Do you feel sorry for Nicole Thomas Kennedy?

[GeneralMacArthur]

People in Seattle are sick of having an ideologue for city attorney.  The city attorney needs to just be a functional machine that quietly does its job.  It's not a place for an ideological revolution.  If you know who your city attorney is at all, you're probably not happy about it.

If anyone wants to know why Pete Holmes lost to Ann Davison in the primary, that's why.  Pete had a reputation in this town for letting people off the hook repeatedly.  Just refusing to prosecute people, not because it was good for the city, but because of his personal ideology.  I've been criticizing Pete for this since before even his last election in 2017, but it seemed like a hopeless cause.  Nobody cares about city attorney, so the incumbent is just going to win every time, thus nobody is going to run against Pete because it's a doomed effort.

What helped the anti-Holmes cause was the Seattle is Dying documentary, which spent some time on the issue of repeat offenders and (correctly) placed the blame squarely on the city attorney's office.  That documentary received an avalanche of criticism and derision from the left in this city, and I think most people would agree that some parts of it are good and some parts feel a little Fox-News-y.  But virtually everyone who saw it agrees that having someone on the street who's committed 250 crimes in the last three years, and then they get arrested for the 251st time and the city attorney refuses to prosecute because he doesn't prosecute homeless/poor people, is bad!  So now people were taking notice, and the seed of "the city attorney is responsible for prolific offenders" had been planted.

However I still think Pete would have won the primary easily if the stars hadn't aligned to end his career.

First, skyrocketing crime, especially visible crime that impacts day-to-day people, put fighting crime first and foremost on everyone's minds, and Pete was an easy target because he actively works to keep criminals on the streets.

Second, the left became obsessed with this bizarre "stop prosecuting all crimes" fantasy, and leftists like Sawant began criticizing "the criminal justice system in Seattle" for prosecuting various crimes that they felt shouldn't be prosecuted.  So when NTK entered the race and gave lefty types the opportunity to vote against a symbol of that criminal justice system, they took it.

But even then, I think NTK would've just been a fringe protest vote candidate if she hadn't received The Stranger's endorsement, which will go down in history as one of their worst political moves ever, and that's saying a lot.  The Stranger telling everyone to go out and vote NTK, combined with the general anti-Holmes sentiment, and Pete Holmes' own pathetically bad campaign skills, all came together to finish him off.

Davison honestly didn't do a whole lot in the primary.  She isn't a good politician and only jumped in at the last minute.  Even with all the issues in Seattle, most people still weren't paying that much attention to the city attorney's office and would've just voted for the incumbent if it had been Holmes vs. Davison.  NTK stealing all those leftie votes from Holmes forced Seattleites to finally pay attention to this issue.  And now the issue has been fixed.