Some relevant non-Seattle election news: Another big primary election ballot drop will come later today, and in the meantime you can get up to speed with our coverage of yesterday’s vote count. We only cover Seattle-area elections, but it turns out they have elections in other parts of Washington too (who knew?), and there are some highlights. Republicans have no path to pick up a state senate seat: Democrats hold a 30-19 majority in the upper house, and it’s not going anywhere. Given incumbent advantages, Republicans’ only hope these days is to fight hard for vacant Senate seats, and given that the one in Bellingham is being fought over between two neck-in-neck Democrats, it means conservatives didn’t fight hard enough. As for the House: Democrats may be in a position to widen their majority should they build on some strong primary returns. Over in the Yakima Valley, the 14th Legislative District was recently redrawn under the Voting Rights Act mandate to empower the region’s Latino-majority voters, who toil in the state’s lucrative plantations without equal rights as other workers or local political representation. Two Latino Democrats from the farm worker movement appear to be within striking distance of ruling Republicans in the district’s House races. Ezequiel Morfin looks to have beaten a fellow Democrat for second place, and together their vote share is just above that of Republican apple farm owner Rep. Deb Manjarrez’s 49 percent. In the district’s other House race, Chelsea Dimas is a little less than 5 points behind incumbent Republican Rep. Gloria Mendoza, about as many points as taken by a flailing independent candidate in the race. Montana, Where Democracy Goes to Die: Montana Democrats specialize in tricking big-city writers into publishing stories with headlines like “This Farmer-Senator Shows How Democrats Can Still Win in Rural Areas” even though, in just a few short years, the Montana Democratic Party went from ruling the state to losing every statewide election twice in a row and costing the national party a seat in the US Senate. The lesson? Don’t try to outflank the far-right from the right.  I cannot warn you enough: do not listen to these people. The latest harebrained scheme by the rightest-wing Democrats in the West to win back that Senate seat is running their candidate as an independent, which is going poorly, as that left the Democrat lane open for someone who didn’t get the memo, splitting the vote and handing the race to the Republican. 4-D Chess indeed. The Democrat, Alani Bankhead, has been facing calls from Democratic leaders to drop out so that the real, secret Democrat, the independent, can win (he probably won’t). Even if Bankhead does drop out, state law says the Democratic Party has to replace her with another candidate on the ballot and continue splitting the vote. The solution? Break the law, according to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, refuse to appoint a replacement, and get sued, per The Atlantic. This is what democracy looks like.  Mitch McConnell lives*: Even if Democrats can’t win back the Senate themselves through elections, there’s still another path to victory (the dark-side ending). A lot of people thought very old Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell died when he checked into the hospital in June after a fall, and we stopped hearing from him. Well, he checked out today, literally, not figuratively, and is continuing his recovery at home. He has spent his career ensuring all Americans do not have ready access to healthcare and paid medical leave. The smoke should mostly lift today: Expect Seattleites to return to their tradition of ignoring Spokane as the winds shift to blow the smoke back over the Cascades, where fires still rage. First, some good news: As Spokane burned, local boy Lucas Jumalon was down in Vegas winning the World Series of Poker and claiming a literal giant pile of money. The Spokesman-Review somehow found time to closely cover his victory despite the city burning down around them.  One Spokesman Review journalist even saw the alleged arsonist while out covering the fires: It’s hard to overstate how hard that newsroom is working when they’re publishing details like the following: A witness told the Spokesman-Review he saw a man later identified as the suspected arsonist behind the city’s big blaze in a green shirt and a backpack near where the fire started. “A Spokesman-Review reporter on West Trails Road and the Centennial Trail observed a man in a green shirt and backpack walking eastbound between 1 and 2 p.m. Saturday.”  But arson is only the proximate (and suspected) cause of the fire, not the ultimate one: RANGE Media reminds us that climate change is behind our worsening fire seasons. If all it takes is one spark to start a raging inferno in your community, then the problem is not ignition; it’s how your community is adapted (or rather unadapted) to its changing environment. Eastern Washington is in its fourth year of drought. The Spokane River ran fucking dry last year.  Anyways, the year of Pattinson continues: In journalism school they show you the episode of To Catch a Predator where the suspect kills himself in a home surrounded by TV cameras as an example of how not to do journalism ethically. The pedophile-hunter craze didn’t go away once Chris Hansen’s show went off the air, which makes the new Robert Pattinson biopic on the man and the show as timely as ever. The post Slog AM: The Farm Workers Are Coming for Their Republican Legislators, a Spokane Local Wins Poker’s Biggest Game as the City Burns, and Democrats in Montana Invent Yet Another Way to Lose an Election appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less