system, which would cost between $12.6 and $31 million per year over the course of three years, according to an analysis from the Office of Financial Management. In essence, this initiative would make us pay to fuck ourselves, which we only like doing for free, thank you very much.  The destruction of this benefit would come down hardest on women in general and on women of color in particular, a disproportionately high number of whom work as unpaid caregivers. It’d also fuck over the LGBTQ community, which faces high rates of financial insecurity and is less likely to have family around to help out as they age.  The right-wingers who back this initiative have never seen a safety net they didn’t want to shred to pieces, so they dance around the catastrophic fallout that would result from WA Cares’ failure and argue that this initiative simply aims to offer workers a choice. But the choice is a false one–as we mentioned, the miniscule private long-term health care insurance market is totally broken, and, oh yeah, it charges women up to 70 percent more than men.  Others rightfully groan about the relatively low amount of the benefit–$36,000 tied to inflation. We hear ya. We, too, would like a universal health care system that takes care of everything. But until then, we’ll have to deal with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all these other earned benefits that don’t quite cover the full cost of everything we need to simply live. Vote no.  US President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz  We here on the Stranger Election Control Board assume that every voter who picks up our (legally binding) voter’s guide wants to vote. In that spirit, you should vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz over Donald Trump.  As president, Harris promises to do whatever polls well at the moment with certain key demographics in certain key states that she needs to win because this country still uses an antiquated and racist election system to pick its top executive. But it’s not like that means she’s offering nothing that will directly improve our lives.  In general, she wants to make permanent a lot of stuff that worked during the first few years of the COVID crisis. She aims to restore the $3,600-per-kid tax credit and raise it to $6,000 per kid for the first year of their lives, which will take a big chunk out of child poverty.  For the childless cat ladies among us, she wants to expand the $1,500 Earned Income Tax Credit to a larger swath of working people. She also plans to keep the Obamacare tax credits and cap insulin prices at $35 for everyone, not just the elderly. Vowing to “build on” all the good work the Biden administration did for the climate, she’ll keep juicing the green energy economy and giving us money for switching to more energy-efficient appliances.  To prove she’s heard our cries about the housing crisis, she will attempt to increase a tax credit that makes affordable housing easier to build, give a tax cut to developers who build homes that “working families” can afford, crack down on price-fixing landlords, offer $25,000 to help cover the downpayment on a first home, and give tax breaks to startups and to manufacturing companies who keep jobs in the country, all while “cutting red tape” to boost housing production and new business applications.  Of course, every one of those insufficient but noble policy goals requires Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which she is very unlikely to get. As president, she has much more control over agency rulemaking, immigration, and national security. On those issues, she has much less to say about what she’ll do with her power. Higher-education advocates question her support for canceling more student debt than Biden. She and every other Democrat made a hard-right turn on immigration. Her foreign policy strategy does not appear to depart with Biden’s in any meaningful way. But no other candidate on the ballot has a snowball’s chance in hell of beating former President Donald Trump, who holds the most insane stance you could possibly hold on every single one of those issues, whose stated policy proposals will dramatically increase inflation, end American democracy as we know it, and endanger the lives of every marginalized group in the country, including the deluded bumpkins who hold him up as their savior. So you should also vote for Harris and Walz in the spirit of stopping a fucking wannabe fascist dictator from taking over the fucking country again, only this time for good.  Many of you may have understandably blacked out the Trump years, or maybe some of you weren’t that tapped into politics back then. You didn’t wake in a cold panic to the push-alert about the Muslim ban and then rush to rally at the airport, didn’t fill with rage as you listened to audio of a border patrol officer belittling babies as they cried out for the mothers they’d been torn away from, didn’t spend evenings at town halls trying to convince Republicans to stop trying to kick millions of people off of their health insurance, didn’t watch your rent rise as Trump signed massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, didn’t go bankrupt as his education secretary fucked over student loan borrowers, didn’t go hungry when he made food stamps harder to get, didn’t have to tighten your belt as he undermined worker protection after worker protection, didn’t light a candle for Mother Earth as he gutted nearly every environmental protection he could find, didn’t protest as he set the stage for the genocide in Gaza, didn’t start forking over hundreds of dollars you couldn’t afford to abortion funds and the like as he filled the Supreme Court with Heritage Foundation goons, didn’t talk to literally any woman during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, didn’t wake up more or less on edge every day for four years, thinking it plausible that at any given moment that fucking moron in the White House could start World War III on a whim. Well, it fucking sucked. And with Project 2025 giving him a blueprint for putting more power in his hands, it’s going to fucking suck more.  And make no mistake: Trump is still no friend to anyone but himself, and he’s definitely no friend to the left. In his 4th of July address, he compared “the radical left” to Nazis and vowed to target “the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters.” He also “promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses” and to deport any protesters from foreign countries. Remember the “snatch vans” during the 2020 protests? Those rolled out under Trump’s administration. In October of this year, he doubled down on all of that, flagging for “removal” anyone who he deems antisemitic, including pro-Palestine protesters, journalists, and members of the Democratic Party. The left’s first order of business is to stop the rise of fascism. Voting for the person who is most likely to bury a fascist’s political career will help do that.  Yes, Harris’s decision to continue enabling Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza presents voters of conscience with an urgent moral question. But we live in a fallen world. Voting in the general election is a zero sum game, it’s realistically a binary choice, and picking the lesser of two evils is actually a worthwhile thing to do, especially when, in this case, the more evil one will make sure you never get the chance to make that choice again. He already tried to stop the peaceful transition of power last time. If we hand him the presidency after inspiring an insurrection and trying to work the refs to overthrow the results, then there won’t be another transition until he dies.  Sure, Washington reliably votes for the Democratic presidential candidate, so your decision to skip that race won't directly lead to the election of a madman who wants you dead. But by that same logic, not voting for Harris really doesn’t make much of a statement, either. Some local consultant might remark that Harris lost a few thousand votes relative to Biden in Washington, maybe, and that will be the end of that. So, in that context, how big of a moral stand is a protest vote for Jill Stein? How little of a “reward” are you denying the establishment?  Conversely, a vote for Harris will make your voice stronger when you do–as we all should do–continue to push her administration to stop sending arms to Israel until they agree to a ceasefire. A vote for Harris could lend you credibility when you try to convince your family members and friends in swing states to vote for her. And, perhaps most importantly, electing Harris will prevent the likes of Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Sara Nelson from becoming the faces of the #Resistance like Jenny Durkan, Ed Murray, and the rest of those losers were during those dark and cringy pussy hat days.  It’s not much, but in the general election under the electoral college in Washington State, that’s about as much as a presidential vote counts. Vote Harris and Walz.  United States Senator Maria Cantwell  Returning US Senator Maria Cantwell to Congress will contribute to a Democratic majority that we need to obstruct a Trump administration or else help a Harris administration move policy forward, which is good. But we’ll be honest: Cantwell’s not our favorite Democrat. We can’t help but fantasize about her retiring and then watching Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal take her place. That said, Cantwell has made some moves we gotta respect. She was the brains behind the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which may create 4,000 new semiconductor manufacturing jobs right here in the U.S. of A. Thanks to her, the University of Washington snagged a cool $10 million to train the future semiconductor whizzes.  She hasn’t shied away from calling out Boeing for their lackadaisical oversight and their airplane doors popping off mid-flight, which we appreciate.  She also collabed with Republican US House Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers this year on the American Privacy Rights Act, which would set national data privacy rights and hold violators accountable. We would like the strongest possible privacy rights to protect data in our period-trackers, our step-counter apps, and our OnlyFans watch history. That shit’s between us and God, not advertisers, cops, or any other third party. If we give her another term, Cantwell will keep fighting to get that bill across the finish line Let’s get one thing straight, though: Neither one of Washington’s senators has done enough to stop the genocide in Gaza. A senator with a conscience would make quicker, clearer, and more frequent calls for a ceasefire, and they would block weapons to Israel at every turn. Cantwell has utterly failed on that front.  But we don’t think her competition, Republican Raul Garcia, will serve as a more passionate advocate for Palestinian liberation. For example, in a July Q & A, he said he would not set stricter conditions for sending bombs to Israel. Besides, he’s shady as fuck. He’s vowed to stay neutral in the upcoming presidential race, which means he wants Trump to win. If elected, Garcia said he would support the agenda of whichever presidential candidate wins, which he thinks is the role of Congress, which is funny because the role of Congress is to serve as a check on the Executive branch, but whatever.  The point is: If Trump wins, then we want senators who push back on his bullshit, not senators who bend over and take it. Heck, if Harris wins, then we want senators who push back on her bullshit, too! We don’t have that option in these two candidates, but, still, Cantwell’s the best choice. Vote Cantwell.  United States Representative Congressional District No. 1Suzan DelBene Well well well, what can we say about Congresswoman Suzan DelBene that anyone will remember five minutes from now?  The earmarks she secured this year include enough money to finally complete the big Food and Farming Center up in Snohomish County, which will serve as a big ag hub and farmer’s market to help local growers distribute food from northwest Washington to the rest of the region. That sounds nice–as does the money to preserve some marshlands, upgrade some water infrastructure in Bothell, and design the Ash Way light rail station up in Everett.  If we send her back to Congress for a seventh term, she vows to continue trying to pass legislation that polls well, such as bills to give people tax breaks for having children and developers tax breaks for building affordable housing.  She heads up the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) because she’s apparently good at raising a lot of money and she enjoys the security of a safe blue seat. That’s kinda fun.  For all her incrementalism and moderation, she’s a hell of a lot better than Republican Jeb Brewer, whose name and politics appear to derive from some generic GOP candidate generator. He’s mad about inflation, he’s mad about electric vehicles, and he thinks homelessness is a mental health/drug problem first and not a housing problem first. He’s also apparently a little bit of a moron. On his website, he argues that “Washington and our country are worse off today than two year [sic] ago,” which is why he’s running. Well, Jeb, we’re just humble cosmopolitans living in cities you call “decaying,” but we do know that a bunch of obstructionist Republicans took over the House two years ago, which partly explains why we’re worse off now. Do us all a favor and stop contributing to that problem. Vote DelBene.  United States Representative Congressional District No. 7Pramila Jayapal  One of the reasons why we get so pissed about local conservatives identifying as “practical progressives” is because “practical progressives” actually do exist, and four-term Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is one of them.  As chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she led the bloc of nearly 100 members as they rolled out the Progressive Proposition Agenda, which tried to push Biden to the left on climate, the economy, and everything else.  When the Republicans are in charge, as they have been for the last couple of years, Jayapal tries to get things done by introducing bipartisan legislation. Recent efforts include bills to tamp down on anticompetitive hospital mergers, reduce wasteful war spending, and restore at least a little trust in Congress by preventing its members from owning and trading stocks.  In lean times, she’s also not afraid to use the bully pulpit. She recently joined the Boeing machinists on the picket line to stand up for workers’ rights, and she regularly appears on TV to defend and advance progressive positions on immigration, Gaza, and data privacy. And after the Israeli Defense Forces killed Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a University of Washington graduate who protested illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank, Jayapal joined forces with US Senator Patty Murray to write a letter demanding an investigation, signed onto another letter with 102 members of Congress demanding the same, and followed up with a fiery press release in early October when she didn’t see any movement from the State Department on that front.  Give her a blue president and senate, and she’ll keep pushing to cancel more student debt, secure a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, reform the Supreme Court, increase protections for LGBTQ communities, and win higher pay for workers.  Meanwhile, her Republican opponent, Dan Alexander, is basically nutso. Over the phone, he tells us he’s probably voting for Donald Trump this year because RFK Jr. supports Trump, and since he supports RFK Jr., then he’ll probably support Trump, too. He also peddled anti-vaxxer bullshit, saying that he couldn’t tell us if the COVID-19 vaccines were safe (they are!) and that his “understanding” was that the vaccines killed thousands of people (they haven’t). Not exactly the kind of views we like hearing from a longtime Boeing engineer who works on military versions of the 737, but there you have it! Vote Jayapal.  United States Representative Congressional District No. 8Kim Schrier As a pro-abortion pediatrician, three-term Congresswoman Kim Schrier will really shine when she inevitably has to play defense against Republicans as they attempt to gut earned benefits and impose national abortion bans. In that way, she’ll be an asset to a likely Democratic minority and to the country as a whole.  Even when she served during the Trump administration, she chalked up a few wins. Her not-so-small list of bills signed by the bad man suggests she can find common ground with MAGA freaks, largely in the worlds of agriculture and conservation. Of course, her embrace of hard-right immigration policy, cops, and her support for Israel overlap with their interests as well, which does not bode well.  Though Schrier now leans way more to the right than she has to, we’ll take her over Republican bank executive Carmen Goers any day. Goers refuses to entertain the notion of raising taxes despite the need to increase special education funding, speed along a just transition from fossil fuels, build around seven million affordable homes that the private sector simply will not build, and pay for about a thousand other things. She also holds anti-trans positions on kids sports and thinks schools have dropped standards “in order to prevent anyone from feeling bad,” which makes her, if nothing else, an absolutely tedious Thanksgiving dinner guest. Vote Schrier.  United States Representative Congressional District No. 9Melissa Chaudhry Oh, look! A Congressional race where we had to make an interesting decision! Kind of!  In terms of issue knowledge and policy imagination, grant writer and civil rights advocate Melissa Chaudhry represents the strongest challenge that 14-term Congressman Adam Smith has faced in recent memory. She presents detailed prescriptions for fixing our dismal and dehumanizing immigration system, increasing worker power, building more housing that people can afford, making our political processes more democratic, and supporting every other item we care about on the progressive agenda.  Most importantly for this race, she also stands well to Smith’s left on foreign policy issues, particularly when it comes to Pentagon spending and Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Smith calls for a ceasefire, and yet he votes to send billions in weapons to Israel while blaming Hamas for being “the biggest obstacle to a ceasefire,” when reporting strongly points to the political ambition of Benjamin Netanyahu as the biggest obstacle to a ceasefire and the cause of war escalation in the region. Unlike Smith, Chaudhry doesn’t talk out of both sides of her mouth on this issue. She wouldn’t have voted to send Israel more bombs to drop on babies, wouldn’t have blocked funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees for a year, and would remain an outspoken critic of the US’s stance on this war until the killing stops.  Unfortunately, though she makes a more persuasive case on many of these issues than Smith does, she has yet to raise the kind of money needed to make sure voters hear that case. Plus, Rep. Smith isn’t all bad. He helped lead the House Democrats’ call for Biden to step off the presidential ticket, nixed a few of the more heinous Republican amendments to the bill that authorizes Pentagon spending, and has tried this year to secure a bunch of funding for affordable housing units and community centers that serve marginalized communities. All of that is good, but it’s all stuff Chaudhry would do as a matter of course. Vote Chaudhry.  GovernorBob Ferguson Attorney General Bob Ferguson is the only candidate for governor prepared to lead Washington through its most pressing, ongoing issues: The housing crisis and the crisis in education funding.  On housing, he’ll focus on increasing market-rate and affordable units in his first term, promising a cabinet-level agency to implement his top priority of building 200,000 new homes “using public-private partnerships” in four years. As for education, he plans to increase the percentage of the state budget devoted to funding the public education system. We believe he’ll follow through on his promises. When he first ran for Attorney General in 2012, he promised to be a consumer protection crusader, and more than a decade later he’s clawed back a couple billion dollars for the people of Washington, state and local government coffers, and nonprofits through his civil law enforcement division, including $1.1 billion to address the fentanyl epidemic. Promises made, promises kept, and then some.  All of that is very nice. Unfortunately, like his GOP opponent, former US Representative Dave Reichert, Ferguson refuses to advocate for new taxes on the rich. Now, Reichert promises to veto any new taxes, which would be disastrous. And while Ferguson has supported the capital gains tax and taxes on big banks in the past, in interviews he routinely asserts the need for the state to cut waste, not to increase its coffers. And yet, he refuses to explain how cutting waste can generate enough dollars to fund all the stuff he says he wants. (Newsflash: It can’t.)  Still, Ferguson’s tendency to pivot away from questions like a man with an avoidant attachment style raises far fewer concerns than the answers Reichert gives. Reichert supports school voucher programs, which would divert public dollars to private schools, exacerbating our education funding problems. He believes marriage is “between a man and a woman,” and while he promises not to foist his beliefs on the state, the friends he keeps raise eyebrows. He chose to hold his first town hall for his gubernatorial bid at Firmly Planted Action, anti-LGBTQ+ group that wants to end abortion rights. Plus, Larry Sandquist, board chairman of the Family Policy Institute of Washington, which actively advocates for anti-abortion policies, donated $5,000 to the pro-Reichert independent expenditure committee, Washington 24. Beyond that, his religious beliefs clearly do affect his policy choices, like in the area of climate change, which he doubts can be reversed because “the guy upstairs” controls the weather.  Ferguson is not the lesser of two evils. He actively supports codifying a person’s right to abortion in the state constitution, and he’s fought vehemently in the past against LGBTQ+ discrimination. Under a Trump administration, Ferguson will fight to uphold those hard-won rights; under Harris, he’d move us forward, albeit *shudders* incrementally. Reichert would take us backward. Vote Ferguson. Lieutenant Governor Denny Heck  So you’ve gotten to the point in the ballot where you have to Google what the fuck the Lieutenant Governor even does. Don’t worry about it, baby girl. Bubble in the circle for Denny Heck and allow us to explain.  The Lieutenant Governor serves as the president of the state Senate. While the position cannot cast a vote, the person who holds it gets to break ties and root for their policy goals.  In his first term, Heck showed he knows how to use his clout to corral the cats in the Senate. For instance, he took major credit for the “Year of Housing” in 2023. He rallied a broad coalition of pro-housing advocacy groups to pressure legislators to pass a bunch of bills to promote density, including the crown jewel of the session, the so-called “missing middle housing” bill, which dramatically reformed zoning around the state. In 2025, he will advocate for lot-splitting measures, transit-oriented development, and other permitting reforms to build, build, build.   If you noticed that Heck’s pushing a lot of supply-side strategies, you would be right (and maybe you should monitor your Urbanist Twitter screen time). He’s sort of lukewarm when it comes to helping renters keep their heads above water as he tries to build his way out of the crisis; the Senate killed the rent stabilization bill last session under his watch, and in his meeting with the SECB he offered no assurances that he would prevent that from happening again. In an ideal world, Heck would use his position of authority to send every rent stabilization holdout in the Senate to timeout until they’re ready to vote right, but we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where we have Heck, who takes the housing crisis seriously, and Republican Dan Matthews, who is too busy obsessing over the genitals of athletes to cheerlead for market urbanism. Vote Heck.  Secretary of StateSteve Hobbs Incumbent Steve Hobbs did a pretty good job in his first term as Secretary of State, and we want to see what he can do with another one. Let’s start with the good stuff. Hobbs takes voter outreach very seriously. In fact, he hired a whole team to help disenfranchised voters cast their ballots. After a 2021 law reinstated voting rights for incarcerated people upon release, he established a new civics course to encourage them to vote. Incidentally, he also got Dungeons & Dragons unbanned from prisons, which counts as lawful good behavior if we’ve ever seen it. If we give him another term, he’ll scale up those efforts. But Hobbs has some work to do. His office rejected more ballots from people of color and young people than from white people and older people. To combat that disparity, he wants to start a program to allow voters to “cure” their ballots via text message. His office also rejected almost 70,000 ballots in the presidential primary because voters failed to check a box to denote party affiliation, which they don’t have to do in other elections. Advocates would have Hobbs get rid of that box altogether, but such a change would require action from the Legislature, and he thinks the political parties would probably fight that effort so they could keep collecting data. Nevertheless, he’s establishing a work group to find solutions. And, fuck it, we’ll say it. Hobbs is a Democrat and his opponent, Dale Whitaker, is a Republican. Call us a bunch of soy libs, but after former President Donald Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, we don’t really trust Republicans to head our Secretary of State’s office. Whitaker did not agree to an interview with us, but we wanted to grill him on why he opposes Hobbs’s efforts to combat online disinformation following the insurrection, on what basis he spreads the myth that undocumented people stuff our ballot boxes, and, to be frank, we wanted to ask him who he thinks won the 2020 election. Sorry, but a Republican with no experience running on “election integrity” in the year 2024 rings alarm bells that Whitaker failed to silence. Vote Hobbs.  State Treasurer Mike Pellicciotti Incumbent Democratic Treasurer Ben Gibbard Mike Pellicciotti has managed our state finances so well that even his Republican opponent openly admits that we're in a “good position.” Stone-cold reality forces her to concede that point. Under Pellicciotti’s leadership, in June Moody’s gave Washington a triple-A rating due to our “strong governance practices and sound reserve and liquidity positions,” which means we govern well, save enough for rainy days, and still have money to get shit done. Meanwhile, this year Standard & Poor’s maintained Washington’s AA+ rating, and they even moved our economic outlook from “stable” to “positive," which means our credit fucking rules. In fact, in terms of our credit rating and our pension fund liability, US News and World Report ranked Washington #1 in the country this year.  Aside from serving as a faithful steward of public funds, we like Pellicciotti for his obsession with long-term thinking, a quality so many public officials sorely lack. In his first term, he goaded the Legislature into passing Washington Saves, a state-run, automatic retirement savings account that will serve the 1.2 million Washingtonians who do not have access to such a benefit through their employers.  If we return him to office, he vows to continue pushing for his baby bonds proposal, which would give every child born on Medicaid tens of thousands of dollars they could tap into at 18 to help launch a new business, or to pay for college or vocational school. Pellicciotti argues that this kind of policy will give us all “the hope and promise of a future where everyone can reach their full potential,” so that the 14-year-old going into high school will have some real financial help to look forward to after graduation.  And right now, he’s drawing up plans to Trump-proof Washington state. Few may remember in the chaos of, well, everything, but in 2020 then-President Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from Seattle. You better believe that Project 2025 Trump will withhold federal funding from Washington State if he doesn’t like the way we, say, support trans kids in school or try to reduce carbon emissions. So Pellicciotti’s in the lab looking at budgets, trying to figure out what he can backfill with state funds in the advent of the worst thing that could happen to America.  We can’t say the same for his Republican opponent, Sharon Hanek, who co-founded Let’s Go Washington with Brian Heywood, the multimillionaire hedge fund manager responsible for all the apocalyptic initiatives on the ballot this year. According to a questionnaire for a religious voter guide, she not only opposes taking into consideration environmental, social, and governance ratings when deciding where to invest public funds, as Pellicciotti does, she also opposes abortion, medical abortion, marriage equality (which she brags about trying to overturn), trans rights, and every other thing we care about. You will not be surprised to learn that she believes “laws to control gun ownership have gone too far.” Well, we don't! Vote Pellicciotti. State Auditor Pat McCarthy Everyone’s worried about government fraud, waste, and abuse, but we’d bet our second-best bong that 9 out of 10 people at the bar couldn’t tell you the name of Washington’s two-term incumbent state auditor, Pat McCarthy. And probably 10 out of 10 people at the bar couldn’t tell you that she’s done such a good job overseeing the place–with one somewhat major exception–that it’s won THREE national awards for excellence since 2020.  In 2020, the National State Auditors Association (NSAA) gave the agency an award for its mildly thrilling investigation that turned up a former Pierce County Housing Authority finance director who stole $7 million in a fraud scheme. In 2022, the department picked up another award for performing a “culture audit” of the Department of Fish and Wildlife—“the only one in the country ever conducted that we’re aware of,” McCarthy says. The audit uncovered a widespread culture of bullying.  And this year, the NSAA bestowed an award upon the agency for its Cyber Checkups program. The “popularity” of the Auditor’s cyber security programs, which help local governments learn where they’re most vulnerable to attack, led to a three-year backup for services. In response to the growing queue, the agency developed the “checkup” program to give governments a few more tools in their toolbox that they could use to avoid cyber attacks while they wait for a proper audit–and everybody loves it.  The cyber security award seems a little funny after a vendor the auditor’s office used experienced a major data breach in 2020 that exposed the sensitive data of more than one million people. McCarthy’s office didn’t reveal the breach for three weeks. She argues the department acted quickly and needed that time to “verify the scope of the vendor’s breach.” Since then, McCarthy says, she’s created a Data Risk Committee to identify and clean up the agency’s data request process, “worked with the state’s IT agency and Microsoft to create a customized data sharing platform called SAOShare, and supported and implemented legislation requiring annual data sharing agreements with the 2,300 governments and state agencies we audit.”  So she took the breach seriously and then took steps to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Plus, that little hiccup isn’t the total expression of McCarthy’s being. We’re impressed, for instance, with the way she embraced the task of auditing investigations of incidents when police use deadly force, a new duty the Legislature gave her early in her second term. In the face of some grumbling from law enforcement, she says she set up the system quickly and welcomed it as a way of “holding everyone accountable.”  If we give her another shot, she plans to continue to strengthen the department’s inclusivity practices and to look into ways to offer performance audits to tribes who’ve expressed interest in finding efficiencies.  Speaking of finding efficiencies, she’s also put together “a small task force” to look into ways to use artificial intelligence. “On the one hand, I know AI is going to destroy civilization as we know it. On the other hand, it could provide efficiencies,” she says. That’s the kind of level-headed approach to certain doom that we like to see in an auditor.  And she’s a hell of a lot better than her Republican opponent, Matt Hawkins, an “election integrity” guy who helped produce an alarming number of children (10), uses Qanon-y phrases like “We the People” in his campaign copy, and clearly does not understand the basic functions of the office he seeks. He thinks, for example, that the auditor oversees elections—it doesn’t. Vote McCarthy.  Attorney General Nick Brown Nick Brown’s years of experience working with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office (AGO) as general counsel for Governor Jay Inslee and his values on topics such as gun safety and abortion make him the best choice to serve as our next Attorney General (AG). Brown can show up on day one ready to defend our laws, provide state agencies with the legal advice they need, and fight for consumers against big business.  As gun violence continues to rip through communities, Brown argues for reducing the number of guns on the street as a key way to lower the number of homicides and suicides. Meanwhile, his GOP opponent, Pasco Mayor Pete Serrano, spends his off-time fighting for the rights of Washington gun dealers to sell assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as seeking to overturn the state’s ban on “ghost guns.”  Serrano’s choice to attack these laws shows a disregard for public safety, as studies show again and again that stricter gun laws can result in less gun violence, and laws such as the ones we have on the books may have prevented mass shootings. His stance on the issue also displays how out-of-step he is with Washington voters, who in 2018 passed a suite of gun safety laws through Initiative 1639. Brown would also better represent the interests of Washingtonians on abortion. Seventy-three percent of the state believes abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and while both Brown and Serrano promised to protect access to the pills and procedures, Serrano refused to guarantee he’d enforce the state’s “shield law,” which makes us a safe haven for those fleeing prohibition states just to get health care. Brown vows to fight to keep those laws on the books.  While Serrano argues that “excessive” consumer protection litigation amounts to an abuse of the AGO’s power, Brown promises to put consumers first. He’ll fight companies that plot to increase rent prices, do a better job of overseeing compliance with the Landlord-Tenant Act, and establish a new unit to actively investigate and punish wage theft. Finally, Brown just has the most relevant experience for the job. As former US District Attorney for Western Washington, he already knows how to run a large public firm. In our interview, he ticked off several ways to make law departments at the state and county levels run more smoothly, most of which dealt with more frequent and more thorough communication practices. Not as flashy of a topic as abortion or gun control, but we do love a bureaucrat who gets fired up about making small but meaningful changes to operations.  A vote for Brown means Washington can continue to progress on all the issues we care about, whereas a vote for Serrano installs someone who plans to pick and choose which laws he’ll fight for based on his political preferences, not the will of elected legislators. Vote Brown.  Commissioner of Public LandsDave Upthegrove The next leader of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), a large agency that oversees Washington’s 5.6 million acres of public lands, will either be a Republican who takes money from lumber companies or a Democrat who takes money from environmentalists. For the sake of all that is green and blue and clear and good, we strongly encourage you to vote for the latter and more aptly named option, Dave Upthegrove.  If the Lorax wasn’t already incredibly gay, we’d call Upthegrove the gay Lorax. As the head of the DNR, he plans to beef up community wildfire resilience efforts, meaningfully increase the frequency of tribal consultation when citing green energy projects, and continue the agency’s new program to set aside 10,000 acres of forest for carbon sequestration, all while trying to preserve structurally complex forests—colloquially known as “mature legacy forests”—from the buzzsaw.  Though we know lumber groups and conservative counties will fight the agency on all of that, we’re confident that Upthegrove’s experience will allow him to win the day. His years as a State House Representative means he knows which arms to twist and which mouths to feed to get stuff done, and his years representing south King County on the King County Council give us faith in his ability to oversee policy implementation.  Our lands would fare much better in Upthegrove’s hands than they would in the hands of Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, who boasts a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters because of all the anti-environment votes she took during her time in Congress. Recently, she voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, against cracking down on oil industry price gouging, against protecting public lands and waters across the west (seriously), and the list goes on because she’s a fucking Republican.  Of course, we know she doesn’t care what environmentalists think of her record, as she referred to those who oppose her as “extremist groups particularly in one part of the state” who “want to see things preserved” but "oftentimes they apply very old science.” The “old science” she’s talking about refers to efforts to preserve the state’s mature legacy forests, most of which were logged before the 1940s and haven’t been touched since. The science she’s leaving out isn’t old but actually new science that says biodiversity is good, and that we shouldn’t cut down a bunch of old trees that do a really good job of storing carbon, maintaining healthy watersheds, and serving as places to walk around and stand in awe of nature. She should read it sometime!  Also, we made the following argument in our primary endorsement, but it bears repeating. We expect not a little discrimination against Upthegrove for being a member of the King County liberal elite telling a bunch of country folk how best to tend their lands. We reject this line of thinking because it fails to acknowledge the “elites” in the timber industry keeping small towns dependent on one crop—trees—and then holding a knife to their throats whenever a conservationist suggests that we might, perhaps, in the midst of a mass extinction, try to increase biodiversity while simultaneously diversifying local economies. As we said in July, the choice between saving the trees and saving rural economies is a false one—we can and should do both. And there’s real urgency here, too. Thanks to some court cases going the right way, the DNR has more latitude to find creative ways to manage and monetize lands that don’t involve destroying them. We need to seize those opportunities now. Vote Upthegrove.  Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal’s experience as a teacher, his three terms as a state lawmaker, and his two terms leading this office through the pandemic and the fog of America’s (latest) stupid culture wars make him the only real choice in this race.  Under Reykdal, who grew up poor and who credits his ascendence to public education, more children are receiving free meals. More schools are offering dual-language programs. He’s got a plan to continue diversifying the workforce and to retain more teachers of color, and he’s made a commitment to protecting marginalized students and teachers from an onslaught of conservative attacks on our education system.  After some mixture of cowardice and cunning convinced the Legislature to pass the so-called “Parents Bill of Rights,” a right-wing initiative from our old pal, hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, this summer Reykdal rightly directed the agency to ignore it until the courts and other institutions provided clarity on a number of issues. That’s the kind of direction we can get behind. (We also like him because we saw him at Pride and he seemed happy to see all the gay people.) Now, a lot of people are pissed at our education system right now, but laying the blame squarely at his feet makes no sense. Our schools are starved for funds, and Reykdal can only ask legislators for more money–he does not control how much he gets. His latest budget request–$2.9 billion–will get us way closer to the bare minimum he says we need to run our classrooms, fund special education, pay teachers a fair wage, and put kids on the bus. The GOP’s pick for superintendent, David Olson, throws up about a thousand red flags. The former Navy welder and diver has been on Peninsula School District’s board for nearly 11 years, and he’s a friend to fringey right-wingers. His district boasts higher-than-average academic achievement numbers, but for some reason he told the GOP convention in Spokane that we’d save America if every student went into the trades and every four-year university went bankrupt. We love the trades, but that kinda anti-school talk seems pretty radical coming from a guy who wants to run the schools.  The proudly anti-DEI Olson claims to stop short of wanting to ban books. Instead, he tells parents who are upset about trans children playing sports to join their local chapter of the book-banning political extremists, Mom’s for Liberty. And–wouldn’t you know it–the PSD school board meetings have been full of parents and students who say racist and anti-queer bullying is a problem in the district! Huh! Wonder what’s up there? Wonder if anyone could use some training in diversity, equity, and inclusion? Hm!  Putting Olson in charge would be a disaster. Remember, the superintendent isn’t just the bag man. The position comes with the statutory power to choose when and what kids learn. Vote Reykdal. Insurance Commissioner Patty Kuderer Democratic state Senator Patty Kuderer’s experience in employment law, her legislative track record on insurance policy, and the fact that she doesn’t spend her time on the Senate floor saying some of the craziest shit imaginable makes her far and away a better candidate than Republican state Senator Phil Fortunato, an absolute dodo bird who, nevertheless, earns some respect from the SECB for picking up the phone when we call. Anyway, the Office of the Insurance Commissioner recently experienced a lot of upheaval and turnover following a slew of complaints against outgoing incumbent Commissioner Mike Kreidler. Kuderer’s background as an attorney who has represented victims of workplace discrimination will help the agency heal, regrow, and hopefully safeguard against any future bullshit.  In terms of policy, Kuderer earned the SECB’s respect not only for picking up the phone when we call but for beating the extremely powerful and extremely annoying landlord lobby to pass a number of moderate renter protections. As she has with tenants as a senator, she plans to focus on advocating for consumers rather than a bunch of vampiric insurance companies. She also aims to continue to “pursue” the establishment of a regional, single-payer health care system, require gun-owners to buy insurance to cover negligence and accidents, and expand the Insurance Fair Conduct Act to make the claims process fairer.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t want to regulate the industry to the point where she’s “strangling businesses,” but we’ll take her approach over Fortunato’s, a man who, to cite one recent facepalm moment, defended the rights of Catholic priests not to tell law enforcement if someone confesses to raping a kid.  As for his views regarding the work of the Insurance Commissioner, his public-facing materials offer only some typical Republican pablum about wanting to deregulate the industry to increase competition. For some reason, his website doesn’t really mention his strident opposition to abortion, the “Don’t Say Gay” in schools bill he introduced this session, his opposition to common sense gun laws, or anything else that would reveal him as widely out of touch with most Washingtonians. Vote Kuderer.  Legislative District No. 5 State Senator Bill Ramos State House Representative Bill Ramos threw his hat in the ring to replace state Senator Mark Mullet after Mullet skipped off to run an inarguably silly campaign for governor. In almost every conceivable way, Ramos represents a major upgrade. For one, Ramos voted yes on the House’s version of an anti-rent gouging bill that Mullet helped to kill. If the same bill came before Ramos again, he said he’d vote for it. Hoorah.  But he’s not just better on tenant issues. During his five years in the House, he picked some worthy issues to champion. He helped craft Washington’s $17 billion transportation funding package back in 2022, which included about a billion to fund pedestrian walkways and bike paths, with some dollars set aside to build these paths in historically underserved communities. He generally stressed the importance of paying attention to equity issues when designing transportation, which we love to hear.  In-between his transportation work, he took on the project of combating violent domestic extremism. The bill he sponsored would establish a commission to study the issue and recommend some concrete proposals to address it, including looking at a public health approach. He says protesters chanted outside his office “for weeks” before the bill ultimately died in the House. Despite the backlash he received, including at times from his own neighbors, he plans to try again next year.  He has reliably supported policies to increase funding for education, transit, and environmental protections, which is more than we can say for his Republican opponent, Chad Magendanz, who loves charter schools so much that he sponsored the bill that kept them open back when the State Supreme Court struck down the law that made them legal. Vote Ramos. Legislative District No. 5 Representative Position No. 1Victoria Hunt During the primary, we swooned over Issaquah City Council Member Victoria Hunt for her enthusiastic support for rent stabilization and her urbanist know-how–she’s an experienced urban planner with a PhD in computational ecology. Now we swoon over her again, especially when we see that her Republican opponent is Mark Hargrove, who we once named the “dumbest legislator in Washington” for using a Jack in the Box commercial to buoy his argument against same-sex marriage. When it comes to housing, Hunt knows that changing zoning alone will not magically create the very large number of apartments that we need to build, which is why she supports funneling more money into the Housing Trust Fund, one of the funds the state uses to help subsidize affordable units.  Unlike her opponent, she believes that we need to increase funding for education, especially for students in the special education system. And she wants to protect that funding by making sure that no dollars go toward charter school voucher programs.  On climate, she strongly supports the state’s cap-and-trade system and wants to pass a bill to force fossil fuel companies to open their books so we can see just how much of a burden they’re passing down to consumers while raking in huge profits. But what we love the most about Hunt is her support for all kinds of progressive revenue ideas– everything from adjustments to the capital gains tax, an excess compensation tax, and even a tweak to make the estate tax more progressive. She’s in her Robin Hood era. Vote Hunt. Legislative District No. 5 Representative Position No. 2Lisa Callan Lawmakers work on a number of issues, but three-term State Representative Lisa Callan seems especially dedicated to helping Washington’s children, which is great–our understanding is that children are our future, and if we want to have a good future then we have to treat them well and not just throw them in the lake when they fuck up like our uncles did.  Anyhow, Callan successfully carried the bill to increase the 2024 special education funding cap from 15 to 16 percent, which was a good start but probably isn’t enough. The bill included funding for a report that will tell us whether we should remove the cap altogether or whether, miraculously, every school’s needs somehow conform to this arbitrary cap, so we’re happy for that.  Last year, Callan also permanently enshrined a program that keeps kids in foster care connected to their original homes. The Family Connections Program provides resources to parents and foster parents to allow them to work together on reunification, seeking to minimize the trauma of the child welfare system by helping to maintain some communication between all parties when possible.   If reelected, Callan will keep pushing her colleagues to back her bill limiting isolation and restraint of children in schools, a disciplinary strategy that really isn’t that productive for a lot of seven-year-olds! In the meantime, she’s scraped together some dollars for some pilot programs encouraging districts to avoid the practice, and she’s running an inside strategy to get more lawmakers onboard with the movement to stop traumatizing kids.  She beat her opponent, Patrick Peacock, by about 15 points in the primary, and it’s no wonder why. Like the rest of these cookie-cutter Republicans, he supports all the shitty initiatives, wants to lower taxes, and yet also wants more police. Classic. We’d do the state’s children a real disservice in swapping out Callan for a generic Republican. Vote Callan.  Legislative District No. 11 Representative Position No. 2Steve Bergquist  When he’s not working on education policy, State Representative Steve Bergquist acts out his own version of Undercover Boss as a paraeducator and substitute teacher in Renton. The time in the classroom informs his work as a legislator, which has led to the introduction and passage of some pretty decent policies.  Last session, he successfully secured money to standardize programming that helps kids transition to Kindergarten. He also voted to eliminate the special education enrollment cap that many legislators (at least 94 of them in the House) believe interferes with the State’s duty to provide a free, appropriate education to all students. Though his bill to fund one year of trade school for free didn’t make it out of committee last session, he'll try again next year if he wins back his seat–which he should.  Bergquist’s Libertarian opponent, Justin Greywolf, is mostly running on a platform of cutting taxes. He also told the Family Policy Institute of Washington–a conservative, religious lobbying organization that defends “Biblical values”—that he agreed with a lot of their positions, though he said he disagreed with their opposition to marriage equality. That’s not quite enough to swing us to his side. Vote Bergquist. Legislative District No. 30 Representative Position No. 1Jamila E. Taylor Last year, State House Representative Jamila Taylor got ahold of $1.25 million to stop Pattison’s West Skating Center (now known as El Centro Skate Rink) in Federal Way from turning into a gas station, an accomplishment that immediately elevated her in our eyes to the status of a 1980s movie hero. We love a legislator who cares that deeply about a culturally significant gathering place in her community.  We also appreciate the economic development work she’s done for her district and across Washington, including her Covenant Homeownership Program, which provides interest-free loans to first-time homebuyers who can prove they or their family felt the effect of Washington’s racial housing discrimination prior to 1968. The program also includes a provision to investigate past housing discrimination to see if lawmakers can expand eligibility criteria, and it will hopefully go a little way toward repairing discrimination that led to wealth gaps.  If we return her to office for a third term, as chair of the House Civil Rights & Judiciary Committee she promises to continue making progress on creating a unified court system. The Legislature needs to modernize and standardize our court system, partly so we can collect better information on its effects. We’re glad Taylor’s on the case because she really lights up when she talks about this very serious but utterly dull work.  Her Republican opponent, Republican Melissa Hamilton, has worked for both the Lacey and Federal Way police departments in support roles. She supports all of the initiatives, which would set Washington back on climate change, long-term care, and progressive revenue. While Taylor’s down in Olympia digging into court structures and trying to reverse years of discrimination, Hamilton would be making it harder for the state to fund services and fighting any bills to limit police power or reduce mass incarceration. Boriiinnnggg. Vote Taylor.  Legislative District No. 30 Representative Position No. 2Kristine M. Reeves State House Representative Kristine Reeves is fine. If elected for a second full term, her one big priority will be to ban flavored tobacco products in Washington State. Whoopee. In the 2023 Healthy Youth Survey, about 7.7 percent of 10th graders reported using an electronic cigarette in the past 30 days. Vaping companies seem to target the youth with their bright colors and candy flavors, and Reeves doesn’t want her kids or anyone else’s to grow up in the shadow of addiction. Fair enough.  Even if we’re a little sad that Reeves plans to confiscate our cinnamon-flavored vape fluid, it was nice that she sponsored the House version of the bill to establish a state-run, automatic Individual Retirement Account (IRA) program for workers whose employers don’t offer them. Though the senate version ultimately passed, the new law could result in Washingtonians saving an additional $3.9 billion for retirement over the next 20 years. That could be big. According to Legislative staff, about two-thirds of all millennials have no retirement savings.  She also voted for rent stabilization, and she promises to keep voting for it, she says. She stressed that Washington can’t build its way out of the problem of housing instability tomorrow, and the bill addresses the immediate harm people face from rising rent prices pushing them out onto the street.  Reeves did do a couple weird things surrounding that bill, though. First, she secured an amendment to monitor the effects of rent stabilization, with a particular focus on whether the program inadvertently dissuades people from pursuing home ownership, especially Black and Brown people, Reeves says. This argument made our heads explode. Washington has the sixth highest average rent in the country, nearly half of our renters currently spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and the median home price in King County topped $1 million this year. That’s what makes it difficult to buy a house–not protections to prevent gouging. But, whatever. The study is mostly harmless. Reeves argued she just wants to ensure the state funds rental protection programs alongside home ownership assistance options, which is fine.  We do like her more than her opponent, Republican Federal Way School Board Director Quentin Morris. In an interview with the Federal Way Mirror, he argued that homelessness is “rarely a housing scarcity” issue and is simply based on “behavioral issues.” Reeves responded to that assertion by first exclaiming, “Jesus Christ,” and then she said she’s just tired of hearing Morris’s bullshit. Reeves herself experienced homelessness for a couple years as a teenager, and it had nothing to do with her having a substance use disorder or a mental health diagnosis. Vote Reeves.  Legislative District No. 32 Representative Position No. 1Cindy Ryu Look, we’re not saying that eight-term State House Representative Cindy Ryu won’t try to defend a landlord. She’s a commercial landlord herself, after all. But she voted for a rent stabilization bill that would help prevent landlords from gouging tenants, and that’s better than we would have predicted in 2022. She’s just okay on tenant issues, but we can work with just okay.  We also didn’t love Ryu for sponsoring a bill to make trafficking in catalytic converters a Class C Felony, but we also don’t love waking up to a damaged car that’s going to release more gross emissions, so we’ll call that a wash.  Plus, Ryu is occasionally a friend to some recently incarcerated people. She said she’s working with Edmonds Community College (ECC) on a bill to help fund support and courses for veterans who did time. ECC started a similar program using federal COVID-19 dollars a few years ago, and Ryu hopes to find state money to make the program permanent and maybe expand it to other community colleges. Though that bill failed to exit a key committee last session, she plans to bring it forward again next session. We’d happily take Ryu’s lukewarm support for rent stabilization (she said she'd be more comfortable with a 10 percent cap than the 7 percent cap she ultimately voted for) and her heavy regulation of the scrap metal industry over her opponent, Republican Lisa Rezac, an auctioneer, fundraising consultant, and former Republican Party Chair for the 32nd Legislative District. Rezac supports the Let’s Go Washington initiatives, which would reduce funding for public education and set the state back in its climate goals. AND YET, she claims she wants to prioritize education and to stop the government and corporations from putting anything into our air and water that might hurt us. We really don’t think she’s thought through her platform, though we did love that she dedicated one entire page of her website to promoting some random wellness book. But that's not enough to convince us. Vote Ryu.  Legislative District No. 32 Representative Position No. 2Lauren Davis State House Representative Lauren Davis deserves a fourth term in the Legislature for her dedication to improving Washington’s underperforming behavioral health and criminal legal systems. Few lawmakers display her breadth of knowledge and commitment to making progress on any issue, let alone a couple of the toughest and most politically dicey ones we face.  But she’s not one to let the cowardice of her colleagues prevent her from funding the issues she supports. Every session that leadership decides to skip an opportunity to pass a new progressive tax, she spends hours digging for ways to close loopholes to find the millions of dollars that the State could be collecting and redirecting toward treatment facilities, recovery housing, and jail reentry programs.  Admittedly her hours of study haven't always paid off. In 2022, she tried to close a tax break for companies that warehouse opioids and other drugs in Washington. The bill would have raised an estimated $53 million to go to far better purposes, but it died at its first public hearing. She promises to bring it back again this session. The death of that bill does not speak to the level of success that Davis has achieved during her time in the House, though. Thanks to her, Washington hospitals send every overdose patient home with a naloxone kit, not just a prescription for one. (Under the previous system, few people actually filled those naloxone prescriptions.) She’s also had her hand in some criminal justice reform, eliminating a law that revoked a person’s license after any felony conviction involving the use of a car, unless the crime threatened the safety of people or property. The law scooped up a lot of people and made complying with sentencing conditions, such as making behavioral health appointments or retaining employment, much harder.  On the other side, Davis’s Republican opponent, Lori Theis, plans to vote for Trump. Though she says she wants to “fix” homelessness, crime, and every other issue conservatives like to exploit for votes, she offers no real viable or evidence-backed alternatives. Vote Davis. Legislative District No. 33 Representative Position No. 1Tina L. Orwall Back in 2015, longtime State Representative Tina Orwall made it her mission to get the Washington State Crime Lab to finish testing all the backlogged sexual assault kits. Thanks partly to her consistent pressure, last year she saw the successful conclusion of that work, allowing us all to close that “dark chapter” in our state’s history, she says. Now, the lab tests kits within 45 days, and sometimes closer to a month, which provides people with more paths for legal action. While Orwall sometimes leans a little heavily into carceral feminism for some of our tastes, at other times she seriously pursues avenues other than policing to solve societal ills. For example, she led the House’s work on 988, a suicide and crisis hotline that allows people to call something other than 911 when they need help with a behavioral health crisis. She also sponsored a successful bill to fund more mobile crisis teams in conjunction with the launch of 988. At a time when people seem reluctant to take up police work and communities struggle to help people cycling through behavioral systems, investing in these alternatives seems wise.  For her next project, she’s started coordinating with colleges to find better ways to help students access services after they’ve dealt with gender-based violence. Right now, victim complaints often only lead to a scheduled appointment with a counselor. She’s not yet sure what “better” looks like, but we’re excited to see what she comes up with. We don’t have very many mean things to say about her opponent, George Richter, mainly because he’s not giving us much to work with. He has no money, and we weren’t even really sure if he existed. But Orwall says she met him the other day, and they’re actually going to talk about some stuff they can work on together. We’d prefer she shun Republicans, especially in the age of Trump, but good for her for neutralizing her opponents. Vote Orwall.   Legislative District No. 33 Representative Position No. 2Mia Su-Ling Gregerson Generally, we have good things to say about State House Representative Mia Su-Ling Gregerson. For the past 10 years, she has consistently supported legislation to keep people in housing, to tax the rich, and to increase participation in the political process.  Last session, she fought hard for a bill to allow cities to hold local elections on even years, when average voter turnout runs much higher. That simple change would make municipal elections much more democratic and representative, which we love–and not just because it scares politicians such as conservative Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson, who was elected in a low-turnout, odd-year election. Unfortunately, Gregerson failed to find the votes for the bill, but she promises to keep fighting if we give her a sixth term.  While she’s good on tenant stuff and democracy stuff, her increased support for charter schools, which she recently confessed to the Seattle Times, deeply disappoints us. As if the education system didn’t have enough issues, now we have to deal with progressives peeling off to funnel dollars away from actual public schools.  Gregerson told the Seattle Times she thought charter schools could offer benefits, such as smaller class sizes, and that it may be time for a conversation about increasing the number of schools. When we asked her what the fuck she was talking about, she said she wanted to remain open to the conversation because people continue to ask her about increasing funding for charter schools.  She says she’s sat through presentations where BIPOC parents with kids attending South King County charter schools share how their students really thrive in those environments. She pushes back on the idea that charters improve outcomes for kids of color, arguing that many of those kids often live in Kirkland and Bellevue, and they benefit from a high economic status. She could also point to all the evidence showing that charter schools lack funding accountability and lead to underfunding of public schools. And while we readily admit that public schools are failing children of color, we disagree that she needs to leave the door open for a discussion about ways to starve public schools of the funding we need to better serve them.  Nevertheless, Gregerson is a much better candidate than her opponent, Casey Esmond, who appears not to be running much of a campaign. His candidate website is no longer up, and he ignored our call, as well as calls from other, lesser, endorsement boards. From what we can tell, he espouses a Libertarian ideology. Very old school, very ‘90s. Still, we hope Gregerson will stand firm against charter schools. Vote Gregerson. Legislative District No. 34 Representative Position No. 1Emily Alvarado When the SECB endorsed House Representative Emily Alvarado for her first term in 2022, we vowed to print out our endorsement and eat it if she ended up morphing into her old boss, Jenny Durkan. Good news: We don't have to do that! Double good news: We don't have to learn how to connect to the printer in the office!  Alvarado exceeded our expectations during her first term in the House. She marketed herself as a strong housing advocate, and advocate she did, supporting, if we are not mistaken, every single bill to encourage housing density. She also championed the perennial rent stabilization bill, an issue so tough we thought she took it on as part of some kind of humiliation ritual to haze the frosh. But she passed it out of her chamber, moving the humiliation on to the moderates in the Senate who killed the bill. In addition to standing up to the landlord lobby, she stood up for the working class by making it easier to access food assistance programs, accelerating stability for those with work-limiting disabilities, and attempting to beef up consumer protections around gift cards.  Alvarado said she wants another term to attend to some unfinished business. She'll pass rent stabilization through the House again, only this time with a more progressive Senate to get it to the Governor's desk. She'll also remove barriers to workers’ benefits that some see after a workplace injury, fight to keep kids who are in the foster care system out of the criminal legal system, and pass legislation to make it easier to get a year's supply of birth control all at once.  Though she anticipates a tough budget year in 2025, she said Washington needs a strong advocate for progressive revenue like her. We agree! And we'll take nine of her for the Seattle City Council, please! Real Slog readers get it *wink*.  With all Alvarado has going for her, it's almost not worth mentioning her Republican opponent, Kimberly Cloud. In fact, it would be almost kinder for us to pretend she does not exist. We like that Cloud frequently used “lol” in the answers to her Ballotpedia questionnaire, but we didn’t like that she said her biggest role model is Donald Trump, and that she recommended voters watch the 1994 buddy comedy Dumb and Dumber to understand her political philosophy. We’ll pass! Vote Alvarado.  Legislative District No. 34 Representative Position No. 2Joe Fitzgibbon State House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon may not be the 23-year-old lefty the SECB of yesteryear fell for (and heavily sexualized! Sorry about that, Joe. It won’t happen again—at least not until you go gray). But with landmark climate policy on the ballot, we need an environmental advocate like Fitzgibbon wrangling Democrats in the House to do the right thing.  As we’ve mentioned, this year mega-rich farmer-cosplayer Brian Heywood bought a slew of “Let’s Go Washington”-branded initiatives, including I-2066 to ban electrification and I-2117 to repeal the Climate Commitment Act. Fitzgibbon said the passage of either initiative would represent a huge step backward, but if that happens, then he would use his leverage in leadership to strengthen the environmental policies the state will still have. For example, he suggested accelerating timelines for the Clean Fuel Standard law, which requires fuel suppliers to reduce carbon intensity of transportation fuels to 20 percent below 2017 levels by 2034. He also said he could expand the Clean Buildings Performance Standards to include more types of buildings, or ramp up requirements on car dealers in the Zero-Emission Vehicles law.   But right now, Fitzgibbon is putting all his energy into stopping the repeal altogether. We think it's pretty cool that he fights the good fight off the clock, too! On the other hand, his opponent, Jolie Ann Lansdowne, shouts out her support for the “Let’s Go Washington” initiatives on the homepage of her website. In addition to the attacks on environmental policy, she seems particularly excited to repeal the capital gains tax, a modest 7 percent tax on the sale of stocks, bonds, and other long-term capital assets. In contrast, Fitzgibbon said he will be an advocate for progressive revenue. Instead of repealing the capital gains tax, he’s interested in filling some of its “loopholes,” particularly the exclusion of residential real estate. Based. Vote Fitzgibbon. Legislative District No. 36 Representative Position No. 2Liz Berry State House Rep. Liz Berry won 89 percent of the vote in the primary, and we totally get it. She advocates for popular, Democratic priorities, and she does so very successfully.  Hate gun violence? Berry’s right there with ya. She introduced and passed a ban on ghost guns, a mandatory 10-day waiting period on the purchase of firearms, and a bill to require gun owners to report their missing or stolen guns within 24 hours. She also co-sponsored a ban on the sale of assault rifles and a ban on high-capacity magazines. Now, if only she’d sponsor a bill to melt all the guns…  Anyway, love workers’ rights? So does Berry. She shepherded bills to help workers recover wages they’re owed, to extend death benefits to the families of gig drivers who die on the job, and to invalidate non-disclosure agreements for workers who experience harassment, discrimination, assault, retaliation, and wage theft in the workplace. As chair of the House Labor Committee, she also worked on and supported the Strippers Bill of Rights and a bill protecting workers who refuse to attend captive audience meetings We’re not sure when Berry sleeps, but we’re glad she’s not tired of her job just yet. In her next term, she will continue her gun safety crusade by reintroducing a bill to establish a permit-to-purchase system. She believes such a system will help prevent guns from getting into “the wrong hands.” She also wants to push legislation to require companies to label their recyclable materials in a way that makes sorting waste easier on the consumer. We would advise you not to vote for her opponent, Victoria Palmer, a Republican who advocates for “vaccine choice,” but, again, almost 90% of voters in Berry’s district already voted for her, so we’re preaching to the choir. Vote Berry. Legislative District No. 37 Representative Position No. 2Chipalo Street BREAKING: The Stranger Election Control Board endorses a tech bro landlord–AGAIN. But we’re not endorsing just any tech bro landlord, we’re endorsing State House Rep. Chipalo Street.  Hear us out. Despite what his background might suggest, Street is without question one of the most progressive lawmakers in the whole State Legislature. He spent his first term securing incentives for the development of affordable housing and supporting vital health care infrastructure.  Street argues that his experiences in some of the more bloodless corners of the private market contribute to his good work in the public sector. His Big Tech job gave him a unique and important perspective on the My Health My Data Act, a first-of-its-kind bill he co-sponsored that requires companies to take meaningful steps to protect consumer health data. He could sniff out when lawmakers should hear the tech sector as whiny babies and when they actually had a good point, particularly when it came to implementation timelines.  Similarly, Street used his experience as a landlord to act as an authoritative counter to the landlord lobby’s advocacy against rent stabilization. When landlords gasped at a 7 percent cap on rent increases, Street pointed out that a landlord’s mortgage is fixed. That 7 percent cap is plenty to cover the increased cost of utilities and maintenance expenses. Finally, if we give Street another two years, he swears to be another dedicated foot soldier in the quest for more progressive revenue. The state will likely face a deficit next year, and the candidates we elect will decide between slashing social programs and taxing the rich. Street would choose to tax the rich. Right answer! Vote Street.  Legislative District No. 41 State Senator Lisa Wellman When not caping for corporate interests, state Senator Lisa Wellman, who represents Mercer Island, tends to vote the right way, and she seems broadly supportive of things we like, such as progressive taxation, opposition to charter schools, and, somewhat excitingly, rent stabilization–though she has some caveats there about wanting cities to set the caps themselves, to which we say booooooo, and booo again.  Given that she chairs the Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee and sits on the Senate’s powerful Ways & Means Committee at a moment when schools across the state face big deficits, education will top her list of priorities this session. In our interview, she swore that in her fifth term she’d push for a fully funded public education system. In fact, she says she’s already starting to “oil the skids” on that topic with her fellow legislators and has put together presentations on why administration and operation costs continue to climb for school districts.  If she can explain where every district spends its dollars to the satisfaction of her fellow lawmakers, she hopes they’ll be more inclined to increase funding. She also wants to push Congressman Adam Smith to make the federal government kick in more for special education funding. Finally, she’s hoping to work with her Olympia “bestie,” potential future Insurance Commissioner Patty Kuderer, to figure out how to lower insurance costs for schools. Our major gripe with Wellman is her consistent opposition to removing the cap on the percentage of students enrolled in special education. In 2023, Wellman agreed to lift the cap from 13.5 to 15 percent, but she opposed full elimination of the cap, a decision that frustrated some lawmakers, including State House Representative Gerry Pollet, who wanted to see the cap gone altogether. (That cap increased to 16 percent in 2024.)  Pollet has consistently framed the "arbitrary cap” as a civil rights issue that disproportionately hurts low-income and students of color. We’re with him on this one and think the state can’t just set a random number for what they think a school’s disability percentage should be. Luckily, the State Auditor plans to study this very issue and give the Legislature a recommendation by the end of 2025. Hopefully Pollet can shake some dollars loose from Wellman in the meantime. Still, Wellman’s clearly working to convince the Legislature that school districts aren’t fretting away their funding on unnecessary expenses, as some would believe. And she’s a hell of a lot better than Republican Jaskaran Singh Sarao, the Bellevue landlord who jumped on the right’s weird “squatter” panic and harassed his tenant for months. Vote Wellman. Legislative District No. 41 Representative Position No. 1Tana Senn Yet again, State House Representative Tana Senn managed to exceed our expectations for someone from Mercer Island. With her bill to allow the Washington State Patrol to melt down the guns they confiscate, she ended the state’s role as a gun dealer, which was kinda fun. She also sided with tenants on the issue of rent stabilization, supporting a 7 percent cap on rent increases. And her bill to fund electric school buses shows us she cares about clean air around bus stops and the planet that our kids will inherit.  She’s also advocated for some necessary but arguably controversial bills, as well. Last session, she sponsored a bill to help children convicted of a sex offense to seek removal from the sex offender registry based on completion of certain court conditions. We appreciate someone who stands up for the future of all children, not just the ones choking on smog at bus stops. That kind of courage deserves a seventh term. And she certainly outshines her Republican challenger, Emily Tadlock, who spent part of 2022 prowling through neighborhoods trying to unearth illegal voters. We imagine Tadlock may end up having some controversial takes about this presidential election. How enthralling. Vote Senn.  Legislative District No. 41 Representative Position No. 2My-Linh Thai We thought about making this endorsement a TikTok montage of us and State House Representative My-Linh Thai set to Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” but our Human Resources department advised us against that. Buzzkills! Anyway, Rep. Thai is an exceptional advocate for working-class people in a Legislature that’s way too cozy with the landlord lobby. In her last term, she fought for renters by scoring more money in the state budget to pay for legal aid for tenants facing eviction and by passing a new law to protect tenants from unreasonable damage claims.  While she’ll always support renters’ rights, she’s got a different priority for her next term: The wealth tax. In 2023, Thai and another SECB fav, state Sen. Noel Frame, proposed the Washington State Wealth Tax, a super-narrow tax on extreme wealth over a quarter million dollars of assessed value derived from the ownership of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets. The revenue would pay for education, housing, disability services, and tax credits for working families. The proposal didn’t make it very far in either chamber, but Thai thinks she and Frame can build a pressure campaign to move stragglers within her party—after all, Democrats have a majority, which should grow after this election.  If Thai doesn’t win, we’d lose one of our strongest advocates for progressive revenue to Republican Al Rosenthal, who advocates against the sales tax, car tab fees, and other regressive revenue streams without plans to backfill them with a tax on the rich. But taxation is far from the centerpiece of his campaign. Rosenthal joins a distressing trend of candidates who seemed to plug the sparknotes of that  San Fransicko book into ChatGPT to write their ill-conceived “Treatment First” homelessness platforms. We’ve debunked this model a few times in response to We Heart Seattle’s Andrea Suarez and new internet villain Rachael Savage. And no amount of cosplaying as war reporters on 3rd and Pine will change the fact that it is more effective to house people than to stick them into mandatory treatment, where they may fail out and return to the streets. This ideology of shame, punishment, and paternalism must be rejected. In the meantime, vote Thai.  Legislative District No. 43 Representative Position No. 2Shaun Scott We could all go on and on and on about how Statewide Poverty Action Network Lobbyist Shaun Scott and We Heart Seattle Executive Director Andrea Suarez represent starkly different ideologies and visions for Washington, but voters in one of the state’s most renter-heavy districts are too busy working too hard for too little to put up with that crap. The choice here is between a candidate who knows what they’re talking about and one who does not. Even if he talks as if he expected us to carve his words into stone atop Mount Sinai, Scott isn’t your typical sanctimonious Democratic Socialist. (Sorry, love you all.) He’s a serious guy with serious policy experience who wants to get stuff done in Olympia–like yesterday. He’s all-in on closing corporate tax loopholes, implementing progressive taxes like a statewide wealth tax, and taxing real estate transactions to pay for social housing. To help out all those tenants in the district, he wants rent control, and he wants rent payments to help build credit scores. As a representative of a neighborhood the cops gassed for a week, he also wants to protect protestors from state prosecution, establish a state police accountability board, and pass a law to stop police unions from bargaining away accountability measures. And as many Democrats ignore COVID entirely, Scott wants to fund research for Long COVID and to support those suffering from the post-viral illness. Sprinkle a state task force to look into white supremacist activity and resettlement centers for asylum-seekers, and, people, you have like a third of his detailed platform.  Suarez lacks this sort of vision and eye for policy. Though her campaign materials tout her as a “progressive,” it’s all drag. Zero Democratic groups back her, let alone the progressive ones–and for good reason. Based on the way she’s been running her campaign, she’s got more in common with a compulsive conservative Facebook commenter than she does with even the most moderate of Democrats. When not calling Scott a “communist,” she spends her time proselytizing on behalf of a homelessness policy that spawned from a toxic MAGA pit and tagging news organizations on social media when she finds stuff in the woods. That’s about it.  Though the big brains on the Seattle Times Editorial Board dismiss Scott as an extremist, they don’t have much company. Scott has been endorsed by more than a dozen labor unions, the biggest conservation group in the state, environmental justice orgs, urbanist orgs, and gobs of establishment Democrats, including his potential future seatmate, State House Rep. Nicole Macri, and Washington State House Speaker Emeritus Rep. Frank Chopp. If you want someone who will actually provoke debate in Olympia and not waste any more of your precious time, then vote Scott.  Legislative District No. 45 Representative Position No. 2Melissa Demyan The Stranger Election Control Board probably would have bought a billboard to attract new talent to the 45th Legislative District, which covers Kirkland, if 20-year incumbent State House Rep. Larry Springer faced another election without a progressive challenger. That’s why it is with such great pleasure that we endorse labor organizer Melissa Demyan to knock down this switch-hitter Democrat.  Things we like about Demyan: She’s a renter, she’s got a union background, she wore a cool tie to our endorsement meeting, and she’s not fucking Springer. He’s a landlord (to his adult son, if that matters), he’s the self-described liaison between his caucus and the business community (there’s plenty others, believe us), and he wore no such cool tie to our meeting. (Though we did like his glasses, and he kinda had great taste in general.)  Instead, Springer droned on and on, excusing his piss-poor voting record on technicalities or utter bullshit. Why didn’t he support a bill to protect abortion care from hospital mergers? He wanted to consider how the bill would affect chiropractors. Why did he want to give more public funding to charter schools? He said he liked the educational “vibe” in charter school classrooms. Why does he support I-2066, the Republican-backed initiative to ban electrification? Based on the convoluted answer he gave and then somewhat walked back in a follow-up email, we have to assume he just did not read the initiative. Still, Springer thinks his experience as one of the few lawmakers who served during the 2008 financial crisis would be valuable next year as the State faces budget turmoil. We say institutional knowledge, shminstitutional shknowledge. If Springer’s still convinced we should use public funds on charter schools after two decades in the State Legislature, we actually don’t think he’s better-suited to manage tax dollars than any rando in Kirkland. And Demyan’s not a rando. Sure, she may be a little green, but she’s got all the organizing experience a lawmaker needs to build coalitions to pass bills that will help people. Give her even half a term in Olympia, and she’ll find all the levers she needs to pull. Springer had his chance. It’s time to pass the torch. Vote Demyan. Legislative District No. 46 Representative Position No. 1Gerry Pollet As Seattle’s school district threatens to shutter elementary schools, voters in the 46th Legislative District, which covers the city’s northeastern reaches, should count themselves lucky to have a public education champion like State House Rep. Gerry Pollet on the ballot this year.  In his last term, he raised the “unconscionable and unconstitutional” cap on education services funding for children with disabilities. He promises to eliminate the cap for good in his next term. To stave off school closures, he will propose a $1.1 billion increase to school budgets. He acknowledges that the sum won’t solve the problem entirely, as school funding relies heavily on local levy revenue. To help juice enrollment to keep those state dollars flowing, he said Seattle must increase affordable, family-sized housing density around public schools. And he’s not just saying that to the Stranger Election Control Board. In a six-page letter, he told Mayor Bruce Harrell that his comprehensive plan did not go far enough to promote affordable density.  That brings us to the elephant in the room—Pollet’s NIMBY streak. He watered down the so-called “missing middle” housing bill, catching a lot of flack from urbanist types. He stands by it, saying he wanted to keep marginalized communities in their neighborhoods. To be clear, we think he should still advocate against displacement, but we hope he finds ways to do that without perpetuating the housing shortage that also prices people out of their neighborhoods. But we probably won’t have to worry about a repeat of the “missing middle” episode because Democrats booted him from the local government committee. And it's not like his opponent brings a platform of militant urbanism to the ballot. Republican Beth Daranciang’s “platform” matches the policy prescriptions offered by every other low-rent GOP loser on this ballot: She supports all four batshit initiatives, wants to cut taxes, fearmongers about crime, and then caps it all off with a little transphobic nonsense about “women’s and girls’ sex-based rights.” Vote Pollet.  Legislative District No. 46 Representative Position No. 2Darya Farivar In 2022, Washington voters sent Rep. Darya Farivar–the State House’s youngest member, its first Middle Eastern woman, and its first Iranian American–off to Olympia. And they were so right to do so.  Whether she’s crafting or voting on legislation, she approaches questions of policy with an exacting mind and human heart. A wonk who previously directed public policy for Disability Rights Washington, she recognizes how small tweaks and vague legal language can make an enormous difference in our lives. Farivar successfully carried bills last session that eliminated the cost of extended family visits to their incarcerated loved ones, made sure people leaving state custody had an ID in their hands when they headed home (you can’t really get a job or apartment without one), raised caps on penalties for antitrust violations to hold big companies to account for things like price-fixing and collusion. She also sponsored the Nothing About Us Without Us Act, which requires the state to include people with lived experience of issues in government work groups, task forces, and advisory committees. In Farivar’s experience, that kind of requirement leads to better policy.  All-in-all, that’s four bills she prime-sponsored and got passed, as well as another she co-sponsored–quite good for a junior lawmaker. And if we send her back, which we should, then she’ll keep doing more good work. Next session, for instance, she plans to reintroduce a bill that would give courts the option to divert low-level offenders with mental health and substance use disorders to treatment alternatives, skipping jail that can disrupt housing and job prospects and even lead to overdoses.  We’ll happily take a compassionate policy nerd like Farivar over a vibes candidate like her Republican challenger, Simone Barron. At first blush, you’d think a service industry pro with 35 years experience who co-founded the Full Service Workers Alliance and sat on the board of Restaurant Workers of America would be into worker’s rights, but names can deceive. In 2021, she did a video for the conservative media nonprofit PragerU, which tries to brainwash America’s children (and adults) with their trash content, to explain how minimum wage increases are an attack on tipped workers. We don’t think they are, and we’re not alone. Barron has attracted only tens of financial backers, and nearly a quarter of her whopping $4,100 war chest comes straight from the King County Republican Party. Lol. Vote Farivar. Legislative District No. 47 Representative Position No. 1Debra Jean Entenman Debra Jean Entenman is the friend we generally get along with, occasionally really vibe with, and have that one awkward topic we don’t want to bring up, but we respect her sense of conviction overall.  A 30-year resident of Kent who first ran to represent a changing South King County, Entenman has represented the 47th Legislative District since kicking Republican dunce cap Mark Hargrove to the curb in 2018. We want her to stay.  On the transportation committee, she says she’s worked to improve the safety between SR 18 and I-90. Covington locals benefit from her commitment to creating more parks and improving the pool, so more kids of color can learn to swim, hopefully preventing drownings in our watery region. We all benefit from her uncompromising attitude on police accountability. In 2021, she sponsored a bill to create Washington’s Office of Independent Investigations, which will start investigating incidents of deadly police force this December. She wants to go even farther by eliminating police immunity and creating a statewide prosecutor independent of the State Attorney General. That latter goal gets tricky because it would take a state constitutional amendment, so Entenman supported State House Rep. Monica Stonier’s Russia- doll workaround to create an independent office within the AG’s office. That bill failed, and she says the community did not think the office would be separated enough anyway because prosecutors still had first dibs on cases. But she remains open to other ideas, and we appreciate the effort. Our beef with Entemann was and will continue to be the charter schools she’s insistent on funding. When we asked about charters siphoning off funds from kids in neighborhood schools across the country, she said without charters there is still inequality from rich fundraising PTA parents at well-to-do public schools. Yeah okay fine, but two wrongs don’t make a right.  But since her now-perennial Republican challenger, Kyle Lyebyedyev, is not so much a real candidate as much as he is a scramble of promises to fix everything without raising taxes, we’ll just have to agree to disagree with her.  This is sort of beside the point, but Lyebyebyev looks like Zach Braff and Dax Shepard morphed into one guy. Coincidentally, he’s also really annoying. For some reason, he calls his public Facebook page “Kyle Lyebyedyev’s Corner: Where Family, Politics and Fun Collide,” our “gateway to connection, insight and a sprinkle of laughter.” The page features smiley family pics  and a photo of him and his wife standing by an American flag with swimmer-turned-anti-trans activist Riley Gaines. At least Entenman’s not for charter school vouchers? Vote Entenman. Legislative District No. 47 Representative Position No. 2Chris Stearns  State House Rep. Chris Stearns made history when his constituents voted him the first Native American on the Auburn City Council, and then again in 2022 when he became one of only three Indigenous lawmakers in the Legislature. And it’s not empty representation—he is using his seat to fight for Indigenous people.  To name one example, he sponsored the Native American apprenticeship bill, which will help pay for tuition, supplies, and the cost of living for tribal members in apprenticeship programs when it goes into effect in 2026. He also doubled state funding to treat people living with a gambling disorder. Studies show Indigenous people deal with gambling addiction at about twice the rate of the general public.  If we give him another term, Stearns says he will continue working to address problem gambling. Last year, he introduced a bill to create a pilot program for gambling treatment diversion court, which would help people who commit financial crimes as a result of their gambling addiction get into treatment instead of jail.  Speaking of jail, the Legislature recently passed a bill to end the automatic use of juvenile points in sentencing that can add years to jail time. If we re-elect Stearns, he will push the issue even further and strike the juvenile points retroactively, removing years off of sentences that already accounted for juvenile points.  It is clear to the SECB that Stearns brings a unique and thoughtful perspective to his role, which is more than we can say of his opponent, Ted Cooke. Cooke is a Republican–and an uncreative one at that. He’s running on a copy-paste platform of election denialism, bootlicking, and anti-trans panic, according to his website. Yawn! Vote Stearns. Legislative District No. 48 Representative Position No. 1Vandana Slatter Vandana Slatter, chair of the Post-Secondary Education & Workforce Committee and co-chair of the Science, Technology and Innovation Caucus, is a clinical pharmacist running for her fourth full term in the State Legislature. We should send her back to continue fighting for the environment, affordable housing, access to a college education, and our all-important health care. Last year, Rep. Slatter worked with Gov. Jay Inslee’s office to create the Washington Climate Corps Network. Managed and administered by Serve Washigton, the program buoys AmeriCorps funds with Climate Commitment Act money to funnel 17 to 31-year-olds and military veterans toward green energy jobs statewide. Neat!  She also co-sponsored a bill that streamlines the financial aid process for high school students on food stamps. Starting next year, they’ll automatically qualify for the Washington College Grant without having to submit paperwork to prove their income.  To ease the crushing burden of student debt on the state’s public servants and to align with changes to the federal Public Loan Service Program, she also introduced a bill to better notify teachers, firefighters, and nurses of relief opportunities. And last year, Inslee also Slatter’s My Health My Data Act, which protects our health information, as well as people visiting on their abortion care and gender-affirming medicine journeys from Republican hell states. All very good things!  We can’t really drum up the same level of enthusiasm for her opponent, Lynn Trinh. Trinh’s short but sweet video-forward platform could be summed up with five hearty puffs on a bright-red dog whistle. Republicans, get your slop: “Reclaim Parental Rights, Restore Quality Education, Redeem Public Safety, Reduce Regulations and Taxes, and Return to Civil Liberties.” Love the alliteration, but hate the ideas.  Trinh, whose family moved to the US following China’s Cultural Revolution, said she “understood the danger of losing freedoms” but has suggested that “Tibet’s today” could be America’s tomorrow, and this “misinformation” talk is silencing “genuine criticism.” Counterpoint: No, and if you’re worried about draconian overreach, then maybe the call is coming from inside the house?  Anyway, she didn’t respond to our meeting invitation, and it’s not entirely clear how Trinh hopes to protect your constitutional rights, but it will involve school choice and “giving power to the people” by giving cops more power, and also solving homelessness with “community-driven” responses. Bleh. Vote Slatter. Justice Position No. 2Sal Mungia We remain big fans of Sal Mungia, who plans to ensure greater access to the legal system and to guarantee that people face a fair and impartial court no matter their race. His passion for his work as well as for civil rights gives us confidence that, if elected, he’ll likely succeed at improving the court system for all. Mungia consistently landed on the right side of history as an attorney. He’s spent most of his career as a personal injury lawyer for Gordon Thomas Honeywell in Tacoma, and while he focused on medical malpractice lawsuits, he’s fought for all kinds of causes. Back in 2005, he was filing amicus briefs in support of same-sex marriage in Washington. Before that, he fought and won better conditions for people held at Pierce County Jail.  Mungia passionately voices his support for the legal reasoning behind “the bright-line Rhone rule,” a Washington Courts policy that allows judges to take direct action against attorneys who try to eliminate jurors based on their race. He can rattle off statistics about the many ways the courts show bias against Black plaintiffs in the civil legal system. His close attention to these issues suggests that he’ll closely examine cases before him involving bias while also looking to make the court more equitable.  Speaking of equity, we squeezed Mungia as hard as we could on the topic of whether he’d do the fair thing and overturn the dumb 1933 court decision that outlaws a progressive income tax in Washington. He knew better than to answer that question, as court cases must be decided based on the facts before the judges and all that jazz.    Weirdly, his opponent, Federal Way Municipal Court Judge Dave Larson, shared his thoughts without much prodding, and he acknowledged if he’d had the capital gains tax in front of him as a Supreme Court Justice, he’d have ruled it a property tax lickity split. Despite finding Larson generally good company, his easy declaration that he’d opposed a progressive tax made it very simple to choose Mungia over him.  Also, Larson’s choice to campaign alongside GOP gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert certainly didn’t earn him any points in the room. When Larson attended an event with Reichert back in June, he told the crowd, “‘It’s time that we take back the judiciary in Washington state,’” according to the Chronicle. He argued that he only meant that people needed to have more control over the court so that it better served them, but, with all due respect, we think he’s full of shit. And anyway, we’re definitely gonna go ahead and back the candidate who defended gay marriage before it was cool over the candidate who speaks alongside a man who believes marriage should be “between a man and a woman.” Vote Mungia. Judge Position No. 41Paul M. Crisalli King County Superior Court Judge Paul Crisalli says he works to pay attention to what happens to Black people and people of color who police sweep into the criminal system, he understands the importance of the Rhone Rule (or GR 37), which allows judges to take a more active role in preventing racist jury selection, and he believes in the importance of a public defender system. All told, he seems like a judge who has his heart in the right place. He’s big on jury selection. He’s embraced doing voir dire virtually, which we think is pretty cool since it allows more people to show up for the selection process, hopefully resulting in more diverse juries. He also advocates for increasing jury pay from the measly $13 an hour that King County Superior Court currently funds. (That’s honestly crazy, juries should unionize.)  Crisalli deeply understands the critical role that money plays in both the criminal and civil legal systems. He says he wished he could spell away the costs of the court system, but the best he can do for now is try to allow for more virtual hearings when possible, avoid holding superfluous hearings, and keep things moving in his courtroom by reading all the material that he needs to beforehand and coming prepared to court. Speaking of reading everything, if you’re an attorney reading this right now and you think you can just ChatGPT up your next brief for Crisalli, think again. He caught an attorney doing that the other day when he read a brief they submitted and realized none of the citations matched actual case law. Crisalli wouldn’t give us any of the other details (we thought the courts were open and public, apparently not.) Still, he says he’s interested in how AI may end up creeping into the court system, and we like a judge who is aware that people can start faking photos and videos to try to pin crimes on them.  At the end of the day, Crisalli’s role is to referee a rigged system. We think he’ll do that as fairly as he can, and for that we say vote for him, especially over Andrew Schach, who works for the Washington State Office of Administrative Hearings. Schach acted like he couldn’t meet us for an endorsement interview or even speak with us during business hours. Literally, we’ve interviewed dozens and dozens of judges as part of SECB and never had this issue. He was also kind of rude. Much ruder for sure than Crisalli, who showed up bearing chocolate chip cookies he’d baked himself. What a sweetie. Vote Crisalli. Council Position No. 8Alexis Mercedes Rinck  It's like the old meme goes: If Alexis Mercedes Rinck has a million endorsements, the SECB is one of them. If Rinck has one endorsement, it’s the SECB. If Rinck has no endorsements, the SECB is dead.  Aside from your NOs on those four ballot initiatives, the race for this citywide city council seat may be the most consequential bubble on your ballot. In 2023, in a low-turnout election, big business spent more than $1 million to flip the council from tepidly progressive to brazenly conservative. Since then, the new council has levied attacks on workers rights in the very region that put the Fight for $15 on the map. They’ve killed measures to incentivize affordable density amid a housing crisis. They’ve reinstated racist, transphobic, and classist anti-loitering laws that the City already repealed in 2020. They’ve so far refused to tax big business, putting affordable housing, renters’ services, and labor law enforcement on the chopping block in the 2025 budget. And they won’t stop there. All that bad shit we rattled off just now? Rinck’s against it. Rinck won’t fight for your bosses to pay you less, or for your landlords to evict you more easily, or for cops to arrest you more, or for corporations to hoard more wealth.  We speak in negatives for a reason. Rinck won’t have many faithful friends on the council to help her advance policy. That’s not to say we doubt her political savvy—if anyone could reason with the current council to move forward on decent legislation, particularly in the realms of homelessness policy and public safety, it would be Rinck, who convinced a bunch of suburbs to buy into the regional response to homelessness during her time at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Still, the numbers are not in her favor, so we expect her to play defense for the oppressed in a legislative body that mostly seeks to comfort the oppressor.  Speaking of comforting the oppressor, Rinck faces off against the council’s nepo baby, Tanya Woo, who lost her election in 2023 but got handed an appointment to the citywide seat at the request of the council’s corporate donors. And we’re not exaggerating here. In a letter to all those donors, PAC wrangler and consultant Tim Ceis said big business had “earned the right” to tell the council who to pick because they paid for their seats, and their puppet council did as instructed.  And who is Woo, the person they picked? She’s the scion of landlords in the Chinatown International District whose political profile rose after she worked with Republicans to block a shelter expansion in SODO. One of the dimmer bulbs in the council’s already flickering chandelier, she evinces zero capacity for discussing complex legislation, no will to put forth any major legislation of her own, and otherwise displays total fealty to the corporate class. None of which should surprise anyone, given the fact that she’s only voted in local elections a handful of times in her life.  Making sure you vote for Rinck is so important because her election represents something bigger than one seat; it represents a referendum on the entire conservative bloc. If Rinck blows Woo out of the water, this conservative council’s legitimacy may as well be toast. Any time they try to mess with working people or make the city more hostile to the unhoused, Rinck can vote against it with the backing of more voters than anyone else on the body. The bigger the win, the more momentum progressives can ride into the 2025 election, when the conservative ringleader, Council President Sara Nelson, will have to defend her seat. Let’s make her scared. Vote Rinck.  Proposition No. 1: Property Tax Levy Renewal for Transportation Yes If you ever leave your place of residence, you should absolutely vote “yes” on Prop 1 to pass our desperately needed transportation levy. The new levy will generate a historic $1.55 billion in its eight-year lifetime. The City will spend that money on 350 blocks of new sidewalks, 160 projects to improve bus-rider experience, safety projects at 70 high-collision locations, a full revamp of Aurora Avenue N, plus much, much, more.  A little history: Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed a puny, baby little levy that favored car-centric infrastructure. Thanks to the tireless work of transportation, environmental, disability, labor, and other advocates, the mayor and then the transportation chair cranked that number up by $250 million and earmarked 45 percent of the total investment for multimodal transportation via buses, bikes, foot, and any other way you may get around without a car. The levy’s been called a “consensus” levy, as it pleases the progressive transit heads and the conservative business community. Even the Stranger Election Control Board struggled to play devil’s advocate against it. Every argument against Prop 1 falls apart like much of Seattle’s poorly maintained infrastructure would if this levy were to fail.  Some may argue that the levy costs homeowners too much. For the owner of the median-valued home, the new levy will cost them $41 per month, a 70 percent increase from the $24 cost of the 2015 Levy To Move Seattle. Washington State relies heavily on property taxes to pay for social goods because our state constitution outlaws an income tax. The SECB would sacrifice a lifetime of drunk cigarettes if it meant flipping our upside-down taxation scheme right-side up, but, in the meantime, this is how we pay for shit.  Besides, that framing's whack. Sure, $41 a month may sound like a lot, but relying on a car costs homeowners about $1,000 a month based on estimates from Experian, AAA, GasBuddy, and the National Conference of State Legislatures. The better our public transit, the less Seattleites have to rely on cars, the more money voters actually stand to save. Besides, the City and County run levy relief programs for seniors and disabled people who cannot shoulder the cost, so no one should be splitting pills for better bus service.  On the flip side, there’s some militant urbanists who would rather tank this levy and force the City to produce a bigger, bolder one in 2025. If the levy legit sucked, then we’d be on board. But it doesn’t suck. And without a strong, concerted movement to reject it in protest, there’s no reason to believe the mayor and the city council would interpret a failed levy as anything but a sign to slash the price on a future proposal.  Don’t overthink it. Vote yes on Prop 1.