At least two Seattle candidates are betting that this is the year voters will decide to replace longstanding Democratic state legislators with progressive newcomers who want to move forward quickly with pro-housing, pro-worker agendas. If either succeeds, it will be a repudiation of the received wisdom that entrenched incumbents have an unshakeable advantage.
The first candidate, Ron Davis, will be familiar to PubliCola readers—he ran for City Council in northeast Seattle’s District 4 in the 2023 election, losing narrowly to Maritza Rivera in a year when moderates swept the council elections. Davis is running against 46th District Rep. Gerry Pollet. Pollet, appointed in 2011, leads an environmental group that advocates for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site; as a legislator, he has worked to defeat or water down bills that would allow more housing in single-family neighborhoods.
In 2022, the state House Democratic Caucus voted to remove housing issues from Pollet’s committee—a decision that was quickly followed by several years of pro-housing legislation that forced cities dominated by suburban-style housing to allow apartments in neighborhoods, not just on busy streets…