Politics

Voters in Seattle appear to be setting the stage for what could end up being one of the liveliest, closest, and most exciting contests for mayor in the city’s history, judging by our latest seasonal survey of the Emerald City electorate.

651 likely August Top Two voters interviewed by Change Research for the Northwest Progressive Institute last week collectively identified incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell and grassroots challenger Katie Wilson as their top choices for the city’s top job out of an eight-candidate field, with Harrell and Wilson drawing similar levels of support in every single question that we asked. The other six candidates running received no meaningful support in the survey, which suggests voters are coalescing behind the frontrunners in the voting that’s now taking place across the Emerald City.

Harrell starts out with a symbolic two-point lead in this month’s horserace polling, but Wilson takes over that symbolic lead after voters see a list of the candidates’ occupations from the voter’s pamphlet distributed by King County Elections and get invited to read the complete statements for all eight candidates on King County’s official website.

Wilson increases her symbolic lead to three points after we ask who respondents would support if the general election were being held today and the candidates were the two of them, mirroring what we saw in our last survey in May, which was a poll of general election voters. We now have two consecutive surveys of different universes of Seattle voters suggesting that this year’s mayoral race could go down to the wire.