Harger: Jamie Pedersen passed Washington’s first income tax. After 20 years, his own party won’t endorse him

The King County Democrats published their 2026 endorsement list this week. Run your finger down the state Senate races to the 43rd District, the bluest patch of Capitol Hill and the heart of Seattle. The name on the endorsement line is Hannah Sabio-Howell, a 30-year-old labor organizer who’s never held office. The name missing is Jamie Pedersen.

Pedersen runs the Washington State Senate. He’s the Majority Leader. He passed the first income tax in state history this spring. He’s been a fixture in the 43rd for almost 20 years. And when the county party sat down to make its picks, it couldn’t find room for the man who runs the chamber. The ground under the Democratic Party in King County has moved.

Credit where it’s owed. Hannah Krieg at The Burner has been on this race while most of the local press looked elsewhere, and she caught the county snub when nobody else did. A sitting Majority Leader gets passed over by his own party at the district level, and the county level, and it barely earns a headline. That alone tells you how normal this has started to feel.

I wrote last week about Sabio-Howell taking the 43rd District party’s nod over Pedersen. The county doing the same thing tells you this is bigger than one rowdy precinct meeting.

Jamie Pedersen is no moderate, which is what makes this so noteworthy

Start with his record. Pedersen was Lambda Legal’s lead counsel on marriage equality and sponsored the bill that legalized it in Washington. He helped abolish the death penalty. He wrote privacy protections for transgender residents and expanded access to abortion medication. This spring, he was the lead architect of the millionaire’s tax, the first income tax in state history. In most of the country, that’s a progressive hero’s resume. In the 43rd District, it drew a challenge from his left.

You can see the gap for yourself. Both candidates filled out the King County Democrats’ endorsement questionnaire, and the two documents side by side tell the whole story. Pedersen lists the millionaire’s tax near the top of his accomplishments, “making our tax system more equitable.” Sabio-Howell, a First Hill renter who ran communications for the labor group Working Washington, treats that same tax as a floor he didn’t push past. She faults “the role that Senate leadership played” in softening last year’s rent cap from 7% to 10%, and she points out she’s “the only candidate in this race not taking corporate PAC money,” a quiet jab at the construction-company lawyer she’s trying to unseat.

Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in 2016. The left is running the same play now

I covered the 2016 race. Plenty of sharp people in this business explained, with real confidence, why Donald Trump couldn’t win the primary, and then why he couldn’t win the general. He won both. Then he remade the Republican Party in his own image, and the folks who’d written him off lined up behind him.

A similar machine is running on the left now. Katie Wilson here. Zohran Mamdani in New York. Bernie Sanders. The Squad. Waved off as too radical to last. Anybody making that bet today is placing the wager that went bust in 2016.

The GOP followed Trump to its own 10-yard line, a long way from the Republicans of Reagan or the Bushes. Now the Democrats are marching theirs to the opposite end. Both teams have left the middle of the field.

Washington’s top-two primary puts Pedersen and Sabio-Howell head-to-head in November

Washington runs a top-two primary. The two highest vote-getters in August advance to the fall, regardless of party. In a district as blue as the 43rd, the two who survive will almost certainly be these two Democrats: The most powerful man in the Senate, and a 30-year-old socialist who said he’s gone soft on corporations.

So picture the November ballot in the 43rd. The Senate Majority Leader. A Democratic Socialist. That’s the whole menu. If you live there and you wanted a moderate, or a conservative, or just somebody promising to pump the brakes, there’s no line for you to mark.

From Kshama Sawant to Katie Wilson, Seattle’s left is winning up and down the ballot

This goes well beyond one strange race. Look around.

Last fall, Katie Wilson, a Democratic Socialist organizer, beat sitting Mayor Bruce Harrell. A Seattle mayor, knocked off by a candidate most of the city couldn’t have named two years earlier. That was the template, and it held.

Now it’s working its way down the ballot. Kshama Sawant, the socialist former city councilmember, is challenging Adam Smith in the 9th Congressional District, the seat that runs down through Kent, Auburn, and Federal Way. Shaun Scott, the first declared socialist in the Legislature in over a century, holds Frank Chopp’s old House seat in the 43rd. Across Seattle this year, something like half a dozen Democratic incumbents are drawing primary challengers from the left. According to reporting from KUOW, Rep. Cindy Ryu is running against Sen. Jessie Salomon, calling him “too moderate,” and Rep. Gerry Pollett is being challenged by Ron Davis, who says Pollett is the “chief NIMBY in the Democratic caucus.”

The pattern doesn’t change. The senior Democrat draws fire for the sin of not being progressive enough.

Mamdani’s New York sweep triggered Hunter Biden’s postmortem

Back east, it’s louder. On Tuesday, a slate of Democratic Socialists endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their primaries. One of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, beat a five-term congressman. The room chanted “you’re next” at Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking Black Democrat in Congress, put on notice by his own activists.

Even Democrats are nervous. New York Attorney General Letitia James warned that the candidates Mamdani backed don’t understand their own city. Frustration with the party is fair, she told CNN, but “you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.”

And then Hunter Biden posted on X.

The sitting establishment’s own son, the guy whose last name is the Democratic machine, wrote seven lessons from what happened Tuesday. One crystallizes what’s happening in our politics right now:

“The middle is not a strategy. It’s an empty room. Voters reached past the establishment to grab someone who actually believes something.”

That’s Seattle’s near future on a ballot.

The economic ladder broke, and some voters are reaching past Pedersen

Rent climbs every year. Groceries cost more every month. For a 30-year-old with a good job, a starter home around here is a fantasy. When people are stuck on a rung they can’t climb, they stop voting for more of the same. They reach for whoever promises to change the game.

Trump tapped that nerve on the right in 2016. Mamdani and Wilson are tapping it on the left now. Pedersen didn’t cause the squeeze. Neither did Bruce Harrell nor Jeffries back east. But they’re the faces of the system that hasn’t fixed it, so the voters reach right past them.

Both parties walked off the 50-yard line

American politics used to be played between the 40-yard lines. Both teams fought over the same patch of grass in the middle, which is where most of the seats are. Now both have run their offense down toward the end zones, and the people at midfield are watching a game that’s drifted away from them.

There was a time when people could be friends even if they didn’t vote the same way. They would watch the game together, split a pizza, holler at the same bad call, and nobody checks a ballot at the door. That was most of the country once. The big middle of the field, where your neighbor’s politics were his own business and the game was just the game.

The crowd at the 50 hasn’t moved. The game has.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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